ABSTRACT
Wow, How Shallow Are We? In an immaculate area within a Hitachi manufacturing facility in Japan, two Virginia Mason teams worked honing their lean management skills by identifying waste in the Hitachi production process. A series of well-spaced white stripes looking something like yard lines painted on a football field separated the two teams. The lines were spotless high-definition white. The senior sensei informed the teams that they should work within the lines. “He said, ‘You can stand on that side of the white line, or you can stand on that side of the white line, but you must not stand on the white line,’” recalls Charleen Tachibana, a team leader. “And we would go about our business and every so often he’d come up and say, ‘You’re on the white line. You can stand on that side or that side but you don’t stand on the white line.’ And he was being kind of a pain in the butt about it.”
