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

gemba-based observers should be able to understand, unassisted, what a given object, process or system is. If relevant, a visual control should also share the subject's purpose, and related operating rules, including a definition of the normal condition (and often, what to do in response to an abnormal condition).

Throw out all of your fixed ideas about how to do things. 2. Think of how the new method will work - not how it won't. 3. Don't accept excuses. Totally deny the status quo. 4. Don't seek perfection. A 50 percent implementation rate is fine as long as it's done on the spot. 5. Correct mistakes the moment they're found. 6. Don't spend a lot of money on improvements. 7. Problems give you a chance to use your brain. 8. Ask "why?" at least five times until you find the root cause. 9. Ten people's ideas are better than one person's. 10. Improvement knows no limit.

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

"Don't be afraid to give up the good for the great." - John D. Rockefeller

"Dust accumulates to form a mountain." (chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru). While this may not be geologically correct, it carries a deep truth that lean practitioners will recognize through experience. Taken positively, this is the essential spirit of kaizen, that small changes repeated over time result in massive improvements. Taken negatively, it means that small, persistent losses result in huge losses.

I agree - it is a must read

The scene from the movie is funny and the article has some great questions.

The lesson: waste doesn't get eliminated until someone asks why is it there!

In business, we tend to assume that crisis will either not occur, or when it does will be within our domain of being able to handle it… but we get surprised and our problem solving skills are stretched to the breaking point. Why? Because we have never really practiced those skills, and if we have, we have not been critical enough of how we went about solving routine problems, and we are sloppy.

One piece flow for Continuous Improvement - How often are we improving?

Toyota has an average 14 mistake-proofing devices at EVERY workstation. You should, too! Go ahead and take away the opportunity to make a judgment error, an identification error, an entry error - the list goes on forever.

Does this cause us to re-think the way we do Kaizen?

Even marketing folks use visual management boards!

Just a good, basic article on zero defects

Gotta love Ohno quotes! I think I'm going to have to get this book. Wakamatsu then shared this response from Taiichi Ohno: This answer infuriated Taiichi Ohno. "I learned how to figure out 8 x 2 = 16 in elementary school. I had never thought I would learn that again from you when I am this old. Do not treat me like a fool"

If our process is perfect today, and everyone continues their job, waste will still increase. Why? There are perhaps many reasons, but none more undeniable than the fact that conditions change. Data changes, regulation changes, customer expectations change, and of course even the people in the organization change. Every one of these changes affects the conditions under which our process was designed for perfection.

Our target condition is a stable process with reduced, more consistent cycle times as less time is spent hunting for things. Though we may see a correlation between 5S audit scores and stability, it is all to easy to focus on the score and forget the reason.

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.

Tips for Continuous Improvement