Now for something completely different
(kind of keeping a promise to Buckaroo)Some of you may have heard about Lean, Kaizen, continuous improvements, 3S, 5S or things like that.
If you are like me when I first heard of those, you would have thought of consultants from some business school who would meeting bosses in suits and workers at the factory floor in work clothes to blend in, and of course a lot of extra chores and do:s and don't:s, but still some good ideas to be used.
I once worked at a company which started to adopt some of these things and it turned out great, even though management, so to speak, did not go all in and used the full tool box. The biggest difference for me was 5S (in essence sort, straighten, shine, standardize and sustain). Things got more efficient, cleaner, organized, less messy and you stopped expecting that the tool you needed for the task would be the tool missing (though of course other tools would be abundant
). In short, things definitively was not better
before.
Someone who
have gone all in and improved and adapted the methodology is Paul Akers of FastCap. He is happy enough about it that he really want to share the concept he call
2 Second Lean which aims at having each person on his company strive for making a two second improvement in their processes every day. On the FastCap web site you can find
this page with a huge amount of interesting, educational and inspiring videos. Below are two that might be interesting as an introduction.
Start your day by "scratching an itch". Oh, and why stop at work. I bet all of you have things nagging you at home that can be improved, 2 seconds a time.