Why should anybody do LEAN? In today’s episode I’m going to talk about just that.

Welcome to today’s episode of businessSUCCESS with Doug Barra. So I was thinking about what I was going to say in this week’s episode and what I wanted to talk about with LEAN and what came to me is why LEAN? And I kind of got this idea from an interesting video that we were watching from Paul Akers.

One of the things that we’ve adopted in our LEAN journey, because we’re on this LEAN journey and we’re still very early on and we’ve only been doing it for a couple of months, is that we’re watching videos from Paul Akers about LEAN and how he and other businesses are implementing LEAN, and one of the things to understand about LEAN, and you might’ve heard it said in other ways such as Six Sigma, Kaizen, Khan Bans, and all of those are ways of looking at LEAN or ways of talking about lean, which is a concept that started in Japan, from the Toyoda family who are the owners and creators of Toyota, the car and also a number of other things that they manufacture.

As a matter of fact, they started manufacturing looms of all things, but their concept is what started this whole concept of LEAN and creating the LEAN culture. And if you go to Japan, you’ll see that it is a culture, it’s an entire Japanese culture around how do we do things that are more efficient and easier and just make life more fun and more enjoyable. That is the Ultimate Why LEAN?

I want to play you a little clip and this is just a little tiny clip, about two minutes long, from one of the videos that we watched recently from Paul. Just to set it up, what’s going on is there is a conference of, manufacturers and Paul has been asked to be a keynote speaker, but he was the keynote speaker the year before. So he said, no, I’m not going to do a keynote speech. What I’m going to do is I’m going to reach out to a number of different business owners that I’ve been connected with because of LEAN, ask them if they would be willing to come and do a panel discussion with me. There’s, there’s so much just amazing stuff in this video. It’s an hour long. So obviously I am not playing you the whole video. I’m just going to play you this one little two minute clip. The main key I want you to get out of this is we want your mind.

So let’s play that clip. (Please watch the video to be able to see the 2 minute clip, Thank you)

So you can see that this whole concept is not about, I want to make my business better. Your business gets better, but it’s about making sure that our team is getting better. Not our business is getting better. Our team is getting better and they’re growing and they’re having a life that matters to them that is enjoyable and they’re growing. This is so foreign from what maybe we’ve all understood. Because I think everybody, every one of us has probably had a job at some point where we were like, I’m a cog in a wheel and I’m just showing up for my paycheck. I always hated that. I needed to know that I was making a difference, even if it was only for my fellow teammates, that I was doing something that mattered to me.

So when I went into business, I wanted to make sure that my teammates were getting a similar concept and I’ve always had a little bit of a struggle around that because most of the people that we bring in have this idea of I’m here to do a job and get paid. I’m always like, no, you’re not here to collect a paycheck. You’re here to make a difference in your life and a paycheck is great and yes, we’re going to pay you, but that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to learn something. You’re here to leave a little better than you came. The longer you stay, hopefully the more you’ll learn, the more you’ll grow and that’s what LEAN is really all about.

So I just thank you for listening to me today.

I’m just going to leave you with this one quote, “My saying is, hard work can take you somewhere, but lean can take you anywhere.”