The Best of Us

I met Orry Fiume, who died on May 5 at age 83, on my first visit to the Wiremold Company in West Hartford, Connecticut, in the spring of 1994. I was searching for lean success stories to feature in my and Dan Jones’s book, Lean Thinking, and Wiremold had emerged as a good example of a mid-sized company making a lean transformation.

Art Byrne, the CEO, was busy when I arrived and suggested that Orry show me around. This did not seem promising. Orry was the CFO and I had never encountered a CFO who did anything but cause trouble for managers trying to make lean leaps in their organizations. But, OK.

When we went out on the shop floor, Orry wanted to tell me about set-up reduction. A whole lot about setup reduction and in amazing detail. We walked up to machines and Orry asked the operators to step aside so he could point to all of the changes made to reduce set-ups. And he wanted to tell me about Wiremold’s pull scheduling system. And he wanted to show me how cells with single piece flow had been created in fabrication and assembly operations for each product family. And he wanted to tell me about the agony and ecstasy of participating hands-on in high-speed kaizen to change everything in the very traditional manufacturing company he and Art had taken on as a project in 1990. CFOs usually neither want nor have any ability to do any of these things. What was wrong with this guy?

When we got to the end of the tour we went back to the conference room where Orry explained that he had been trained as an accountant, in business school and at Price Waterhouse, but that the abstractions of accounting had never felt right as a way to run a business. And then he met Art who had a plan for doing things in an entirely different way, focusing on the value stream for each product family, and who needed a CFO who was willing to change the method of keeping score. And off they went to a brilliant success at Wiremold.

As the lean movement progressed and Orry retired from Wiremold in 2000, he concluded that his special contribution would be to make accounting useful for managers pursuing change. He did this through a long series of publications beginning in 2003 with Real Numbers (co-authored with Jean Cunningham.) The idea was to replace standard cost accounting, with its complex and often misleading allocation of overheads, with value stream accounting and an understanding that inventory was actually an unnecessary waste rather than an asset.

As he continued to think about the direction of the lean movement, he eventually decided to tackle the bigger issue of strategy as well, in the 2017 volume The Lean Strategy (co-authored with Michael Balle, Dan Jones and Jacques Chaize.) The idea in this broader space was to use lean thinking – clearly identifying value for the customer and removing the waste getting in the way of providing it – as the best way for enterprises to gain competitive advantage.

Over the years, I often asked Orry to join me for conferences and workshops on lean thinking and he always agreed. Eventually, toward the end of my tenure as LEI CEO, Orry joined the board to help guide the transition to the next generation of leadership.

With all this said and accomplishments listed, I still feel I have failed to explain how Orry was special. I think it goes back to his choosing to minor in philosophy (with a major in accounting) during his college days under the Jesuits at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Orry was always the outside thinker, the philosopher, stepping back from immediate circumstances to think about the big picture, what it all meant, and how to improve it. And he included everyone he met in his inquiries. There was a brightness and light in this – an optimism and assumption of the best in people — that lifted the spirits and changed the attitudes of all those around him. I’m truly grateful for his companionship on the lean journey.