Six thinking hats pdf free download

What emotions do you feel about this issue? Remember, no explanations or justifications are necessary. The black hat is the critiquing hat. Black hat thinking looks for problems and logical flaws. Black hat thinking kept our ancestors from being eaten by predators or falling off cliffs.

Being sensitized to danger is a crucial part of our neurochemistry and serves a valuable purpose. They excel in finding problems everywhere and pointing out logical flaws. This is useful and important, because black hat thinking keeps us from making irreparable mistakes. But too much of the black hat can stunt our thinking under other hats , especially yellow and green.

This can mean that new ideas get squashed before they have time to grow, or that a proposal is thrown out entirely rather than examined for its potential Download PDF Summaries. Download PDF Versions. What design flaws can you spot? What are the weaknesses in the current approach as it stands right now? The yellow hat is the constructive hat. Yellow hat thinking is positive and concrete.

You can remember this easily: Builders often wear yellow hardhats when working on new buildings, and yellow is the color of sunny optimism. Most people could use some consistent, focused practice to strengthen their yellow hat thinking abilities. As with black hat data, yellow hat data is based on logic. What design flaws and weaknesses did you identify with the black hat?

List the main ones. For each flaw or weakness, put on your yellow hat and see if you can find ways to strengthen or overcome the weakness. The green hat is the creative hat. Green is the color of new growth, and green hat thinking looks for new and original ideas. Though the attitudes that drive green hat and yellow hat thinking are quite similar a sense of possibility; a desire to build rather than break down , the thinking styles involved are qualitatively different.

For example, you might know someone who is very optimistic but quite conventional in their ideas. You might also know someone who is highly creative but not very optimistic. This is why we consider the green hat and the yellow hat separately in practice. Green hat data is anything completely new. Trace the development and expression of themes, characters, and language through the work.

How do they help to create particular meaning, tone, or effects? Explore the way the text affects you as you read through it. Read closely, noticing how the elements of the text shape your responses, both intellectual and emotional. How has the author evoked your response? Read the work more than once. When you first experience a piece of literature, you usually focus on the story, the plot, the overall meaning. Compose a strong thesis. Your goal is not to pass judgment but to suggest one way of seeing the text.

Do a close reading. Find specific, brief passages that support your interpretation; then analyze those passages in terms of their language, their context, and your reaction to them as a reader.

Why does the writer choose this language, these words? What is their effect? If something is repeated, what significance does the pattern have? Support your argument with evidence. The parts of the text you examine in your close reading become the evidence you use to support your interpretation. Paying attention to matters of style. Literary analyses have certain conventions for using pronouns and verbs. Describe the historical context of the setting in the past tense.

Document your sources. To read an example literary analysis, go to digital. Lovers propose marriage; students propose that colleges provide healthier food options in campus cafeterias. These are all examples of proposals, ideas put forward that offer solutions to some problem. All proposals are arguments: when you propose something, you are trying to persuade others to consider—and hopefully to accept—your solution to the problem.

This chapter describes the key elements of a proposal and provides tips for writing one. Some problems are self-evident and relatively simple, and you would not need much persuasive power to make people act. While some might not see a problem with colleges discarding too much paper, for example, most are likely to agree that recycling is a good thing.

Other issues are more controversial: some people see them as problems while others do not. For example, some believe that motorcycle riders who do not wear helmets risk serious injury and also raise the cost of health care for all of us, but others think that wearing a helmet—or not—should be a personal choice; you would have to present arguments to convince your readers that not wearing a helmet is indeed a problem needing a solution.

A solution to the problem. Once you have defined the problem, you need to describe the solution you are suggesting and to explain it in enough detail for readers to understand what you are proposing. Sometimes you might suggest several possible solutions, analyze their merits, and then say which one you think will most likely solve the problem. You need to provide evidence to convince readers that your solution is feasible—and that it will, in fact, solve the problem.

