Everything changes but the truth.
Everything. Inevitably. Everywhere.

That leaves us to navigate all of everything else with the one thing that doesn’t change—the truth: more specifically the deep, fundamental, timeless truths that govern our world and the organizations we manage.

The Floworks is a learn-by-doing method developed for you to systematically arm yourself with the deep truths and proven principles held by the world’s foremost management framework and put them to work in your organization. 

This framework truly is the best of what there is to know about management and The Floworks brings it to you, the small business owner, right here in central Ohio. 

For the sake of brevity, I'll jump ahead to give you in one sentence an idea of where we are going with this: 

            We take what made Toyota great and customize it to your small business.

With that said I want to be very clear that this is not about Toyota, it’s about you with Toyota serving as the ultimate example of excellence.  Where appropriate—but only where appropriate—we borrow from its practices to further your cause.

Actually, The Floworks' focus is upstream of Toyota on the key source of brilliance embraced by its founders in developing a system of management that would ultimately make them the world’s greatest manufacturer. This source—who has been called, ‘the man who taught the Japanese about quality’—is also, as you might have guessed, the originator of the aforementioned management framework, the one being made available to you right here through The Floworks (His name is W. Edwards Deming: much more on him to follow).

If you've been exposed to Toyota's system of management—the famed Toyota Production System—you might understand the importance of workflow as vital to success in any kind of business.  The contributions of workflow to business excellence are not necessarily well-known but they are well-defined and inspire the name, The Floworks.  You will come to understand and appreciate the fundamentals of each as work begins to flow in your company; something that The Floworks makes happen long before anything gets nearly as complicated as what you might have heard about with the Toyota approach.

And we go beyond just workflow to develop your organization in the flows of knowledge, improvements, and decisions.  All four are important where excellence is the aim but know that workflow remains central to the approach because it serves as foundation for the other three.

Yes, our chosen example is a gargantuan global auto manufacturer, and you are engaged in something completely different: perhaps running crews that install and maintain furnaces, supplying hospitals with specialty devices out of a small warehouse, or offering local CPA services.  Whatever your endeavor, the differences don't matter.  By going upstream to the greatness that Toyota seized en route to its own greatness, The Floworks transcends the differences with an inherently adaptable approach that exists on a higher plane than any short-sighted attempt to force-fit your business with the tools and techniques that worked for Toyota. 

Companies have been trying for four-plus decades to copy what Toyota does, bringing limited success in some cases and disaster in others. Horror stories abound and often have the label 'Lean' attached to them; I still hear them to this day. But this is not about wishful copycatting, and again, this is not about Toyota. This is about you realizing your own greatness by understanding the thinking and the principles that made Toyota great, not the techniques and tools it used along the way. 

If this sounds compelling, or if your favored management practices are largely reliable but seem fragmented, perhaps in conflict with one another at times, buckle in for 15-20 minutes and read on. You will become acquainted with the framework that will allow you to see where one useful fragment fits in relation to another, and you will have begun the journey to possessing the knowledge where all truth in management meets. 

I've spent the entirety of my career wrapping my head around this framework, how to put it to work, and how to teach it. Now, I want you to have it. 

With The Floworks' learn-by-doing design, the learning, doing, and improving will occur simultaneously. The leaps in performance that result from adopting this proven framework become, themselves, an important part of the learning process. The improvement effort thereby begins to fuel itself in an upward spiral that is truly exciting to experience.

The essay you are about to read was developed for new and prospective clients. It begins with a personal question and works its way through this magnificent framework, building until it reveals the simple theory behind The Floworks. You will begin to see how it all fits together, why it works, and why you can trust this to be the truth by which you convert the challenges of small business ownership into the success story you originally intended and then some.

I am honored to have had Henry Neave, a close colleague of Dr Deming's, review the main content of thefloworks.com.  Henry is such a gentleman that he will insist the honor was his.  You will learn more about both men throughout this website.

There is more information in the essay than you will find in a typical promotional website because it is also meant to be instructional, so I've placed this little flow diagram at the appropriate points within to mark progress as you read it.  You can navigate through all the pages of thefloworks.com in the sequence intended simply by clicking the blue button with the arrow at the bottom of each page.