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The Laws of Subtraction provide insights and lessons towards removing the clutter and honing in on the essence in order to awaken the creativity and innovation that generally gets buried under a deluge of non-essential information. Through a series of excellent stories that serve as examples for his laws in action, May highlights the unique features of these laws and their applicability to everyday life, both professional and personal

"Keeping it simple isn't easy. By exploiting subtraction in innovation, we've been able to create an environment of freedom and creativity that allows us to thrive." - Brad Smith, CEO, Intuit

Great list of factors that make change last.

"Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence."

How could we use this? Too often 5S, kaizen, standardization and checking our own work or the work of others begins with enthusiasm as a new management program but soon becomes a routine and neglected "nice to have". Putting 5S and kaizen together as the "6T practice" positions them as essential daily "must haves" behaviors. Placing the record of completing these duties on the clip board on the food service floor within reach of the customer is an excellent way to link practice with purpose.

Specifically, Karen and I have an excellent discussion related to the traps many practitioners fall into when working with value stream maps as well as how, and why, this tool is being used by many non manufacturing focused organizations.

It seems that since the beginning of time we've all learned, "Lean is about continuously developing people and improving processes to create and flow value to customers using the least possible resources required." Value of products and services is created through a series of work processes, some which create value and some that definitely do not (think of rework, inspection, waiting and expedited shipping). One objective of operational excellence and lean is to eliminate non-value added work to improve the flow of value to our customers, the result of which is shorter delivery cycles and higher levels of quality. Some people describe this as "creating value as efficiently and effectively as possible." 

Give yourself some time, don't be too busy to go to the kitchen of your company, observe and ask "why" as many times as you can to understand better what's cooking there. It is the place where work gets done and the only place where value can be added to business processes: Solve the problem at hand Prevent it from recurrence  It will result in better quality, delivery and lower costs. You'll be surprised how much it contributes to the value delivered to the customer.

Some excellent personal development/learning apps in here. Experiment with one.

Interesting thoughts about decisions, simplification and lean thinking.

Excellent ideas!

Great article! Time to outsource some decisions if you ask me...

Improvement doesn't just happen.  It takes time, and in the pressure pot of our day to day activities, there is never enough time to improve our situation. The structure of Lean permits and requires time be set aside for improvement. If managers do not definitively provide time for the task of improvement, then people will know that they are not serious about making improvement a formal part of the work.

Excellent point!

Excellent point, that looks like a job aid for Coaching Manager. What do you think?

Yes and for Continuous Improvement as well!

Toyota is famously credited for living by their "we don't build cars, we build people" motto but in fact this same sentiment can be traced back nearly a century ago to the Reverend Samuel Marquis, head of the Ford Motor Company's employee relations department, when he said: "Mr. Ford shoots about fifteen hundred cars out of the back door of his factory every day just to get rid of them. They are the by-products of his real business, which is the making of men."

Excellent quote!

While I'm not a fan of trying to be disciplined every moment of the day, there's no doubt most of us could use a little more discipline in our lives.

Excellent / practical article!

Yes - 5S is very relaxing!

If one of them happens to be a tall table for standing meetings, let me know. I'd like to replace the table in the Creative "War Room" with a taller version and eliminate the chairs. However, I need to find one with roughly the same circumference as the current table since we use it for design reviews.

Brian - I'm game. Let's do it.

The only thing better would be if he had a stand-up desk!

Wow!  Studying history, everyone is a "process engineer", celebrating improvements, discussing problems, reviewing results This is something to aspire to and emulate.  What could we start with?

This company simply amazes me! I'm going to start with our P&D Innovation team, what about showing these at our next Ops Check-in?

Possibly, I will select one, and put it at the end of the meeting. This is one of the things that I was thinking about for our Tribe of Tweddle Employees Pursuing Excellence. I have to come up with a better name.

Perhaps a little hard to tell, but there's an identical air conditioning unit in every single little office. Hundreds of them (it's a large building). I saw similar examples with large apartment buildings. Is central air a waste? Sure there's some production efficiency in large-scale utilities - wait did I just say that? But how much of that efficiency is wasted when it is delivered to areas that don't necessarily need it. Would smaller units that can be easily turned off create greater aggregate system efficiency? Aggregate "actual in use" efficiency vs. the "large scale production efficiency"? It's the same issue that electric cars and makers of single-home power plants (solar, geo, etc) are wrestling with.

I don't know about this one.

I agree - it is a must read

The moral? Don't let preconceived notions of what can't be done limit you, whether in football, in life, or in a kaizen.

Excellent point. Very few things at Tweddle carry more preconceived notions than kaizen