Nobody in your business is idle. That isn't the same thing as everybody doing work a customer would agree to fund.
Operations.
The Seven Wastes
Take the busiest hour of your week — the floor, the inbox, the board, wherever the work actually happens. Of everything going on in it, how much would survive if the customer had to approve each item separately, knowing they were paying for it? You already know it isn't most of it. The useful question is which of seven kinds the rest turns out to be.
Taiichi Ohno joined Toyota Motor Company in 1943 as a shop-floor supervisor in the machine shop and spent the next thirty-five years rebuilding how the company built cars, rising eventually to executive vice president. His book, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, appeared in Japanese in 1978 and in English a decade later, and its most portable idea is also its smallest: a list. Muda is Japanese for waste, and Ohno sorted it into seven kinds — overproduction, waiting, transport, over-processing, inventory, motion and defects. He was explicit that the first is the worst, because overproduction hides all the others: making more than is needed, sooner than it's needed, manufactures things to store, things to move, things to check, and enough visible activity to conceal the lot. What the list really does is turn an argument into an inspection. Saying the team should be more efficient invites opinion and goes nowhere. Saying that a particular report is over-processing, and nobody has read it since March, names one thing one person can stop doing on Friday. The eighth waste you'll see on posters — unused talent — is a later Western addition, not Ohno's.
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