Kaizen Institute is organizing benchmark tours in Austria on June 26 and 27. Participants will see best practices in 5S, flow, TPM, and daily kaizen and systematic implementation of operational excellence. The companies to be visited are:

Eisenwerk Sulzau-Werfen (ESW)

BRP-Powertrain

Dräxlmaier Group

Learn how to engage people in continuous improvement, improve operational and financial performance, howt to create a sustainable continuous improvement process, and much more.

Full details are here on the website.

Download PDF brochure for the KAIZEN Benchmark Tour Austria 26-27 June, 2013.

Mention my name and register by May 24 to receive a 20% discount. I hope you can join us.

If you are looking for a definitive technical guide to implementing lean manufacturing in discrete production, logistics or for improving end-to-end supply chain performance, Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains by Euclides A. Coimbra is the book for you. This book is the result of two decades of collected practical experience by Euclides and members of the Kaizen Institute team. The book explains what it takes to apply kaizen to logistics and supply chains. After introducing the various concepts and explaining each in detail, the final chapters walk through an actual case study based on the lean transformation of a European manufacturer. The book is illustrated with over 150 figures giving up-close look at the systems for designing and implementing heijunka, kanban systems, internal and external logistics loops, production line layouts, workstation design, line balancing, standard work and much more.

Worthy of special note is the level of detail this book covers on the "border of line" concept of delivering materials to the point of use based on the use of small containers, frequent deliveries, standardized routes made by the water spider, material transport trains, types of kanban loops and connection to the supermarket, and how to establish the foundation of leveling pull planning to enable continuous flow. Too many lean implementations try to "pull and flow" without really understanding what it takes to do this successfully across the whole enterprise, and Coimbra gives both a broad and deep view into this area.

The chapters on external logistics, milk runs, warehouse deign, source flows, logistics pull planning and other practical topics on lean distribution are also valuable, and the use of value stream maps throughout the book to demonstrate how to understand the current state and design the future state by applying the various concepts that are introduced allow the reader to build a step-by-step framework.

Although the book describes manufacturing supply chains throughout, the exact same principles and methods are being successfully applied in real life to logistics and supply chain processes in retail, healthcare, food service and energy companies worldwide. Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains by Euclides Coimbra is recommended for anyone interested in improving supply performance in safety, quality, cost, product availability, order lead-time and inventory levels.

Perfecting Patient Journeys by Judy Worth, Tom Shuker, Beau Keyte, Karl Ohaus, Jim Luckman, David Verble, Kirk Paluska, Todd Nickel and Sam Watson is the latest in a series of practical workbooks from the Lean Enterprise Institute. Think of this as "Value Stream Mapping for Healthcare" which the book does well in explaining, extending the discussion into proper scoping of problems, consensus-building and other change management and project management aspects. The Foreword by Sam R. Watson, Senior VP for Patient Safety and Quality at Michigan Health & Hospital Association, leaves the reader wanting more from the book. On the current condition of unaffordable, inefficient and sometimes dangerous healthcare delivery, he writes:

Many now hope that technology can turn the tide in the transformation of healthcare. But beliefs and behaviors are the root of transformation, technology merely enables, facilitates and hastens change.

It was disappointing that this topic of culture, and specifically the deep assumptions and beliefs that drive our behavior, did not receive significant discussion in the book. The aim of value stream mapping is to make problems visible and create a path to a more connected process end-to-end, and the project is a method to bring about the change. A major reason transformations fail is that we try to change things and rules without changing how we think and feel. Value stream improvement is a technique, if not a technology, on which many Lean practitioners place significant hope. Over-reliance on VSM or any Lean method remains a risks, if significant and deliberate attention is not paid to making cultural beliefs and assumptions visible, explicit and the target of the PDCA cycle.

The book introduces "socialization" and uses this new Lean term liberally in place of "get buy-in" or "develop consensus". It takes some getting used to (I am not yet socialized to the use of 'socialization'). We can say socialization is low-key culture change arrived at through cross-functional kaizen events, empowering people to redesign their processes and problem solving through consensus building. In the real world, organizations face much more dire challenges with culture during a transformation than the instructions in this book will effectively address, but it provides a good start in the form of socialization / culture change built around value stream transformation projects. The various hints on socialization, codes of conduct and consensus-building are fairly standard change management and kaizen preparation guidelines, reworded and put into the hospital context. The instructions are sometimes too shallow, simply saying "Socialize your data collection measures and plan to the rest of the staff" without explaining how this is done or what are the typical pitfalls.

