Summary: Can the principles of Lean be applied to your daily life? Dan Markovitz, founder and owner of TimeBack Management certainly thinks so. He has developed a consultancy specializing in improving individual and organizational performance through the application of lean concepts. Dan has backed up his claim in his latest book, A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance. Dan feels Lean can be just as powerful for yourself as it for organizations. After talking to Dan, I reviewed the 5 basic principles of Lean: Identify Value Map Value Stream Create Flow Establish Pull Seek Perfection I certainly found an interesting relation to how I apply them from an organizational standpoint and how I could use them to improve my day. Dan gave a few tips and encouraged me to find the root cause of several of my most nagging problems. I can’t say the choices were easy but I was certainly able to address them and make decisions accordingly. Now, if I can only sustain it!!! I reviewed the book in this blog post: How do you handle inputs into your life? and there is a written excerpt from the podcast, Can you Lean yourself?. Related Information: Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban Successful Lean teams are iTeams Kaizen is Always Individual 4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified
