World Class Manufacturing and continuous improvement: why certifications don’t create a true Lean culture

The year was 2013. I was working at a plant near Turin that manufactured refrigerator
compressors – a site born back when Fiat was still in the home appliance business.
“Next month we have the World Class Manufacturing audit, and we have to halt all continuous improvement activities. We need to get all our paperwork in order to secure at least the Silver Medal, or they’ll shut us down.”

This is what my project contact told me, freezing all my activities for two months. Poor guy, it wasn’t his fault; he was just a victim of the system.
That sentence made my Aristotelian heart bleed – it was a direct stab to the principle of non-contradiction.
I wanted to ask him: “Could you explain that again? Are you really telling me that you can’t perform continuous improvement because you’re too busy working to get the certification for continuous improvement?” But I was a humble supplier, and one does not ask such questions.

In the end, that plant was closed anyway. And they would have closed it even if they had won a Platinum Medal (which doesn’t even exist in WCM!!). The reasons were economic, political, and global.

Let’s be clear: WCM is not the problem.
World Class Manufacturing is a structured framework designed to reduce waste and improve production performance, quality, and efficiency through clear pillars, rigorous methods, and operational discipline. The inspiration was clearly the Toyota Production System, “pre-digested” to be more transferable to Western companies. There are excellent applications of WCM that I have personally seen in large multinational groups, where WCM was used as a learning system rather than a control tool, producing real results, despite a degree of bureaucracy that even its supporters acknowledge.
The problem arises when WCM – or any other method – is distorted by a certification system into a sequence of audits and a race for medals. In many companies – and particularly in its historical application at Fiat – WCM was progressively transformed into a top-down, heavily bureaucratized system. Its implicit goal was no longer to improve flow or quality, but to pass the next audit or provide a rationale for the “Darwinian selection” of management.
In these cases, the “badge” stops being a means and becomes the end. Even Fiat realized that the system had produced distortions and, as of 2022, it was abandoned.

Lean, the real one that doesn’t need certifications, is visible to the entrepreneur in the income statement and in the reduction of working capital; the customer sees it at the speed with which an order is fulfilled; management sees it in the continuous improvement mindset of people as they grow. This attitude could even be measured and certified, but it wouldn’t add anything: it only needs to be practiced.

Starting from the era of Sergio Marchionne and Stefan Ketter – head of manufacturing – WCM was implemented in all FCA group plants and promoted (or rather, imposed) even on some suppliers. I have heard conflicting accounts of its applications: on one hand, factories that gleamed; on the other, an audit system that spread terror.
In 2021, I was struck by an article in which Jean-Philippe Imparato, then CEO of Alfa Romeo, spoke about lean production. It was October 2021, eight months after the appointment of the much-maligned Carlos Tavares as CEO of Stellantis, with the goal of cutting 5 billion in costs for a group with a turnover of 152 billion and 21 billion in EBITDA. Not exactly small change.

Imparato declared to dealers: “The new model will be built-to-order for at least 80%: we will produce cars only if we have the end customer. At the beginning of 2021, we were at 38%. Stocks are a cancer; no car must remain in the parking lots for more than 90 days.” Translated: it is normal to make cars if you have customers. And therefore, it is normal not to make them if you don’t.

When Terlaak and King published a study in 2006 on the impact of ISO 9000 certification, they asked a simple yet uncomfortable question: do companies improve because they get certified, or do they get certified because they are already better?

By tracking companies over time, both before and after certification, they showed that certified firms were already performing better beforehand, whereas no significant or stable improvements emerged after certification.
Certification does not cause quality; it signals it. It serves to tell a credible story to the outside world, not to change what happens inside.
This evidence reminds me of an old mentor of mine who used to say that people with three bathrooms in their house have higher incomes than those with only one—not because you need more toilets to build a career, but because the two facts are correlated, and correlation is not causation.

Motivational psychology, specifically through Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, shows that when behavior is regulated from the outside—through rewards, evaluations, and controls—intrinsic motivation tends to decrease. People do what is required, but they progressively stop feeling responsible for the outcome.

This effect is particularly evident in complex tasks, those requiring judgment and problem-solving: exactly the type of work that industrial organizations claim they want to foster among employees when they implement Lean. The more external control increases, the more the internal energy that sustains quality over time weakens. Behaviors only remain “correct” as long as someone is watching.