The topic of clarifying problems statements also begged for more detail in terms of examples of good and bad problem statements, what to include and what not to include in problem statements, how to make it succinct, the differences between highest-level problem statements and lowest level ones, how to cycle back to the problem statement if it becomes apparent while turning the PDCA cycle that the problem was not properly stated, etc. There are good standards for problem statements in the Lean literature, the Toyota Business Practice, including in courses offered by LEI but the book, and it would be good to see more cross-referencing and linking of these best practices within the LEI literature in the future. While promising to help the reader practice the 5 pitfalls of problem solving, the book still leaves plenty of room for practitioners to err when writing problem statements.

The authors to promise that by patiently working through the steps in the workbook, the five pitfalls of problem solving will be gradually addressed and the organization will become more effective. It is admirable that it is presented in this way, not as a simple checklist of dos and don'ts but as process of learning which will take time and practice. Since the title is Perfecting Patient Journeys, the 8 pages dedicated to what happens after the value stream improvement project seems inadequate. The authors know full well the enormous effort and never ending commitment it will take to "perfect" patient journey, as in Lean terms this means to "approach perfection but not ever attain it". Ending the book without referring the reader who is a beginner to books on daily management such as Creating a Lean Culture by David Mann seems unhelpful at best.

For those somewhat seasoned in Lean and with any competence in value stream mapping, there is little gain from the mechanics of the process. For a complete beginner, the book provides enough of the basics to make Perfecting Patient Journeys a good starter book. On the whole, the book is a valuable addition to the library of any Lean practitioner, in healthcare or any people flow process such as food service, entertainment, hospitality and so forth. It is a good refresher for a practitioner needing guidelines in the broad framing and execution of a value stream transformation project.

When doing kaizen we also need to take into account the non-mathematical or indirect benefits which include learning more about the process you are improving, becoming better at problem solving, engaging people's minds in the work, morale boost (provided time savings is a result of reduced burden or boring tasks), and the success-builds-on-success factor of making many small changes resulting in an organization generally more adaptive to changes that inevitably come to them.

Some very successful people are committed to the idea of making small changes every day, even if it is only 2 seconds of improvement per day, regardless of the short-term financial justification.

It's good to see the transportation authorities finally doing something about the problem of sheep abandonment in taxis. Hopefully this will put an end to the awkwardness of having to hand a lamb to the driver and explain that it is not yours, it was there when you got into his vehicle. Not to mention that sinking feeling when you reach for your sheep only to realize that it's sped off in the cab you just exited.

With news this week of Stephen Fry walking a sheep across London Bridge and scammers selling sheep as miniature poodles in Japan, it's none too soon that taxi companies are taking action to stamp out sheep abandonment before it takes root in Chinese cities and leaves all travelers thinking woolly.

Month after month, year after year we have added new online learning content to Gemba Academy while keeping the prices low. Now celebrating four years and 400+ videos and 120 hours of Lean and Six Sigma learning, we are offering our best value promotion ever. But there is only one week left.

Until March 31, 2013 anyone purchasing an online subscription to the School of Lean, School of Six Sigma, or both will receive up to 68 DVDs free of charge, including worldwide shipping. School of Six Sigma subscribers will also receive a free Minitab and/or SigmaXL statistical software license.

If you are already a subscriber you may use this promotion to extend or add other sites to your subscription. Details can be found here. If you have any questions please do let us know by calling us at 1-888-439-8880
________________________________________

"The fact the courses are delivered into small, bite-size modules, makes learning easier and allows the students to go back to a particular module for refresher training. This reinforces particular learning points for the student and makes learning much more effective. This results in a more engaged and active participant."

- Jeff Miller, Global Best Practices Group Chair, Toyota
________________________________________

Recent New Content Added at Gemba Academy

In our latest webinar author and lean healthcare expert Mark Graban illustrated each of the eight types of waste with a story from his work helping healthcare systems around the world. The webinar focused on the definitions of waste, how to identify waste, and how to see the benefits for patients, staff and clinicians, and the healthcare organizations.

