Strategy and Tactics – Page 90

Who LSD is good for

What is it about Lean? It consists almost entirely of excellent and very practical notions, and yet for many of us, our first reaction when Lean ideas come along is an irrational desire to poke holes.

And so, you can imagine my joy: Last week’s column wondered why Lean would invade the hoary halls of accounting with its enlightened, queue-less (no, not clueless, queue-less) approach to process design, and then fail to advocate elimination of period closings as a wasteful batch-and-queue process design.

Leery of LSD

I like Lean.

At least, I like Lean when it’s applied within its proven domain, which is process optimization. And that’s in spite of the nearly Messianic fervor of some of its proselytizers, not to mention their annoying decision to build their impenetrable jargon on a Japanese vocabulary, instead of the gratuitous Latin that lawyers and George Will prefer or the three-letter acronyms all right-thinking people use.

But I digress …

Lean has discovered that IT’s traditional waterfall methodology is a batch-and-queue process, making it Bad (clue: It’s in English, as opposed to chaku-chaku, or single-piece flow, which clearly is Good as it’s Japanese).