John,

Lean manufacturing is defined and I am sure there are other reasons for the loss of this relationship. We enjoy your blog but try not to be so indirect with your blog contributions. And, unfortunately today is the first mention of the term.

Jim

ps don’t say “thanks for the advice” or the like. – circumlocution – could you repeat that?

Jim,

It may be defined but it is often misunderstood.

I'm amazed that you can be sure of anything about that happened between us and our client in Brazil (the relationship is not lost, by the way).

Circumlocution = a roundabout way of saying something or an expression that uses more words than are necessary to get the idea across.

Readers are welcom to mention the term I am avoiding this month, of course.

I sincerely appreciate your feedback and requests. I hope it's OK to say that.

Jon

Jon,

I have been reading your blogs for about a year now, and it has really helped me grow as a person. To comment on what you stated in your blog, I think it takes a person a while to come to this conclusion. In our business,(we are a wood manufactuer) I would do continuous improvement activities, but started to see that other Team Leads and management would/wouldn't do things because they didn't think it was the lean thing to do. So eventually I stopped saying the word Lean. What I found that was helpful to me is when I would tell them is to just find the waste and eliminate it. If you can't figure out how, then go into the Continuous Improvement toolbox and pull out a tool that will help in that situation. But don't let the word stand in your way of getting better.

Thank You,

Jermaine

Having a physical challenge (left above knee amputee) I feel I have a different perspective on process efficiency. When a person becomes or has a sight impairment, their other senses become more in tune with their surroundings. A person with a mobility impairment is accutely aware of "walking a process" that others without an impairment take for granted. To make a process more efficient I would suggest performing it in a wheelchair, then the inefficiencies become more magnified.

I stumbled across this blog when I used googles blog search for TPS... and why did I do that ? I work in the banking industry and currently as an enterprise we are at the fringes of exploring process (in) efficiencies. As a part of this , a few of us are to make a trip to Nagoya to the Toyota factory there and hence I wanted to learn more. To my feeble mind, conceptually, it is about becoming more efficient and eventually more productive and the sooner the better . Its all about today for tomorrow.