The Ninth Waste

The Seven Wastes

When Womack and Jones wrote The Machine That Changed the World they coined the term Lean and identified the seven wastes:

• Transport
• Intellect
• Motion
• Waiting
• Over Production
• Over Processing
• Defects
• Stock

The observant among you will notice that is eight wastes not seven. Somewhere along the line somebody thought to add Intellect.

On that note I’ve just read about a ninth waste:

Missed opportunity:

• Why don’t more women have mammograms?
• Why doesn’t everybody who needs one have a mosquito net?
• How about education, access to the internet and clean running water?

And those are only a handful of the socially responsible missed opportunities. Let’s not get started on the commercial ones.

You can only get to nine wastes if you have spotted the first seven

It is easy to pick holes in other people’s ideas.  It is better to add to them.

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants ~ Isaac Newton

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Image by Gerald Carter