About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
Anonymous, You're right
Anonymous,
You're right about the pointlessness of antagonizing professionals about where they store pens. But what about where and how they store emails and other information? In 1997, a WSJ study showed that executives were spending 6 weeks per year simply *looking* for information -- not working on it, just looking for it. (And I can only imagine it's gotten worse since then.) Even if their survey was wrong by 50%, think of the waste.
So the precise location of their pens may not be important. But the discipline and habit of organization is indeed critical to "their quality and their work." Toyota considers 5S to be the foundation of all lean efforts, even though sweeping the floor may seem far removed from stamping a quarter panel.