The recording of this webinar is available here for free viewing until April 15th after which it will only be available to subscribers of the School of Lean.

Many people find even the idea of rules, standards and policies to be stifling. Poorly designed and executed rules can indeed be stifling. But so can working with a total lack of rules, standards and order. Rules are the foundation of continuous improvement and essential to a lean enterprise. Some years ago I wrote about the lean enterprise rules of three and here is another one:

The three rules for rules

1) Rules must be fair. This is the single hardest rule for setting rules. Leaders tend to set the rules. These leaders tend to already have privileges and advantages. They have the ability to skew rules to their favor, or even to design rules in a way to be unfair, to not apply to themselves. The first step, and test of whether rules, improvement and lean thinking will survive is to start with a basic agreement on a level of fairness and improve from there.

2) Rules must be followed. If rules are fair but not followed, either people don't believe in fairness and you have a genuine people problem or the rules can't be followed in practice. Such rules may be well-intentioned but in effect unfair, and need revision. If rules aren't being followed, there is a reason. Proceed to the next rule and rewrite an improved rule.

3) Rules must be frequently improved. Taiichi Ohno taught us that there can be no kaizen without standards. He also taught us that rules could be poor, as long as the current agreed method was used and it was understood to be provisional, soon to be improved. Ohno also wanted managers and engineers to have to wash their hands several times each day because they were getting their hands dirty helping to improve the workplace.

Finally for those who would argue that fewer rules are better than many rules, I would say that they are in fact making up their own new rules every single time they do things a different or their own way. This desire for creativity should be satisfied by designing and redesign rules. If the purpose of the rules are agreed and viewed as fair, energy will flow in the direction no of beating the rules or evading them, but in the direction of achieving the purpose of them.

Recently heard on the gemba:

"We are great problem solvers, but the same problems keep coming back."

When the countermeasures are off target, the problems reoccur. If problems reoccur for the same root cause, we have not in fact solved the problem. We have only temporarily contained it. Even if the same problem reoccurs due to a different root cause, it is possible that problem solving was done without a thorough enough root cause analysis step. Problem solving has not successfully happened until we can verify that the root causes have been identified and that the countermeasures applied to them are effective.

Taiichi Ohno wrote in Toyota Production System:

When a problem occurs, if the root cause analysis is insufficient, the focus of countermeasures can be off. That is why we ask 'why?' five times. This is the foundation of the scientific attitude of the Toyota system.

In the Toyota way of working called TBP (Toyota Business Practice) there are 8 steps. These are synonymous with practical problem solving and are mapped against the PDCA cycle.

1. Clarify the problem
by providing background detail, context, history and going to see. Write a concise and simple problem statement. Gain consensus on the problem statement.
2. Break down the problem
by deconstructing complex problems into their component issues or themes, narrowing the scope or identifying any out-of-bounds or unaddressable areas.
3. Set a target
that will be achieved based on the above selection of the clear and broken down problem statement.
4. Analyze the root causes
by going to see, employing a variety of means such as Pareto analysis, Ishikawa diagrams and 5 why analysis, to arrive at actionable areas.
5. Develop countermeasures
to these root cause areas, with the emphasis on multiple countermeasures that can be deployed as experiments, rather than looking for one total solution.
6. See countermeasures through
to their successful or unsuccessful result, trying again and again without giving up until the target is reached.
7. Evaluate both results and process
in order to learn whether the plan was followed or whether short cuts were taken, whether results were achieved by luck or random variation or actual successful countermeasures, and systematically examine failed experiments or incorrect assumptions exposed while seeing countermeasures through.
8. Standardize successful practices
and learn from failures, share and set sights on the next targets by returning to step 1, the beginning of the PCDA cycle.

Granted, this process takes a lot longer than quickly defining the problem and jumping to a solution. Sometimes that is necessary in order to temporarily contain a problem. But it is not true problem solving, as in the application of root cause countermeasures. When the root causes are found and countermeasures are dutifully applied, the problems remain "solved" or at least non-recurring for the same root cause.

