A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance,

by Daniel Markovitz (Productivity Press, 2011)

The book describes how you can foster a new mindset and improve your performance by applying lean methods to your work. It translates powerful lean tools such as visual management, flow, pull, 5S, and kaizen to your daily work, revealing how they can help to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and link you ever more closely to customer value. This practice will help you develop better self-awareness, more disciplined problem-solving skills, and the ability to self-correct errors.
This book not only provides the tools, but also teaches you how to find the root causes underlying your inefficiencies so you can eliminate them permanently. It will enable you to immediately improve personal productivity while developing the skills needed for continuous improvement. Providing the perfect mix of “what to do” with “why to do it,” the text details a step-by-step approach to applying lean principles to your work.
Each chapter provides exercises and case studies. The book’s five chapters include:
What’s Your Job?—Identifying the value you create, going to the gemba, what your work is all about
Spotting Value, Spotting Waste—5S for information: how to ensure you can access what you need when you need it; the absurdity of out of sight out of mind; frequency-based organization; systematic information 5S
Flow—Daily work processes: enhance flow to reduce the time it takes to complete your work; routine work; transforming the creative into the transactional
Visual Management—Create visual management systems to indicate what you should be working on; to-do lists, kanban; calendars; four easy steps; other types of visual management; reflexive vs. cognitive systems
From Bad to Good, and From Good to Great—Kaizen; standardized work: the things that are predictable, repeatable; creating mental capacity for improvement; 5 Whys; implementing improvement: A3 thinking; continuous improvement
About Daniel Markovitz
Daniel Markovitz is president of TimeBack Management, a consulting firm that radically improves individuals and team performances by identifying and eliminating root cause impediments to productivity.