KAIZEN, OR CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT

Hirishi Mikitani, Market Place 3.0: Rewriting the Rules of Borderless Business (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) ("In general, people have quite a bit of room for improvement. Most people are not working at full capacity. Most have a store of undeveloped skills. Perhaps they have never been pushed or encouraged to explore their limits. Perhaps it never occurred to them to try. Many people are satisfied if they meet the standards set for them by their teachers, their families, or their work supervisors. Many assume that once they have graduated from school and secured a job, their efforts have paid off. But what if they undertook an attitude of kaizen? What if each individual looked within himself and made a commitment to constant improvement?" "This is a concept that really excites me, because I believe there is so much untapped potential in people. Asking someone to become a genius overnight is not reasonable. But if you told that person, 'Improve a little bit every day,' what would those results look like over the course of a year? Ten years? An entire career? The difference is staggering." "You can look at this from a mathematical point of view. Calculate a daily increase of 1 percent for one year: 1.01 to the 365th power. The answer is 37.78. Even if you could only achieve 1 percent improvement each day--1 percent kaizen per day--at the end of one year, your result is over thirty-seven times better than when you started." "I once heard this story: A man in search of wisdom opened a book from a sword-fighting school of the Edo Period (1603-1868). Inside, there was just one phrase: 'Myself of today will triumph over myself of yesterday.' This is a beautifully distilled vision of kaizen. The goal is not to be great overnight, but to be better each day, knowing that this accumulation of improvements is the path to success." Id. at 106-107. I once worked in banking. On the operations side there was considerable data-entry work, e.g., keypunching data from payments received in customers' lockboxes. A form of kaizen was practiced there: The goal was not to eliminate all keypunching errors  in data entry. Rather the goal was to move from 1 error per 1,000 keystroke, to 1 error per, say, 1,100 keystrokes. Once that was accomplished, the goal was to move from 1 error per 1,100 keystrokes to 1 error per 1,200 keystrokes. The goal was not perfection, no errors period; rather the goal was a smaller percentage of errors.).