The popular A3 thinking or A3 problem solving is nothing more than the process of developing and documenting this collaboratively, one one page of paper, often A3-sized. Becoming great at problem solving is not a question of speed, brilliance or heroic effort, it is a dedication to the proven PDCA process and practice, practice, practice...

Costco Wholesale is the third largest retailer in the United States with 2012 sales of $87 billion and a net income $1.45 billion. It is the largest membership club retailer in the world. As a member I rely on its supply chain, purchasing practices, quality control, recruiting and customer service practices to feed, clothe and replace my worn out suitcase at fair prices.

Above is a photo of the Costco Wholesale mission statement seen on the wall of one of its local warehouse stores, reading:

"To continually provide our members with quality goods and services at the lowest possible prices. In order to achieve our mission we will conduct our business with the following Code of Ethics in mind:

1. Obey the law
2. Take care of our members
3. Take care of our employees
4. Respect our vendors
5. Reward our shareholders

If we do these four things throughout our organization, then we will realize our ultimate goal, which is to reward our shareholders."

The founder Jim Sinegal's management philosophy has been to a model the behaviors desired from employees, provide training constantly, develop our own talent always and promote people from within the company. Costco pays the highest wages in the industry with benefits that are very good for any industry. Perhaps as a result, the employee turnover rate is less than half that of industry average.

Read more about the The Six Rights of People and talent retention at Costco. These are not rights as in "rights and privileges" but meaning correct, as in "the right person for the job" or the "the right environment for the person".

There are a few big lean leadership lessons we can gain from Costco:

• Put the focus on the customer
• Respect people and invest in them
• Value and respect partner firms
• Raise quality and lower costs
• Good processes brings good results

There are many Lean buzzwords that attempt to rebrand and repackage what are timeless but often forgotten principles. Buzzwords are an attempt to appeal to today's reader or manager or student. The principles, methods and techniques behind these buzzwords are by and large all worth studying, if for no other reason than to understand how they are the same, similar or different from yesterday's good management practices. They are good for capturing our attention.

What is often missing in the discussion of continuous improvement, Lean or any other management buzz-trend is the promotion of basic, proven, workaday or even dull business practices such as the ones found Costco's Code of Ethics and mission statement: obey the law, take care of customers and employees, and respect vendors.

Even when these are remembered and practiced, we may fail at prioritization, thinking they are a list to be checked off rather than realizing that "good processes bring good results". Leaders find that their Lean efforts struggle when they put result ahead of process. The word "ultimate", so often misused colloquially to mean "greatest" is used here by Costco in its original and correct meaning: the last. Good processes bring good results to shareholders, sustainably.

Management by fact is a key guiding principle of kaizen and lean thinking. By gathering facts and evidence people are able to communicate realities, define problems, and convert them into opportunities to improve the situation. Many of the management methods of kaizen and Lean, such as one piece flow, jidoka, visual management, 5S, kanban, andon, genchi genbutsu, standard work for leaders and standard work are designed to bring facts to the forefront.

Sometimes these facts are not pretty. Nor do facts always agree with company politics or the prevailing leadership dogma. Facts are not always convenient. Reconciling the need to manage by fact with the desire for beauty and harmony within our lives may be a reason why these Lean methods are often resisted at first.

Nineteenth century biologist Thomas Huxley said, "science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact". As an early champion of modern Western science he left us with quite a few more quotes relevant to managing by fact and the kaizen philosophy in general.

Learn what is true in order to do what is right.

God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

But facing facts, questioning beliefs and grappling with the unknowns in the universe with healthy scientific skepticism is neither easy nor comfortable for humans, nor was it for Huxley:

I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.

And Huxley was not saying to live only through facts and deductive reasoning, but also encouraged us to use inductive reasoning, go forward boldly to present new hypotheses in spite of human failings and biases:

There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.

As an advocate of science and managing by fact, Huxley believed that the thinking process is more important than the views, positions or specific thoughts one has. In kaizen we say "good process, good results, while Huxley said:

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

But all of this talk of hypothesis, reasoning and science does not mean that Huxley was merely a man of thought. For him thought was a means to an end, to taking the necessary actions in life.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

On converting decision into action, Huxley said:

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.

For those with humility and courage, the facts await. Go see.

