Middle managers need to get out of the way for companies to implement lean production. That’s the message of survey results released today by the Cambridge-based Lean Enterprise Institute.
In a survey of nearly 2,500 businesspeople conducted by the management research center, 36.1 percent of respondents cited middle-management resistance as an obstacle to streamlining production. The next most common responses were the lack of implementation know-how at 31 percent and employee resistance at 27.7 percent.
Last year’s top response, backsliding into old ways of working, dropped to sixth place in the new survey.