A response to questions readers may have. You need to consider any questions readers may have about your proposal—and to show how its advantages outweigh any disadvantages. A proposal for recycling paper, for example, would need to address questions about the costs of recycling bins and separate trash pickups. A call to action.

The goal of a proposal is to persuade readers to accept your proposed solution—and perhaps to take some kind of action. You may want to conclude your proposal by noting the outcomes likely to result from following your recommendations.

An appropriate tone. Readers will always react better to a reasonable, respectful presentation than to anger or self-righteousness. Choose a problem that can be solved. Large, complex problems such as poverty, hunger, or terrorism usually require large, complex solutions. Most of the time, focusing on a smaller problem or a limited aspect of a large problem will yield a more manageable proposal.

Rather than tackling the problem of world poverty, for example, think about the problem faced by people in your community who have lost jobs and need help until they find employment. Most successful proposals share certain features that make them persuasive.

Explore several possible solutions to the problem. Decide on the most desirable solution s. One solution may be head and shoulders above others, but be open to rejecting all the possible solutions on your list and starting over if you need to, or to combining two or more potential solutions in order to come up with an acceptable fix.

Think about why your solution is the best one. What has to be done to enact it? What will it cost? What makes you think it can be done? Why will it work better than others? Ways of organizing a proposal. You can organize a proposal in various ways, but you should always begin by establishing that there is a problem. You may then identify several possible solutions before recommending one of them or a combination of several.

Sometimes, however, you might discuss only a single solution. Identify possible Propose a Call for action, solutions and solution and or reiterate consider their pros give reasons your proposed and cons one by one. Anticipate and answer questions. To read an example proposal, go to digital. Such essays are our attempt to think something through by writing about it and to share our thinking with others. A reflective essay has a dual purpose: to ponder something you find interesting or puzzling and to share your thoughts with an audience.

Whatever your subject, your goal is to explore it in a way that will interest others. One way to do that is to start by considering your own experience and then moving on to think about more universal experiences that your readers may share. For example, you might write about your dog, and in doing so you could raise questions and offer insights about the ways that people and animals interact.

Some kind of structure. A reflective essay can be organized in many ways, but it needs to have a clear structure. Whether you move from detail to detail or focus your reflection on one central question or insight about your subject, all your ideas need to relate, one way or another.

The challenge is to keep your readers interested as you explore your topic and to leave them satisfied that the journey was interesting and thought-provoking.

Every now and then someone will cheer her on. Details such as these will help your readers understand and care about your subject. A questioning, speculative tone. So your tone will often be tentative and open, demonstrating a willingness to entertain, try out, accept, and reject various ideas as your essay progresses from beginning to end, maybe even asking questions for which you can provide no direct answers.

Choose a subject you want to explore. Make a list of things that you think about, wonder about, find puzzling or annoying. Explore your subject in detail. Reflections often include descriptive details that provide a base for the speculations to come. Back away. Ask yourself why your subject matters: why is it important or intriguing or otherwise significant?

Your goal is to think on screen or paper about your subject, to see where it leads you. Think about how to keep readers with you. Reflections must be carefully crafted so that readers can follow your train of thought. Ways of organizing a reflective essay. Reflections may be organized in many ways because they mimic the way we think, sometimes associating one idea with another in ways that make sense but do not necessarily follow the kinds of logical progression found in academic arguments or reports.

Here are two ways you might organize a reflection. To read an example reflective essay, go to digital. You may be assigned to create annotated bibliographies to weigh the potential usefulness of sources and to document your search efforts. This chapter describes the key elements of an annotated bibliography and provides tips for writing two kinds of annotations: descriptive and evaluative.

Doherty, Thomas. Unwin Hyman, A historical discussion of the identification of teenagers as a targeted film market. Foster, Harold M. An evaluation of the potential of using teen films such as Sixteen Candles and The Karate Kid to instruct adolescents on the difference between film as communication and film as exploitation. They are often helpful in assessing how useful a source will be for your own writing.

