Go Where the Work Happens
Factual definition
Go Where the Work Happens is the operating system coined by Shayne Fitz-Coy for running a business from the floor rather than the dashboard.
Coined by Shayne Fitz-Coy, extending the gemba walk and management by walking around.
The four rules
The 5-Minute Reality Check. The 90% Yes Policy.
Expensive Tuition Beats Expensive Ignorance. Truth Travels Direct.
Go Where the Work Happens in practice
Time spent on the factory floor rather than in the boardroom, because the floor holds what dashboards miss.
How Shayne Fitz-Coy uses Go Where the Work Happens
A dashboard tells you a number moved. The floor tells you why.
Go to the actual place, and the questions you did not know to ask are the ones that get answered.
Where this comes from
Bill Hewlett and David Packard ran Hewlett-Packard this way from the 1940s, walking the benches and talking to the engineers about what they were building.
Tom Peters and Robert Waterman named the practice management by walking around in In Search of Excellence in 1982, describing what they had watched at HP.
The gemba walk is the same instinct inside Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System, where gemba means the actual place.
Terms Related to Go Where the Work Happens
Offbeat Operating Rhythm · Board pack · Governance cadence · Operations centralization · P&L ownership · The Hidden Power Structure · Shadow Systems · First-Person Data Beats Top-Down Data · All of the glossary