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Ninety percent of everything you and I do every day is waste.

That's what Lean Thinking is all about. It's understanding that everything we do can be improved continuously, without end. 

This applies to both your professional and personal lives.

Lean isn't just a business term, it's a life term. 

"In the Lean world, there is something we call the spaghetti trail. A simple Lean exercise would be to chart the walking path of how a particular person would travel to perform a common task, like emptying the dishwasher. Most of us are shocked at the amount of non-value activity (walking, reaching, opening, and closing) compared to the value-added activity (getting the dishes and silverware in the cabinets and drawers). The actual value-added time is a millisecond compared to all the waste."

Start a journal and for one week, keep track of all the activities and processes every day that might have waste in them. At the end of the week, see if more things are wasteful than they are profitable, productive, and efficient.

Make things simpler. 

Lean is about making things simpler. It's intentional on simplifying any process, whether it's how you manufacture a diode or keeping the bathroom clean and organized.

"When you make a process simpler, you yield a better, more satisfying result with less effort."

It's about working smarter, not harder.

We don't need to use our mental energy to brute ourselves through a clunky and complicated process. We need to use our human potential to improve processes, eliminating waste, solving complex problems, and intently thinking about our highest value-added activities.

Approach everything you do intending to make things simpler. 

"If it takes an hour to do something, ask how it can be done in 30 minutes. It is not a frantic 30 minutes, it's 30 minutes you achieved by eliminating the 8 kinds of waste**. When you get it down to 30 minutes, ask how you can get it down to 15 minutes. And after you reduce the time to just 7 minutes, get ready to do a happy dance. Before long, you have eliminated the process altogether, and sure jubilation will set in. Lean is the art of subtraction, not addition."

"Lean thinking applies to every aspect of life and, therefore, can improve every aspect of life."

"Everything in life is a process. When you begin to learn how to think Lean, you start incorporating certain questions into your daily thoughts. You will start to imagine how you can make those processes faster, safer, and simpler and improve the quality of everything you do every day. Not once, not twice, but every day you will make small improvements for the rest of your life."

The 5 principles of lean.

There are five principles of lean:

1. Sort — "sort everything and remove what is not necessary to the job at hand and get rid of all the clutter and junk."

2. Straighten — "a way to prioritize and organize the tools and resources needed for efficiency so that employees have easy access to their tools or supplies."

3. Shine — "a clean environment improves morale and actually makes it easier to identify equipment deterioration and/or malfunction."

4. Standardize — "this involves building consensus in the workplace for best practices so that everybody understands what to expect and what is expected of them."

5. Sustain — "finding ways to keep the changes in place. It is easier than you think if everything has a place and every place has a thing. I mean everything, even the salt and pepper."

The 3 lean pillars and 8 wastes.

The 3 Pillars of Lean are: 

Pillar 1: People must see waste. 

If you can't identify the eight wastes in everything you do, then it's challenging to eliminate the waste. The first pillar of Lean is to teach your people to see waste! 

The 8 wastes of Lean that must be seen are: 

1. "Over-production. The number one waste is over-production. It is the "mama muda," present in all the other wastes. 

2. Transportation. We transport the over-produced goods. 

3. Excess Inventory. Then we put those over-produced goods in inventory. 

4. Defects. Then we have defects, and we have to rework those over-produced goods. 

5. Over-processing. Then we have over-processing as we rework defects in the over-produced goods. 

6. Wasted Motion. Then we have to handle those over-produced goods. So we have wasted motion. 

7. Waiting Time. Then we have to force our customers to wait as we rework the defects in the over-produced goods. 

8. Wasted Potential. Then we have wasted employee potential, because our team members are reworking waste instead of focusing on seeing waste, eliminating waste and letting value flow to the customer."

Pillar 2: Constant improvement.

Every person must continuously improve everything. 

Pillar 3: Before and after. 

You must make "before and after" videos of all your improvements.

This allows you to see and benchmark improvements. 

As you review processes, look at it globally, and be sure to factor in interdependencies of other people or teams. 

Stand back and ask yourself, "What is it that we're trying to do for the customer here? What value are we trying to flow to the customer?"

Toyota doesn't try to remove waste unless they can remove it by half. 

"Our team also knows to look for the largest constraint. They have been trained to understand that the bottleneck—the biggest backup of work in a particular process—is the best place to see and eliminate waste."