Gore, A. An inconvenient truth: The planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it. New York, NY: Rodale. It centers on how the atmosphere is very thin and how greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are making it thicker.

The thicker atmosphere traps more infrared radiation, causing warming of the Earth. He includes several examples of problems caused by global warming. Penguins and polar bears are at risk because the glaciers they call home are quickly melting.

Coral reefs are being bleached and destroyed when their inhabitants overheat and leave. For example, many highways in Alaska are only frozen enough to be driven on fewer than 80 days of the year. In China and elsewhere, recordsetting floods and droughts are taking place. Hurricanes are on the rise. It is useful because it relies on scientific data that can be referred to easily and it provides a solid foundation for me to build on. For example, it explains how carbon dioxide is produced and how it is currently affecting plants and animals.

This evidence could potentially help my research on how humans are biologically affected by global warming. It will also help me structure my essay, using its general information to lead into the specifics of my topic.

For example, I could introduce the issue by explaining the thinness of the atmosphere and the effect of greenhouse gases, then focus on carbon dioxide and its effects on organisms. A concise description of the work. Relevant commentary. If you write an evaluative bibliography, your comments should be relevant to your purpose and audience. To achieve relevance, consider what questions a potential reader might have about the sources.

Consistent presentation. All annotations should be consistent in content, sentence structure, and format. If one annotation is written in complete sentences, they should all be.

Decide what sources to include. Though you may be tempted to include every source you find, a better strategy is to include only those sources that you or your readers may find useful in researching your topic. Is this source relevant to your topic? Is it general or specialized? Are the author and the publisher or sponsor reputable? Does the source present enough evidence?

Does it show any particular bias? Does the source reflect current thinking or research? Decide whether the bibliography should be descriptive or evaluative. Read carefully. To quickly determine whether a source is likely to serve your needs, first check the publisher or sponsor; then read the preface, abstract, or introduction; skim the table of contents or the headings; and read the parts that relate specifically to your topic.

Research the writer, if necessary. In any case, information about the writer should take up no more than one sentence in your annotation. Summarize the work. Sumarize it as objectively as possible: even if you are writing an evaluative annotation, you can evaluate the central point of a work better by stating it clearly first. You may find, however, that some parts are useful while others are not, and your evaluation should reflect that mix. Ways of organizing an annotated bibliography.

Depending on their purpose, annotated bibliographies may or may not include an introduction. State scope. List first List second List third List final alphabeti- alphabeti- alphabeti- alphabeti- cal entry, cal entry, cal entry, cal entry, and anno- and anno- and anno- and anno- tate it. Sometimes an annotated bibliography needs to be organized into several subject areas or genres, periods, or some other category ; if so, the entries are listed alphabetically within each category.

Category 2 alphabetically, and annotate them. List entries Explain category 2. To read an example annotated bibliography, go to digital. You may be required to include an abstract in a report or as a preview of a presentation you plan to give at an academic or professional conference. This chapter provides tips for writing three common kinds: informative, descriptive, and proposal.

That one paragraph must mention all the main points or parts of the paper: a description of the study or project, its methods, the results, and the conclusions. Here is an example of the abstract accompanying a seven-page essay that appeared in in the Journal of Clinical Psychology: The relationship between boredom proneness and health-symptom reporting was examined.

The results suggest that boredom proneness may be an important element to consider when assessing symptom reporting. Implications for determining the effects of boredom proneness on psychological- and physicalhealth symptoms, as well as the application in clinical settings, are discussed.

They usually do not summarize the entire paper, give or discuss results, or set out the conclusion or its implications. The findings and their application in clinical settings are discussed. You prepare them to persuade someone to let you write on a topic, pursue a project, conduct an experiment, or present a paper at a scholarly conference; often the abstract is written before the paper itself. Titles and other aspects of the proposal deliberately reflect the theme of the proposed work, and you may use the future tense to describe work not yet completed.

