Warner Robins AFB Maj. General Dennis Haines, is the commander of the Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, the largest industrial facility in Georgia. He talks about the role leadership plays in a lean conversion, what is required of the top personnel and the vast potential of lean principles applied throughout the government industrial complex. Here are some of the questions he answered: Is there a future for lean in the military's industrial complex? What propelled Warner Robins into considering adopting a lean approach to its operations? How long have you personally been involved in the lean way of thinking? Is that knowledge beginning to percolate into the management ranks at Warner Robins? What are some of your success stories? The potential applications must be vast at Warner Robins, given the 14 million square feet of industrial space there. How hard will that be to achieve base-wide? How long will it take? Where else have you expanded the effort? Are there any intangible benefits to the lean approach to your operations? How many rule changes require an act of Congress? Can an organization like yours initiate a lean implementation on its own or do you need help doing it? How did you personally come to your enlightened state? Was it easy to see the connections between a Wiremold type of industrial case study and your processes? Is lean becoming institutionalized at Warner Robins? How hard is it to change the traditional culture there? How are you training your people? How has lean changed your own individual job? How shocking is it for the people working the line to see you working there with them on a kaizen? When you're involved in a week-long lean event, are you outfitted like a major general or dressed like someone who is working the line? Does it make it more difficult to have success when someone of your stature is down on the floor with the line workers? Do plant floor workers hesitate in your presence and wonder about what they should say and what it is they're doing? Do the workers try to hide their blemishes, thinking, "Oh boy, this process isn't very good and we've worked it for 20 years so we better try to make it look better than what it is"? Does the old command-and-control military mentality make it hard for you to get management to work together with workers? What can other managers in government industrial operations learn from your experience? To view questions from other interviews in Lean Machines, Click Here. Click Here to order a copy of Lean Machines.