The article Kaizen - the Achilles heel of Japan on a blog titled "On the Surface - Logical thinking in an everyday world" (which I suspect may be a title attempting irony but at two posts it is too early to tell) pulls off the triple crown of failing to understand kaizen, Japan and Achilles' heel.

Kaizen

The premise of the article is that kaizen was what made Japanese tech firms unstoppable in the1980s, but now kaizen is the one thing holding them back.

Kaizen or CIP (Continuous Improvement Process) as it's referred to in western countries is the idea of identifying points of improvement in a process and then taking continual, incremental steps to address those points. It's amazingly logical and surprisingly simple.

The article claims that managers who practice kaizen (or at least those who use the word) become risk averse. Continual improvement makes one risk averse. Taking small steps to changing processes makes one conservative? The more we change, the more we desperately want to stay the same? The better things get, the less we want to make things? The more we see that our actions to remove obstacles to employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction and growth are successful, the less we want to do these things? Sounds illogical, but let's read on.

What happens when a company abandons Kaizen as the leading factor of their business model? We only need to look at Toyota for the answer. Toyota was one of the major proponents of Kaizen in the 1980s and 1990s and still uses it today, but not in the same capacity.

So Toyota abandoned kaizen, but still uses it. Because it did / didn't abandon kaizen, it was able to stop making boring cars.

Kaizen is problem solving. When the problem is unappealing product design, Toyota applies the same thinking to the innovation process. For more on this, look up Toyota Business Practice, A3 thinking and practical problem solving. They are all branches of the same kaizen tree, rooted in the scientific method.

Moving away from concepts like Kaizen and focusing on the risky path of innovation is the only way for the Japanese tech industry to make its long awaited comeback.

Logically, continuous improvement (kaizen, CIP) cannot do damage, or it is no longer improvement. There is a word for "change for the worse" and it is not kaizen.

Japan

What the blogger is trying to say is that innovation-killing management attitudes have damaged the Japanese high tech industry. No doubt there are practices resulting from risk aversion, hubris and comfort with the status quo that have stifled innovation at some tech giants in Japan. Kaizen is not one of these practices.

There are many factors to consider. These include a lack of proximity and intimacy with the American market due to separation by language, an ocean and a sizable Japanese home market making it possible do business without moving R&D to the USA; social and cultural norms such as the extreme aversion to bankruptcies and business failures which prevent rapid learning from failed experiments and stifle innovation; the barriers to entrepreneurship including minimum levels of capital required to start businesses, the reluctance of established firms to extend credit or supply to startups that may potentially disrupt the business of their major customer, and the relative immaturity of venture capital in Japan to develop startups even if the previous points were not limiting factors to the emergence of startups and innovation to begin with.

In hindsight, Masaaki Imai's book should have been titled Kaizen: A Key of Japan's Competitive Success rather than Kaizen: The Key... because kaizen is just one factor in the success of an organization or society. Kaizen is necessary but not sufficient.

Achilles' heel

Achilles is the hero of Greek mythology who was physically invincible in battle with the exception of one spot - his heel. Used as a metaphor, the Achilles' heel is the single weak spot in something that is otherwise invincible. A look beyond the surface reveals that Japan was and is far from invincible. It's economic miracle was felled not by kaizen but by the economic bubble brought on by inflated land prices, a declining population, and and saturation of the home market with consumer goods. The surprisingly delay in wider adoption of kaizen, Lean or Toyota Production System methods compared to countries in the West is in part due to a lack of marketing. Masaaki Imai's book was published in English and not published in Japanese until a few years ago.

So little of the Japanese economy actually practices kaizen that a more apt metaphor would be "Achilles' heel in reverse". If the Greek hero's mother had dipped only the baby's heel in the Styx, rather than the whole body, that would be the analogue to kaizen and Japan.

The surface is but the uppermost layer or outside part of something. If you are curious, dive deep into the water, or risk bearing Achilles' flaw all over.

A label is a visual control that should clarify, not confuse. Here is an ambiguous visual control, its intentions good but lost in translation.

Does metal stand in an airport even need a label? Perhaps. There is not much else that one could do with this object other than to attach a notice to it either or both clips. Or one could use it for temporary coat storage I suppose. But the chances for this sort of confusion, requiring a clarifying label, are slim.