Here is a possible proposal for doing research on boredom and health problems: Undergraduate students will complete the Boredom Proneness Scale and the Hopkins Symptom Checklist.

A multiple analysis of covariance will be performed to determine the relationship between boredom-proneness total scores and ratings on the five subscales of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist ObsessiveCompulsive, Somatization, Anxiety, Interpersonal Sensitivity, and Depression. An informative abstract includes enough information to substitute for the report itself; a descriptive abstract offers only enough information to let the audience decide whether to read further; and a proposal abstract gives an overview of the planned work.

Objective description. Abstracts present information on the contents of a report or a proposed study; they do not present arguments about or personal perspectives on those contents. Unless you are writing a proposal abstract, you should write the paper first. You can then use the finished work as the guide for the abstract, which should follow the same basic structure.

Copy and paste key statements. Copy and paste those sentences into a new document to create a rough draft. Pare down the rough draft. Introduce the overall scope of your study, and include any other information that seems crucial to understanding your work. Conform to any length requirements. In general, an informative abstract should be at most 10 percent as long as the original and no longer than the maximum length allowed. Descriptive abstracts should be shorter still, and proposal abstracts should conform to the requirements of the organization calling for the proposal.

Ways of organizing an abstract [An informative abstract] State conclusions of study. State Summarize nature of method of study. State implications of study. To read an example abstract, go to digital.

We read cookbooks to find out how to make brownies; we read textbooks to learn about history, biology, and other academic topics. And as writers, we read our own drafts to make sure they say what we mean. In other words, we read for many different purposes.

Following are some strategies for reading with a critical eye. It always helps to approach new information in the context of what we already know.

List any terms or phrases that come to mind, and group them into categories. Then, or after reading a few paragraphs, list any questions that you expect, want, or hope to be answered as you read, and number them according to their importance to you. Finally, after you read the whole text, list what you learned from it. Preview the text. Start by skimming to get the basic ideas; read the title and subtitle, any headings, the first and last paragraphs, the first sentences of all the other paragraphs.

Study any visuals. Think about your initial response. Read the text to get a sense of it; then jot down brief notes about your initial reaction, and think about why you reacted as you did. What aspects of the text account for this reaction? Highlight key words and phrases, connect ideas with lines or symbols, and write comments or questions in the margins.

What you annotate depends on your purpose. One simple way of annotating is to use a coding system, such as a check mark to indicate passages that confirm what you already thought, an X for ones that contradict your previous thinking, a question mark for ones that are puzzling or confusing, an exclamation point or asterisk for ones that strike you as important, and so on.

You might also circle new words that you need to look up. Play the believing and doubting game. Analyze how the text works. Outline the text paragraph by paragraph. Are there any patterns in the topics the writer addresses?

How has the writer arranged ideas, and how does that arrangement develop the topic? Identify patterns. Look for notable patterns in the text: recurring words and their synonyms, repeated phrases and metaphors, and types of sentences. Does the author rely on any particular writing strategies?

Is the evidence offered more opinion than fact? Is there a predominant pattern to how sources are presented? As quotations? In visual texts, are there any patterns of color, shape, and line?

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Writing an essay for university my future plans essay grade 7 essay on dua in urdu, dance essays. This also requires redefining the role for a firm's technical experts like the inward-looking German engineers we just cited and rethinking just where in the world to create value. Realistically, no manager can actually implement all of these changes instantly, but it's essential to form a clear view of what's really needed. Otherwise the definition of value is almost certain to be skewed.

In summary, specifying value accurately is the critical first step in lean thinking- Providing the wrong good or service the right way is muda. Identify the Value Stream The value stream is the set of all the specific actions required to bring a specific product whether a good, a service, or, increasingly, a combination of the two through the three critical management tasks of any business: the problem-solving task running from concept through detailed design and engineering to production launch, the information management task running from order-taking through detailed scheduling to delivery, and the physical transformation task proceeding from raw materials to a finished product in the hands of the customer.

