Introducing Lean. What could go wrong? Right?

An article went up on NPManagement.org today about implementing Lean, preventing employees' assumption it will cause layoffs, and doing this by getting rid of excess people before the roll-out of Lean approaches.

The problem?  How do we know who is "excess" until we're far enough into Lean to understand what our value streams are?  And how do we determine our value streams if we've laid off people who have the information we need in order to figure things out?

And what, pray tell, might internal corporate politics do to this whole process?

You can read about it here in the article "Lean Implementation + Politics = ?"

ejt
www.npmanagement.org