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Whilst out with friends at dinner the other day the conversation turned to diets. Turned out that at our table of eight people five of them were on one sort of diet or another. As I listened to the conversation it became apparent that most had been on other diets before with varying degrees of initial success but after a while the initial weight was regained, sometimes with an extra kilo or two.

Now I don’t profess to have an expertise in this field although I have always wondered why, if any particular diet works, there are so many others?

This article first appeared in the Quality Digest Magazine. The author makes a very important point about how just having lean tools does not support a lean change.

If you truly do get what you measure it is interesting to note that many traditional organisations rely on metrics that are focused on operational features like cost of labour, raw materials and production output vs. sales projection or forecasts. Making decisions in the current business climate on such narrowly defined operation factors, see examples in Table 1, could prove disastrous.

Ok, so you brought into the idea of becoming a lean organisation. The process probably started by either somebody within the organisation being exposed to lean principles, seeing the benefits and then beginning to drive the changes or by engaging an outside consultant with the goal of becoming ‘lean’ To varying degrees both of these approaches will bring significant initial improvements to the organisation.