Daniel sent us this Review of Paul’s book, 2 Second Lean. Great thoughts!

“I just finished reading the last six chapters last night…

The final big take-away I got from the book were your comments about Kaizen events (p. 110) and how they really are an uneven approach to Lean that can be disruptive or even burdensome and thus hard to get buy-in for. I also think they are maybe a bit disempowering because they send the message that change is something we can only do occasionally with big projects, and outside of that it is business as usual. Unfortunately this is how almost all Lean initiatives start, in part I think because it is a model that works well for consultants. But governments and politicians like big projects for other reasons as well.

Contrast that to my 2 second improvement this morning. There was a hole punch that wasted about five minutes of my time yesterday because it seized up on the 24-sheet document I tried to hole-punch yesterday. Today literally 15 seconds with some shredder oil I brought from home fixed that problem for anyone else who uses that hole punch in the coming months, saving probably hours of waste all told. One beauty of this is that I didn’t need any executive sign-off or stakeholder consultations to do this. While it is small, the return is probably measurable in 1,000s of percents! If you do that every day, with everyone in an organization, how can you not have amazing results?

For myself, it also caused me to realize that hole-punching is overprocessing to begin with, I can just keep a document in a folder and it is actually easier for me to work with that way.

Even better (now that I am actually using my brain on this problem which I would have thought beneath me), I can read and annotate a document electronically and avoid even the step of printing it (Overprocessing), going to the printer (Motion), _Waiting_ for my job to come out, and bringing it back to my desk (Transportation), filing it away (Motion / Inventory), and then, all too often, realizing I actually needed a different report (Defect), or just a few pages of it (Overproduction), and while I am dealing with all that Waste I am being Underutilized by my department and wasting the customer’s (taxpayer’s) dollar. There we go, all the 8 wastes just in the act of printing a document!”

Paul Akers will be speaking at the 2013 Iowa Jobs Training Lean Consortium at North Iowa Area Community College. Paul will be speaking about his book, 2 Second Lean. For more information on 2 Second Lean, visit his website. For more information on the 2013 Iowa Jobs Training Lean Consortium, go to this link.

Paul Akers, of The American Innovator broadcast, interviews FastCap employee Hannah about her thoughts on lean and working at a lean organization. For more information on The American Innovator, visit our website.

Bankers in Europe dress up in waste to illustrate how waste is everywhere, and have some fun in the process.

Biography of Paul Akers (PDF)

Paul Akers, of The American Innovator broadcast, discusses the 3 things you must do to make lean stick.

Paul Akers, of The American Innovator broadcast, introduces us to Katie Bailey. Katie shows us how lean comes naturally to kid. This show is cuteness from start to finish!

For more information on The American Innovator, visit our website.

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Cheryl at Walters & Wolf shows how they used lean principles to save time distributing the office mail.

Katie discusses how she used lean principles to keep from being late for school…again! What a impressive kid, and what a hopeful video! For more information on lean, visit 2 Second Lean. For more lean kid videos, go to this link.

Lean Morning Meeting Agenda (DOC)