The Innate Need for Improvement

As I sit here writing my first entry I look back at how my career and indeed my life has lead me to this point. From the time I can remember I have always been a person who could never be content ‘standing still’ in life, I had to be doing something that added value. It was almost as if standing still meant I was going backwards. Come to think of it, this need to improve and solve problems is a unique compulsion for our species as a whole. No other species has ever managed to improve its quality of life like we have, let alone within such a relatively short time. How far we have come from the hunter gatherer days.

In my early years in the Corporate world, I knew I wanted to improve the way business was done, but I didn’t possess the right tools nor the right amount of freedom to do so; that is until I was introduced to the remarkable power of Lean and Six Sigma.

Lean Six Sigma has opened my eyes to new ways of improving the way things are done, a new way of identifying waste & variation where we never realized it existed. This is a new lease of life for me, a trek towards continuous improvement like never before. Shigeo Shingo said “The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we don’t recognize”, well I guess the only thing worse than that would be us not doing anything about it even when we have recognized it.