About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
SIGN UP FOR TIMEBACK
NEWS, ARTICLES & UPDATES
NEWS, ARTICLES & UPDATES
Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
Tools vs. problems
Mark,
Very good point about tools vs. problems to solve. I hadn't thought of that. It's an important distinction, and I think I lose sight of that on occasion.
If I read Jamie's post on LeanBlog correctly, one of the roles of the leader (CEO, VP, Mgr, Supervisor) is to pick up the tools without waiting for his team -- though as you say, in order to solve a problem, not just for the hell of it.
I probably obsess too much about 5S, largely because it's so visual. Feel free to us 5S as a symbol of any other lean tool: the key point is that they need to use them and live the, not just encourage others to do so.