Lean operations in real life | MBA Learnings

First-year student Rohan Rajiv is blogging once a week about important lessons he is learning at Kellogg. Read more of his posts here.

In the past week, we’ve been deconstructing the idea of “Lean operations” in our Operations Management classes. Lean, for the uninitiated, is a way of operations pioneered by Toyota’s legendary founder Taiichi Ono. It was simply called the “Toyota Production System” until academics from the west re-branded it as “lean.”

Lean embraces the idea of “kaizen,” or continuous improvement. The process behind lean improvement is illustrated in the image above.

The concept illustrated here is that having large amounts of inventory can hide the issues in the system. The best way to understand and fix problems is to gradually lower the inventory level. As soon as we do that, we start bringing problems to light and can begin the process of continuous improvement. It is critical that we don’t bring the water down all at once, as it is impossible to fix everything together. In fact, yesterday’s solution is, very often, today’s problem. So, it has to be one at a time and it has to be continuous.

The beauty about learning Operations Management is that every learning has a direct application in our daily lives. There was an interesting article on 99U.com titled “Don’t work harder, work faster” – inspired by social media consultant, author, investor and speaker Gary Vaynerchuk. This is Gary talking about the idea of working faster:

“I always tell people to start working harder, to hustle. I truly believe that people could watch an hour less of Scandal and instead do some f****** work. But there’s another variable that I don’t talk about enough: be much faster in the hours you’re already in. Train yourself to do a little bit more in each hour than you normally would. Every day add something, and get it all done. The first few days you may not get it all done, but keep adding on, and you’ll get there. It’s training for a marathon. It takes time, but once you’re done, you’ll see that you’re doing much more in a day because you’re moving faster.”

That’s lean operations in action. Even though I am nowhere close to as prolific as Gary, that’s been my experience with thinking about a learning every day. Over these years, it’s been a gradual process of thinking about ideas like productivity and making small tweaks that have all added up over time.

I feel myself getting through larger volumes of work than I ever thought possible a few years back, and yet, I seem to be able to make time for sleep, food, exercise, reading and even meditation. This was in complete contrast to my life just three years ago – I’d barely manage seven hours of rest, exercise half the amount I do now and never find time/space to meditate.

Small improvements over a long period of time add up. That’s what makes lean and the idea of “kaizen” really powerful.

Lean is a way of life.

Rohan Rajiv is a first-year student in Kellogg’s Full-Time Two-Year Program. Prior to Kellogg he worked at a-connect serving clients on consulting projects across 14 countries in Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. He blogs a learning every day, including his MBA Learnings series, on www.ALearningaDay.com.