Step

16

Don’t practise continuous improvement

Another way of describing what we’ve covered in the last few steps is kaizen. Please have nothing to do with this funny Japaneseword which roughly translates as ‘continuous improvement’.The practice of kaizen is responsible for the business revolution that took place in Japan after the war. Kaizen transformed the Japanese economy and made it the envy of the rest of the industrial world. Essentially it’s a four-stage process (see Figure 4).

This is often about small, incremental improvements, evolution rather than revolution (successful individuals, and businesses, don’t try to improve one thing by 1,000%; they try to improve 1,000 things by 1%). So, for example, if we were making a car:

Figure 4 Continuous improvement

• •We come up with the plan or design.
• •We make the car.
• •As we make the car, we consistently monitor that it’s on the plan.
• •After the car is finished, we review and ask how it could be improved next time around. We then build these small, incremental improvements into our next plan and run through the cycle again.

The point is, where do failures spend most of their time? That’s right, at stage two, just doing stuff. Yet at what stage does all the improvement take place? Right again, at the end, when we review and build in the improvements for our next attempt. Few spend any time here but just rush off to get on with the next urgent thing. Your long-term prosperity will be determined by how much time you spend working on your business compared with how much time you spend working in it. My advice is stay stuck at stage two, in your hamster wheel, if you want to avoid all improvement.