The Hidden Enemy of Continuous Improvement
The article identifies pusillanimity—"smallness of soul"—as a hidden barrier that prevents organizations from realizing continuous improvement. It explains how this mindset limits ambition, locks away employee creativity, and creates waste beyond the traditional Lean definition. The opposite virtue, magnanimity, encourages responsibility, humility, and bold experimentation. Finally, it argues that leaders must cultivate confidence and ask probing questions to shift culture from complacency to a sustainable Kaizen environment.
Theory of Constraints: Why Improving Everything Fails
The article warns that attempting to improve every process simultaneously leads to sub‑optimization, where overall performance barely shifts despite local gains. It introduces the Theory of Constraints (TOC) as a disciplined alternative that focuses improvement on the single bottleneck limiting...