And 3 many additional steps will be found to create no value and to be immediately avoidable Type Two muda. At the same time, the initial ingot of material—for example, titanium or nickel—was ten times the weight of the machined parts eventually fashioned from it.

Ninety percent of the very expensive metals were being scrapped because the initial ingot was poured in a massive size—the melters were certain that this was efficient—without much attention to the shape of the finished parts. And finally, the melters were preparing several different ingots—at great cost—in order to meet Pratt's precise technical requirements for each engine, which varied only marginally from those of other engine families and from the needs of com- petitors.

Many of these activities could be eliminated almost immediately with dramatic cost savings. How could so much waste go unnoticed for decades in the supposedly sophisticated aerospace industry? Very simply: None of the four firms in- volved in this tributary value stream for a jet engine—the melter, the forger, the machiner, and the final assembler—had ever fully explained its activities to the other three.

Partly, this was a matter of confidentiality—each firm feared that those upstream and downstream would use any information revealed to drive a harder bargain. And partly, it was a matter of oblivi- ousness. The four firms were accustomed to looking carefully at their own affairs but had simply never taken the time to look at the whole value stream, including the consequences of their internal activities for other firms along the stream.

When they did, within the past year, they discovered massive waste. So lean thinking must go beyond the firm, the standard unit of score- keeping in businesses across the world, to look at the whole: the entire set of activities entailed in creating and producing a specific product, from conceDt through detailed design to actual availahilitv.

The organizational mechanism for doing this is what we call the lean enterprise, a continuing conference of all the concerned parties to create a channel for the entire value stream, dredging away all the muda. Whenever we present this idea for the first time, audiences tend to assume that a new legal entity is needed, some formalized successor to the "virtual corporation" which in reality becomes a new form of vertical integration.

In fact, what is needed is the exact opposite. In an age when individual firms are outsourcing more and themselves doing less, the actual need is for a voluntary alliance of all the interested parties to oversee the disintegrated value stream, an alliance which examines every value-creating step and lasts as long as the product lasts. For products like automobiles in a specific size class, which go through successive generations of development, this might be decades; for short-lived products like software for a specific application, it might be less than a year.

Creating lean enterprises does require a new way to think about firm-to- firm relations, some simple principles for regulating behavior between firms, and transparency regarding all the steps taken along the value stream so each participant can verify that the other firms are behaving in accord with the agreed principles. These issues are the subject of Part III of this book. Flow Once value has been precisely specified, the value stream for a specific product fully mapped by the lean enterprise, and obviously wasteful steps eliminated, it's time for the next step in lean thinking—a truly breathtaking one: Make the remaining, value-creating steps flow.

However, please be warned that this step requires a complete rearrangement of your mental furniture. We are all born into a mental world of "functions" and "departments," a commonsense conviction that activities ought to be grouped by type so they can be performed more efficiently and managed more easily.

In addition, to get tasks done efficiently within departments, it seems like further common sense to perform like activities in batches: "In the Claims Department, process all of the Claim As, then the Claim Bs, and then the Claim Cs. In the Paint Department, paint all of the green parts, then shift over and paint all the red parts, then do the purple ones. But this approach Irppnc the members of the denartment busv.

So, it must be "efficient," right? Actually, it's dead wrong, but hard or impossible for most of us to see. Recendy, one of us performed a simple experiment with his daughters, ages six and nine: They were asked the best way to fold, address, seal, stamp, and mail the monthly issue of their mother's newsletter. After a bit of thought their answer was emphatic: "Daddy, first, you should fold all of the newsletters.

Then you should put on all the address labels. Then you should attach the seal to stick the upper and lower parts together [to secure the newsletter for mailing].