A billboard is typically a large outdoor advertisement. The Chinese reads "public announcement board". In any case, all of them I passed by in PVG terminal 2 were devoid of announcements. Perhaps these billboards are part of an understated advertisement for stainless steel surfaces. It could be a overly clever viral marketing campaign for a brand yet to hit our consciousness.

The three vertical poles holding up the display surface strike me as artistic but a bit over-engineered for its purpose. But I digress.

I am tempted to attach a public notice reading "This is in fact not a billboard" but I have a flight to catch...

Stop press: update

...only minutes later, at my gate.

Delightful. Now I am really confused.

First of all I would like to thank Matthew May for the opportunity to contribute a page to his book, and for the review copy of the book. With greater skill in subtraction, my days will be less full and future reviews will no doubt be more timely.

In an interview Matthew May describes subtraction as:

"...the art of removing anything excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly...and the discipline to refrain from adding it in the first place."

Whenever a book's theme or title is one that can be reflected back on the structure and content of the book, it is tempting to do so. Does the book need 220 pages? Does it need 70+ vignettes? Why 6 laws of subtraction rather than five, or three? This is not merely a pedantic exercise, it may be the central question that the book raises; how do we know when to subtract and when to stop (to turn subtraction upon itself and stop subtracting)?

Any theory should be tested in three ways:

1. Is its truth or efficacy demonstrable by evidence? On this count I give the book half marks. While an abundance of social proof is presented, it was hard to find evidence of the type that isolated subtracted as the key factor in success of any of the examples. We could easily choose a success factor, collect vignettes and just-so stories, and present a new theory. For example we could use "timing" and build a case around "being at the right place at the right time, something good happens". But unless we took into account the other factors leading up to being in the right place, and the effort in following through after grasping the opportunity it would not be scientifically valid. Subtraction may indeed be the differentiating factor in all of the examples cited, but it is left up to the reader to experiment and verify of disprove this notion. This is not a criticism of The Laws of Subtraction, as the book does not claim to be a scientific paper. It is more of a wish, as I believe in and try to practice subtraction and would not like to see it becoming a popular system of belief, which due to a lack rigor and proof, is eventually subsumed by the next idea.

2. Is it falsifiable? While there are hundreds of examples and stories that satisfy and convince the reader that the principle of subtraction is a real thing, we are not asked to imagine a scenario under which would render "when we remove just the right things in just the right way, something good happens". While the idea resonates and is true from experience, it is practically a tautology due to its wording. Can we imagine a circumstance under which we remove just the right things in just the right way but something good does not happen? If we can't it is impossible to call this a scientific theory, which it deserves to be.

3. Is it internally consistent? In other words, can the ideas and claims within the theory be applied to itself, or does the theory claim to be above its own standards? Can we apply the laws of subtraction to the laws of subtraction? Can the theory be improved in the future by removing lower quality elements? All scientific theories, if not all knowledge, improves over time as false assumptions are exposed and removed through experiments and experience. Can we improve upon the six laws to make them more elegant? No doubt we can, and a good place to start may be to restate the "just right" theory of subtraction in a way to make it falsifiable. Refinement through personal practice is also another good way to test its internal consistency.

Both the narrative scope of Subtraction the book and the application of the theory are broad and varied, for which we need to thank the author Matthew May. He illustrates the importance of subtraction from visual art to product design to rock gardens to city planning to film to development of scientific knowledge. He makes the case through a variety of personal stories, one-page vignettes from contributors, and leading research in neuroscience and human behavior. The book is highly readable and makes the reader easily feels the truth and simplicity of the main idea of this book.

Matthew May explains subtraction in an interview:

The key is to remove the stupid stuff: anything obviously excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly. If you don't know what that is, ask people on the receiving end of what you provide or produces. They are generally more than happy to tell you.

The importance of asking "people on the receiving end" of your service, product, experience or design effort cannot be trivialized. The lack of people engagement whether customers, leaders or employees, is broadly responsible for many faltering transformation efforts. Matthew May demonstrates that he is well aware of this through his writing, speaking and consulting work, and could have drawn more attention to this point in the book. The entire premise of removing "just the right things in just the right way" to bring about good things assumes that we have a powerful grasp of "just the right". While this is easy to spot, document and connect to subtraction in retrospect, it is fiendishly difficult to do when staring at the excess and complexity in front of us. The methods to arrive at "just the right" are, in decreasing order of efficacy, listening carefully to customers, determined trial-and-error and long-term statistical inevitability (luck). When lacking, subtraction may start with adding customer engagement.

