It’s a lean lean world.

We are living in a lean world; and there is a problem with this. “Lean” has become the preferred language of managers and executives to describe a diverse array of new efforts to improve a corporation. The very word “lean” has become a conflation of so many ideas, and varying opinions, resulting in it’s true meaning and value becoming increasingly diminished. A traditional lean approach aims to match the throughput of a process to the rate of demand by the customers (read that last part as “takt time”). This approach will ultimately, in a perfect world, decrease wasteful spending and consumption of resources in a given process. So, where is the problem with this? Not one company has ever been successfully launched, or grown, with the entire goal of it’s existence being a simple reduction in wasteful spending. The purpose of a company is to make money. Lean is one of the tools that a corporation needs to leverage, and it has to be done with an process that uses this to propel an overall goal of making money. Lean is not the answer to everything, and we have to stop pretending that it is.