The Path Taken and Not Taken

Patrick M. Anderson

The lunch buffet had been set up in an area just outside the Nypro Precision Plastics board room in Clinton, MA. I was a Sealaska Corporation appointee to a Joint Venture board with Nypro called Nypro Kánaak, a troubled investment we made in a plastics manufacturing company. We had invested in Vancouver, WA based Triquest Precision Plastics in 1997, just before the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented in the U.S. Almost overnight, plastics companies in the U.S. were headed offshore and competition heated up. What I thought was a solid business plan for growth and consolidation in an industry of many small companies faded quickly and we were in survival mode. That’s when our management team found Nypro. They made an investment in our Guadalajara manufacturing plant in 2002 and started helping us to reclaim some value.

I sat at a table just in front of one of the 2 screens being used for PowerPoint presentations with 2 of my colleagues, both well-educated Alaska Natives like myself with executive experience. The tall slender President of Nypro, Brian Jones, joined us for lunch and in a half hour, changed my world view. He talked about the management system they were using, and I was mesmerized. Nypro was implementing Lean Manufacturing. He described the world of 5S, one piece flow, process mapping, eliminating waste, just in time inventory and other Lean Management tools. I was already trying to think about whether Lean Management might be useful for a small Alaska Native nonprofit corporation I had been hired to lead in December of 2003.

My Sealaska colleagues sat with us patiently as I asked a few questions about using Lean Management in administrative processes. When Brian told me that they were discussing an expansion of their initiative to administrative processes, I was sold. I could have sat with him for hours leaning about Lean, but a fellow board member told him that we had to go to start our afternoon meetings.

After I returned to Anchorage, I gathered my executive team in my office and told them about my conversation with Brian and the tour of their Clinton Plant that I took to see their innovations. They agreed that it was worth looking into and I scheduled a visit to my First Lean Management conference, the 2004 Annual Shingo Prize Conference in Lexington, KY.

Years later, one of my executives recalled that conversation. She said she felt like a deer in the headlights of a car, surprised and unsure what to do as I explained this new concept to them. But she said that it seemed worth trying, “because nothing we were doing seemed to work” for improving the organizations. I started on a path that Sealaska, other than in this joint venture, did not.