Then you should put on the stamps. Wouldn't that avoid the wasted effort of picking up and putting down every newsletter four times? Why don't we look at the prob- lem from the standpoint of the newsletter which wants to get mailed in the quickest way with the least effort? What's equally striking when looked at this way is that most of the world conducts its affairs in accord with the thought processes of six- and nine-year-olds!

Taiichi Ohno blamed this batch-and-queue mode of thinking on civiliza- tion's first farmers, who he claimed lost the one-thing-at-a-time wisdom of the hunter as they became obsessed with batches the once-a-year harvest and inventories the grain depository.

But we all need to fight departmental- ized, batch thinking because tasks can almost always be accomplished much more efficiently and accurately when the product is worked on continuously from raw material to finished good. In short, things work better when you focus on the product and its needs, rather than the organization or the equipment, so that all the activities needed to design, order, and provide a product occur in continuous flow.

Henry Ford and his associates were the first people to fully realize the potential of flow. Ford reduced the amount of effort required to assemble a Model T Ford by 90 percent during the fall of by switching to continu- ous flow in final assembly.

Subsequently, he lined up all the machines needed to produce the parts for the Model T in the correct sequence and tried to achieve flow all the way from raw materials to shipment of the finished car, achieving a similar productivity leap. But he only discovered the special case.

In the early s, when Ford towered above the rest of the industrial world, his company was assembling more than two million Model Ts at dozens of assembly plants around the world, every one of them exactly alike.

After World War II, Taiichi Ohno and his technical collaborators, includ- ing Shigeo Shingo,5 concluded that the real challenge was to create continu- ous flow in small-lot production when dozens or hundreds of copies of a product were needed, not millions.. This is the general case because these humble streams, not the few mighty rivers, account for the great bulk of human needs.

Ohno and his associates achieved continuous flow in low- volume production, in most cases without assembly lines, by learning to quickly change over tools from one product to the next and hv "right-sizing" miniaturizing machines so that processing steps of different types say, molding, painting, and assembly could be conducted immediately adjacent to each other with the object undergoing manufacture being kept in contin- uous flow.

The benefits of doing things this way are easy to demonstrate. We've recently watched with our own eyes, in plants in North America and Eu- rope, as lean thinkers practiced kaikaku roughly translatable as "radical improvement," in contrast with kaizen, or "continuous incremental im- provement".

Production activities for a specific product were rearranged in a day from departments and batches to continuous flow, with a doubling of productivity and a dramatic reduction in errors and scrap. We'll report later in this book on the revolutionary rearrangement of product development and order-scheduling activities for these same products to produce the same magnitude of effect in only a slightly longer adjustment period.

Yet the great bulk of activities across the world are still conducted in departmentalized, batch-and-queue fashion fifty years after a dramatically superior way was discovered. The most basic problem is that flow thinking is counterintuitive; it seems obvious to most people that work should be organized by departments in batches.

Then, once departments and specialized equipment for making batches at high speeds are put in place, both the career aspirations of em- ployees within departments and the calculations of the corporate accountant who wants to keep expensive assets fully utilized work powerfully against switching over to flow. The reengineering movement has recognized that departmentalized thinking is suboptimal and has tried to shift the focus from organizational categories departments to value-creating "processes"—credit checking or claims adiusting or the handling of accounts receivable.

In addition, they often stop at the boundaries of the firm paying their fees, whereas major breakthroughs come from looking at the whole value stream. What's more, they treat depart- ments and employees as the enemy, using outside SWAT teams to blast both aside. The frequent result is a collapse of morale among those who survive being reengineered and a regression of the organization to the mean as soon as the reengineers are gone.

The lean alternative is to redefine the work of functions, departments, and firms so they can make a positive contribution to value creationjjH speak to the real needs of employees at every point along the stream so it is actually in their interest to make valueflow.

