Jack Sprat

As the devoted readers of my blog that you all are, you've no doubt thought that I read books that you would never read. A book about the number zero, the number e, and even 1,100 page books about physics. You have haven't even begun to imagine the books that I read that you never will, because last week I finished off "Lean Transformation: How to change your business into a lean enterprise". As you might have guessed, I didn't really read this one for fun. At work, people are always talking about being "lean" so I thought it a reasonable idea to read a book on it.

It turns out that "lean" is a pretty simple idea. Basically, the book was 200 pages of "don't do stuff that you don't need to do. Look for ways to cut out the unnecessary stuff." Simple idea. And yet, most companies to tons of stuff that they don't need to. So, it's good to think occasionally about how to be more efficient.

Of course, the book is unnecessarily full of claims like "once your factory becomes lean, you will make 11 times as much stuff per day, and it will only take 4 minutes to fill a new order." And half the suggestions they make really wouldn't work at my work. But still, there are always useful ideas mixed in with the silly ones that don't apply.