If you focus on everything, you'll end up with nothing. Don't distract yourself with the minutia unless that's all that's left. Start with the biggest problem causing the most waste. Improve those areas first.

The goal of lean is creating value for the customer, cut everything else out. 

"The purpose of a company is to improve the quality of the customer's life. The purpose of a company is to deliver value at a very high level to the customer. The purpose of a company is to strip away the non-value-added activities and deliver to the customer more value consistently day after day, month after month, year after year. When you do that, your stature increases in the eye of your customer, your customer keeps coming back for more and then you make more money."

Ask yourself, 

“Is the activity that I’m doing delivering value to the customer—or is it just a process that’s been added on?”

“Am I trying to eliminate waste even though the process is delivering no value?” 

“We don’t want to do anything unless we’re delivering value to the customer.”

Don't organize waste. 

"Shelves filled with inventory— perfectly polished, shined and predictable, well- labeled and good visual controls—all the elements of Lean."

But most inventory is waste. It's an example of overproduction, and overproduction is where all waste begins. 

You can efficiently organize waste. 

"Organizing something is not indicative of being Lean. Lean Thinking is eliminating waste or non-value-added activities." 

"Anything that doesn't add value to the customer is waste."

"The customer wants the product. They don't want to have to pay for me to make it, transport it, put it on a shelf, manage it, power and heat the building to store it, light the shelves and then pay for all my employees to go up and down and count inventory once a month. That is total waste. Organized… but, total waste."

Ask people to fix what bugs them, to look at each of their work areas and ask, 

Is everything perfect? 

You wouldn't change a single thing? 

Surely there must be something that irritates the hell out you? 

"Getting people to think at this level about what bugs them and then make the effort to improve it or fix it—no matter how small the improvement—was the single most important improvement I made."

Build a lean culture.

The sign of a mature culture focused on Lean Thinking asks these questions continuously, at all levels of the business.

What is it that I need to improve? 

Where is my waste? 

What do you see?

If you're going to build a Lean Thinking culture, you need to look at every process and ask the question, 

"Bob, what are the eight wastes and which ones can you see in the process you are doing right now?"

Continuous improvement is everybody's job and the incentive is life keeps getting better when you are Lean Thinking.

Lean Thinking starts with the individual, the process, and then the product.

“It's double 'I'-PP (I.I.P.P).”

"Most people give up on Lean, they are 90% process focused and 10% people-focused. When in reality, it should be 100% the opposite."

Keep everything simple. Don't overcomplicate it. 

"Building a Lean culture requires standardizing and simplifying everything."

"Just give me a single 2-second improvement a day. That's it. That's all I ask for. A 2-second improvement."

Here are a couple of ideas to start to build a Lean Thinking culture:

Improve something by 2 seconds a day. 

Commit the first hour to sweeping, sorting, and standardizing to allow finding the 2-second improvements. 

Hold a Kaizen event, which "is when a group of employees focuses on a process and examines every step, then put it back together — removing all the non-value activity or waste. It's a team approach to making improvements."

"In order to make something stick, you must first: Set the expectation, Inspect the expectation Reinforce the expectation."

People will make mistakes. Expect it. That's how they'll learn. 

"Commit yourself to validating, complimenting and/or recognizing the work of your employees at least ten times a day." 

Your people should be accustomed to hearing you say things like,

"That's a great idea, Bob," or 

"Mary, I appreciate how hard you've worked on this project," or 

"Actually, John, I like your idea better than mine." 

"When humility becomes a central attribute of the Lean Thinking Leadership a vortex of creativity and buy-in will follow."

Hiring is one of the most important aspects of building a Lean Thinking culture.

Two characteristics stand out as the most important when hiring — people who are humble and curious.

"We want people who don't act and feel like they know it all. We want people to be naturally curious about life."

"The minute we get somebody in an interview who tells us about everything they know and who is not really intrigued about what we're doing and the way we conduct ourselves as a company, we know that this person doesn't really possess the characteristics we need in our team members."

Lean starts with great questions. 

• What are the eight wastes and which ones can you see in the process you are doing right now?

• What bugs you? 

• Is everything perfect? You wouldn't change a single thing? 

• How would you fix this? 

• What is it that we're trying to do for the customer here? 

• What value are we trying to flow to the customer?

• What is it that I need to improve? 

• Where is my waste? 

• What do you see?