This requires not just the creation of a lean enterprise for each product but also the rethinking of conventional firms, functions, and careers, and the development of a lean strategy, as explained in Part III. Pull The first visible effect of converting from departments and batches to prod- uct teams and flow is that the time required to go from concept to launch, sale to delivery, and raw material to the customer falls dramatically.

When flow is introduced, products requiring years to design are done in months, orders taking days to process are completed in hours, and the weeks or months of throughput time for conventional physical production are re- duced to minutes or days. Indeed, if you can't quickly take throughput times down by half in product development, 75 percent in order processing, and 90 percent in physical production, you are doing something wrong. What's more, lean systems can make any product currendy in production in any combination, so that shifting demand can be accommodated immediately.

So what? This produces a onetime cash windfall from inventory reduction and speeds return on investment, but is it really a revolutionary achieve- ment? In fact, it is because the ability to design, schedule, and make exactly what the customer wants just when the customer wants it means you can throw away the sales forecast and simply make what customers actually tell you they need.

That is, you can let the customer pull the product from you as needed rather than pushing products, often unwanted, onto the customer. In fact, your copy is lucky. One half of the books printed in the United States each year are shredded without ever finding a reader!

How can this be? Because publishers and the printing and distribution firms they work with along the value stream have never learned about flow, so the customer can't pull. It takes many weeks to reorder books if the bookseller or warehouse runs out of stock, yet the shelf life of most books is very short. Publishers must either sell the book at the peak of reader interest or forgo many sales. Because the publisher can't accurately predict demand in advance, the only solution is to print thousands of copies to "fill the channel" when the book is launched even though only a few thousand copies of the average book will be sold.

The rest are then returned to the publisher and scrapped when the selling season is over. The solution to this problem will probably emerge in phases. In the next few years, printing firms can learn to quickly print up small lots of books and distribution warehouses can learn to replenish bookstore shelves frequently using a method described in Chapter 4.

Eventually, new "right-sized" book- printing technologies may make it possible to simply print out the books the customer wants at the moment the customer asks for them, either in a bookstore or, even better, in the customer's office or home. And some cus- tomers may not want a physical copy of their "book" at all. Instead, they will request the electronic transfer of the text from the "publisher" to their own computer, printing out an old-fashioned paper version only if they happen to need it.

The appropriate solution will be found once the members of the publishing value stream embrace the fourth principle of lean thinking: pull. Perfection As organizations begin to accurately specify value, identify the entire value stream, make the value-creating steps for specific products flow continuously, and let customers pull value from the enterprise, something very odd begins to happen.

It dawns on those involved that there is no end to the process of reducing effort, time, space, cost, and mistakes while offering a product which is ever more nearly what the customer actually wants.

Suddenly perfec- tion, the fifth and final principle of lean thinking, doesn't seem like a crazy idea. Why should this be? Because the four initial principles interact with each other in a virtuous circle. Getting value to flow faster always exposes hidden muda in the value stream. And the harder you pull, the more the impedi- ments to flow are revealed so they can be removed. The new system cuts production costs by half while reducing throughput times by 99 percent and slashing changeover time from hours to seconds so Pratt can make exacdy what the customer wants upon receiving the order.

The conversion to lean thinking will pay for itself within a year, even if Pratt receives nothing more than scrap value for the automated system being junked. Perhaps the most important spur to perfection is transparency, the fact that in a lean system everyone—subcontractors, first-tier suppliers, system integrators often called assemblers , distributors, customers, employees— can see everything, and so it's easy to discover better ways to create value.

What's more, there is nearly instant and highly positive feedback for em- ployees making improvements, a key feature of lean work and a powerful spur to continuing efforts to improve, as explained in Chapter 3.

Readers familiar with the "open-book management" movement in the United States7 will recall that financial transparency and immediate feed- back on results, in the form of monetary bonuses for employees, are its central elements. Thus, there is a broad consistency between our approach and theirs.