Every monitoring system – whether it’s called an audit, a Gemba walk, observation, inspection, or control – can act as either a negative or a positive reinforcer, as defined in behavior analysis.
It acts as a negative reinforcer when the fear of punishment prevails, and as a positive reinforcer when the hope for gratification takes the lead. An audit where you fear losing your certification, and with it, the clients who require it, acts as a negative reinforcer because it creates distress. Such an audit works just like a speed camera.
To avoid a fine or losing license points, we do “whatever it takes” (which isn’t necessarily driving slowly): most of us learn to slow down near the camera and then speed up again; some learn to take routes with fewer cameras; others learn to check where the GPS flags them. The wealthiest learn to laugh it off, bragging about their fines with friends at dinner. Those with large, compliant families learn to pay the fine and then have the points deducted from their wife’s or octogenarian mother-in-law’s license by declaring them as the driver (these examples are all “single-gendered” because I’ve never heard of the opposite happening). The most pathological ones learn to saw down the speed camera poles, like the infamous “Fleximan.”

To be clear: cases that cross the line into criminal activity must be condemned. However, it is an established fact that negative reinforcement does not produce stable responses because it fosters “avoidance learning” – as it is called in psychology. Furthermore, you can never predict exactly how a subject will choose to avoid punishment (because fear can drive us to do things we otherwise wouldn’t).

I am reminded of an anecdote from a colleague who witnessed – in a company with a robust WCM program in place – perfectly functional Kanban cards being replaced just for the day of the audit. Everyone knew the certifier would have challenged their format (regardless of their actual effectiveness), and no one wanted to “get a bad grade.”
Conversely, a plant visit or a Gemba walk where fear is absent – where there is only the certainty that the observer will see your progress and, in case of anomalies, work with you to understand how to improve – acts as a positive reinforcer. You will look forward to the next Gemba walk because you know it will be an opportunity for gratification and learning.
In this dynamic, there are no grades or stamps. There is only self-respect – that inner voice telling you whether you are doing the right or wrong thing. If you make a mistake, you correct yourself – not to please the auditor or the manager on duty, but because you have internalized the value, the rule. That rule is the only effective “negative reinforcer” that doesn’t trigger flight or avoidance learning, because it is always with you.

Therefore, negative reinforcement works best when it is “self-administered” when you listen to that voice telling you to “do the right thing.” In Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) literature, these are known as “self-generated rule-governed behaviors” or “self-instructions”. In everyday language, we simply call them values.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant states that a rule is truly moral only if it is autonomous – that is, recognized as one’s own. If I act correctly because someone is monitoring, evaluating, or rewarding me, I am not following a moral law: I am reacting to a mechanism.

From an organizational standpoint, we could say that a rule is truly effective only if it is part of the culture – when it can even be removed from procedures because “for our people,” there is no need to state it explicitly. Organizations can pass audits and obtain certifications, but real Lean culture – the kind that holds up when no one is watching – is born only when rules are internalized, when the standards are those the group demands of itself. No stamp or badge can create this responsibility; at best, it can simulate it for a while.
The fascinating part is that scientific psychology arrived at the same conclusion nearly two centuries after Kant, using different tools and different languages.

Gianni Agnelli delegated much of the factory and operational organization to the managers he put in charge of the business. His detached relationship with these topics emerges clearly in a public text: the February 1991 preface to the Italian edition of The Machine That Changed the World by Womack, Jones, and Roos.

Agnelli wrote:

“Reading this book may be worrying for us Westerners as it highlights the gap we have accumulated compared to our Eastern competitors, but it also gives us a positive message: that the Japanese experience is based on a diversity of methods and tools, and not on insurmountable differences in mindset.”

His mistake lies right there, and it is exactly the wrong point! But there is no blame for the Avvocato: in those years, Lean culture arrived in bits and pieces through vertical tools and methods; it was all talk of Quality Circles and ISO standards…
He likely lacked the time or interest to delve deeper, having other interests, as we know. His story is primarily linked to women, boats, Juventus, and the political and financial maneuvers to give Fiat the support it needed when the market began opening up, first to European producers, then to the Japanese and Americans.

If Lean were truly just a matter of tools, we wouldn’t have turned it into a race for medals. What is difficult in any change is not implementing methods or copying tools but building a mindset. Principles are shared with passion and demonstrated through example. But when we don’t internalize these principles, everything becomes mere storytelling, a performance – or as they would say in Naples, ‘ammuina’ (making a hollow fuss).