Lean manufacturing evolved over decades, built on a foundation of scientific rigor in quality control brought to Japan by Dr. Deming, combined with the dogged pursuit of "just in time" by Taiichi Ohno and others at Toyota. Various industrial engineering, human resource development and intelligent automation breakthroughs enabled this. Often this was helped by subtraction applied to borrowed methods such as TWI, Taylorism and statistics. While there was much subtraction both at the front line level through continuous improvement (kaizen) activity and at the theoretical level (from push-based execution to pull-based), the resulting Toyota Production System is intricate, complex and elegant in comparison either to where they started in the 1950s or to where many firms are today.

The methods of lean management, six sigma, agile and so forth have been misunderstood to mean simply removal of waste, overburden and/or variation. In fact it is not so simple as this. At the surface level it is true that these methods seek to maximize human happiness by removing those things that erode it. However many times this means adding steps, processes, checks and systems rather than subtracting anything. The result may be the subtraction of inventories, delays, defects and correction loops, transportation etc. but the action to achieve these reductions may well be to add team leaders and supervisors to enhance support to the front lines, to add the capability to use the andon cord in order stop to call for help, the addition of in process self-inspection to every step rather than relying on line-end inspection, the addition of a vast number of visual controls across the chain of processes to make the current status of work visible, the addition of structured morning meetings and daily routines where before there was none, and the list goes on. While the result of all of this is simplicity and subtraction of many wastes, perhaps only half of the 6 laws of subtraction are truly applied (2. simple rules, 4. intelligent constraints, 5 break). Surely this is not to say that lean management does not apply subtraction, or that subtraction does not apply to business process redesign, leaving as an option the need to review the theory and/or its wording.

Another question this raises is whether there is a level of maturity and complexity that is required for subtraction to apply. If a product, service, experience, community or system is simple to the point of being incomplete or inadequate, are the laws of subtraction the right choice? There is an assumption of Western hemisphere abundance, an excess of choice, within the context of applying subtraction. Can we apply subtraction effectively to relieving the suffering of drought-caused famine? Or do we need considerable addition (wells, basic supplies, shelter) before considering subtraction? Do we add something but invoke the double-negative and call it "subtraction of what is missing"? Is subtraction an approach we can apply to bringing about goodness at all levels of the Maslow hierarchy, or only at the highest levels?

The Laws of Subtraction draws on traditions and cultural practices from east Asia. One such axiom is:

To gain knowledge add things everyday. To gain wisdom, remove things everyday.

In this book there are some great ideas and encouraging stories around success through subtraction. Begin by reading the book to add to your knowledge. Then subtract daily to gain wisdom.

I took a clipping from the December 5th 2012 edition of the China Daily, the article titled pomp and ceremony must end. Xi Jinping, the new leader of China asked officials to "slash red tape, including unnecessary visits, meetings and pointless discussions". Here is the leader of one of the most powerful nations on the earth today telling his civil servants to be more effective as civil servants. This is not an uncommon exhortation for political leaders, but I was impressed by how he wants them to get this done.

1. Grasp the situation... The article stated that all members of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China were urged to understand the real situation facing society.

2. ...through gemba walks... He asked that they conduct more thorough inspection tours where social problems are acute and that senior leaders to go to the grassroots to listen to the public.

3. ...to remove non value added. Xi encouraged his leaders to end unnecessary pomp, extravagance and displays and cut down on too much jargon and empty words in many speeches.

All this in order to tackle to better tackle people's most practical problems.

The Politburo of the CPC are the most senior party officials in that country, each holding both vast regional authority and the ability to appoint other leaders. The statements by Xi are akin to a CEO telling the senior VPs to go to the gemba, look, listen, cut meetings and extravagant off-sites junkets, and take actions that will improve the practical problems on the gemba.

China is already the "workshop of the world". Will it also be come the "gemba kaizen workshop of the world"? This is most interesting to watch.

This one hurt my head a little.