However, a major question emerges for open-book managers as finances are made transparent and employees are rewarded for performance. How can performance be improved?

Sweat and longer hours are not the answer but will be employed if no one knows how to work smarter. The techniques for flow and pull that we will be describing in the pages ahead are the answer. It's also useful, because it shows what is possible and helps us to achieve more than we would otherwise.

However, even if lean thinking makes perfection seem plausible in the long term, most of us live and work in the short term. What are the benefits of lean thinking wbirb wp ran crrnsn ricrht awflv? Errors reaching the customer and scrap within the production process are typically cut in half," as are job-related injuries.

Time-to-market for new products will be halved and a wider variety of products, within product families, can be offered at very modest additional cost. What's more, the capital investments required will be very modest, even negative, if facilities and equipment can be freed up and sold. And this is just to get started. This is the kaikaku bonus released by the initial, radical realignment of the value stream.

What follows is continuous improvements by means of kaizen en route to perfection. Performance leaps of this magnitude are surely a bit hard to accept, particu- larly when accompanied by the claim that no dramatically new technologies are required.

We've therefore worked for several years to carefully docu- ment specific instances of lean transformations in a wide range of firms in the leading industrial economies. In the chapters ahead, we provide a series of "box scores" on precisely what can be achieved and describe the specific methods to use. The Antidote to Stagnation Lean thinking is not just the antidote to muda in some abstract sense; the performance leap just described is also the answer to the prolonged eco- nomic stagnation in Europe, Japan, and North America.

Conventional thinking about economic growth focuses on new technologies and addi- tional training and education as the keys. Thus the overwhelming emphasis of current-day popular writing on the economy is on falling computing costs and the growing ease of moving data around the planet, as exemplified by the World Wide Web.

Coupling low-cost, easily accessible data with interactive educational software for knowledge workers will surely produce a great leap in productivity and well-being, right? During the past twenty years we've seen the robotics revolution, the materials revolution remember when cars would have ceramic engines and airplanes would be built entirely of plastic? The problem is not with the new technologies themselves but instead with the fact that they initially affect only a small part of the economy.

A few companies like Microsoft grow from infants to giants overnight, but the great bulk of economic activity—construction and housing, transport, the food supply system, manufacturing, and personal services—is only affected over a long period.

What's more, these activities may not be affected at all unless new ways are found for people to work together to create value using the new technologies. Yet these traditional tasks comprise 95 percent or more of day-to-day production and consumption. Stated another way, most of the economic world, at any given time, is a brownfield of traditional activities performed in traditional ways.

New technologies and augmented human capital may generate growth over the long term, but only lean thinking has the demonstrated power to produce green shoots of growth all across this landscape within a few years.

And, as we will see, lean thinking may make some new technologies unnecessary. The continuing stagnation in developed countries has recendy led to ugly scapegoating in the political world, as segments of the population in each country push and shove to redivide a fixed economic pie. Stagnation has also led to a frenzy of cost cutting in the business world led by the reengi- neers , which removes the incentive for employees to make any positive contribution to their firms and swells the unemployment ranks.

Lean think- ing and the lean enterprise is the solution immediately available that can produce results on the scale required. This book explains how to do it. When reviewing your finances, you might want to consider the following factors: Cash flow Working capital Cost base Growth Borrowing Evaluating your finances provides you with an overview of the current standing of your finances and where it is going. When financial assessment will also require a working budget plan that includes areas that are oftentimes overlooked.

Competitors Before you enter the world of business, you should understand that you will be facing a lot of competitors. If you want to survive the cutthroat competition in business, it is highly important to equip yourself with a working knowledge of your competitors. This will make it easy for you to position yourself and make a lot of room for improvement.

Internal Employee job satisfaction and training levels are also considered to be two of the important indications of good business performance. Threat Assessment Template for Situations rowan. This template gives an example of a university that puts out information relating to the safety standards of its campus. Event Security Assessment Sample repository.