Kaizen

mt.kaizen.com

Kaizen is a Japanese word that means continuous improvement. Here are three main points that Kaizen has taught me.

- Small, continuous improvements outperform large, stopped improvements.

Extreme diets or workout programs usually fail because they need a large amount of willpower. For instance, beginning a workout can be hard sometimes and a very small step to take is to only stand on a treadmill for a minute everyday. As the one minute increases, one should start walking on the treadmill. Another example is if one wants to stop overspending and so removing a single item from the shopping cart before heading to the cashier is one way.

- 0.99^(365) = 0.0255

1.01^(365) = 37.783

These two equations mathematically prove that a small difference over a long period of time can make a tremendous difference in results. For example, investing 10% of your annual salary in Life Cycle funds or Index funds for the next 5-10 years can provide very good returns on investments.

- Ask small questions. "What are you going to do to make our company the best in the industry?" The problem with this question is that it is too big that can undoubtedly freeze up the listeners. Breaking the question down can improve the quantity and the quality of the answers people give. For example, if the question was, "Can you think of a very small step that you might take to improve a service or a product the company has?"

The author, Michael Ondaatje, asks himself small questions rather than big ones. A large question is similar to this, "What kind of character would be fascinating to readers?" Instead, he makes up an incident such as a plane crash or a small night talk between a patient and a nurse. Thereafter, Micheal asks, "Who is the patient? Who is the man in the plane? Why is he there? What year is this?" Asking these types of question is one of the main reasons Micheal has prize-winning novels.

Source:

One Small Step Can Change Your Life (The Kaizen Way) by Robert Maurer