What do you need to improve productivity?

Interesting question, is it not?  I guess you found it interesting or you wouldn’t be reading this.

So what do you need?

Well fundamentally – just one thing.

A burning desire to identify and eliminate waste in all its forms – waste of resources, waste of effort, waste of talent, waste of time and so on.

Once you’ve learnt to identify waste, it can become something of an obsession.  Seeing people wasting their time and effort makes you angry.  Seeing people who create processes that makes people waste their talent and effort makes you even angrier.

So, start to attune your radar.  If you don’t know the 7 wastes of Lean, read up about them – and start to look for them wherever you go.  Calm your anger and think about how you would organise things differently to avoid the waste.