Kaizen's, Elections, stimulating the economy

What a week! I'm not going to blog about the obvious - the election. All that I will say is that it's a new administration and I hope that everyone will keep the new president in their prayers.

So - in between the rush to find a good time to hit the polls I had two days of meetings. Correction Kaizen . A Kaizen needs to be experienced. The best I can describe is that it is a do-it-yourself type meeting. The "Lean" team comes in an basically guides you thru the process of what you presently do, what your goals would be to improve, and the best way to get to those goals. The whole time they just point you in the direction you want to go and help you focus on the problems you need to correct to get there.

They start by having you write down problems on sticky notes- then they put these on the wall in groups. They then move to an alternate wall and map out your "as is" which would be the problem area you are there to correct. Then it is disected in every possible detail. All on sticky notes. When it was over there was a sea of yellow notes all over the wall (with an occassional pink or green thrown in).

It really was an excellent meeting - tiring but you basically end up figuring out how to correct your own problem. As for cutting out the "waste" - I think we may have killed a sticky-note tree or two.

That managed to take the wind out of my sails for two days - leaving me two days to play catch-up at my desk and explain to customers what a Kaizen was.

So feeling patriotic the need to stimulate the economy, I went out today and spent some money. Picked up a few little things for the Birthday girl this month. I was looking for a nice warm jacket that I could wear when I'm walking the dogs. I didn't get lucky but I did get some for the kids. As you can see they are less than happy as usual. I suppose I do need to fix the hood on Carmel's.