ABSTRACT
Real kaizen means pursuit of better means to carry out the purpose of the job. The starting point of every improvement is the question, "What is the purpose of this job? Why am doing this?" When we start thinking along these lines, we are going in the right direction. If the purpose of a job is not clear, people tend to pay too much attention to the means of doing it. This makes kaizen difficult, because there is always some way the job "has always been done." A genuine kaizen improvement tends to be very simple. The more we find out about the details of the problems in our own jobs, the simpler and more effective our kaizen ideas become. The Best Kaizen Finds the Shortest Way to Accomplish the Purpose. This chapter briefly summarizes what author knows about kaizen.
