SUMMARY (The 90 Day Schedule) How to win the War on Waste in 90 days? Having read the book, you can now ask me again: “How can I win the War on Waste in 90 Days?” First of all, you sign up with me.[1] Or do it on your own with a consulting phone support from me. Or you just do it and if you get in trouble, call me. It really is pretty easy to do. I also have training manuals that you can buy to follow the program. Calendar Action to be Accomplished. ...

The 7 things listed below are items that you need to do to make the War on Waste work successfully. Begin the 6 Steps of the War on Waste! Of course, that is what this whole process is about. Start it up and stand back. This is really a fun process.Use the tools of the War on Waste. Tools of the War on Waste were explained throughout the book. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 describe a number of tools that we use extensively as we deliver the War on Waste. Check in often with each...

9. The TKC The War on Waste creates the ideas and a process to get ideas into play. But it still requires a formal process to get new ideas into the system. Once the War on Waste is completed, the company still wants new ideas to continue. When the War on Waste is over, the implemented ideas need to be tracked. That is achieved with the Tribal Knowledge Council, the subject of this chapter. The TKC is the control point for the input of all ideas. Its ...

10. FAQs Have you ever done a company like ours? This is one of the most interesting questions that I get asked. The answer is pretty easy. Probably not or if I did one like yours, it still wasn’t yours. And that doesn’t matter a bit. The War on Waste is about fixing a company’s processes. It doesn’t make any difference what business you are in, the first question that we ask in the program is, “What do you do here to make money?” That is what determines ...

8. Strategy This is not a chapter to compete with other treatises on strategy. There are a number of great tomes on the subject. This chapter is merely to place it in context within the War on Waste. The War on Waste led to the idea that strategy became aligned with process in the program. We referenced Michael Porter,[1] who is the pre-eminent strategy scholar in the United States. But this observation is not Porter’s. It is ours. ...

6. Value-adding There are a number of ways to define this term. We define it simply as “what customers are willing to pay for.” In any business, everyone needs to understand why the business exists and how it makes money. As we do the War on Waste, we ask a very simple question, “What does this company do to add value?” The answer to this simple question serves as the basis for the War on Waste. So the question “what is waste” is intimately tied to the comp...

7. Tools of the War Over the years, we used tools of the trade in unique ways. We borrowed tools from friends. And we made up our own tools. Some of these are worth noting. 120/20 Rule of Profits. There is a corollary to the 80/20 Rule. A business “turn around” consulting friend showed us this rule. We have all seen it. It is the 120/20 Rule of Profits. · 120% of a company’s profits come from 20% of the customers. &nbs...

5. Using the Mission Statement We made an observation early on. It wasn’t a life changing experience but it was part of many of our conversations. We noted that the Mission Statement is rarely involved in decision-making. Once a few bright MBAs put a Mission Statement together, it goes somewhere to die. It just isn’t involved in the daily routine. So we wondered why? Why is so much time spent on developing a “Mission Statement” and it isn’t actively u...

No Excuses The No Blame motto was developed to encourage employees to come up with ideas. It serves as their protection from the Black Knights that fight change in the organization. But there is a downside. When an employee invokes “No Blame” there is no accountability and that’s why we came up with the idea of “No Excuses”. When an employee team fails to measure up to its capabilities, they accept the consequences and report the data honestly. They ...

4. No Blame The War on Waste (waste is anything in the company that keeps money from being made) begins with an idea. It doesn’t matter the size of the company, if you want to find out what’s wrong with the company, listen to an employee’s idea. The idea is not just any idea; it is an idea that identifies a waste in one of the business processes. In our definition, the War on Waste is a company-wide affair. Everyone participates. And all parts of the compa...

3. The War on Waste The War on Waste consists of the 6 steps noted in the previous chapter. We would like to expand on them a little bit here. If the program is a company initiative, the CEO or top Exec needs to announce the campaign and require that everyone get on board. If it starts with a single team, working a project through the Internet eWOW program, the team can influence the company to follow suit and get others involved. Engage – En Garde! Phase 0: H...

2. How I Got Started The story began twenty-nine years ago, as I stood in front of a group of employees who had been forced to attend a class I had been contracted to deliver. It was a training program that introduced a small manufacturing company to the principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS). The Toyota Production System is the basis of current Lean Manufacturing and 6-Sigma programs. In essence, I was teaching a method for identifying and eliminating waste in bu...

1. What is Waste? In the Toyota Production System, Taiichi Ohno, its developer, identified 7 major wastes: · Waste of over production (largest waste) – making too much of a product and not being able to sell it. Idle inventory is a waste. · Waste of time on hand (waiting) – of course this would be waste because while a worker is not adding value, he or she is costing the company money. · Waste of transportation – w...

I told a client about the title of this book and he laughed. “Len,” he said, “I grant you, we got the processes under control and we made a lot of money as a result of your efforts in less than 90 days. But it is an ongoing effort. Paying attention to our inefficiencies is a continual struggle. But we know how to deal with them. And that is what the War on Waste did. It gave us the system to deal with the wastes and we keep our antennas up. It is mana...

As I have delivered the War on Waste for 25 years, I have watched CEOs become shocked as their employees dissected their companies with laser precision as they developed and presented proposals to management. Many CEOs were flabbergasted that their employees could be so smart. Others knew the talent was there but didn’t want to spend the time to fix their companies. The observation of the War on Waste Paradox has given me a chance to revisit the story that I originally wrote over ...

I love delivering the War on Waste over the years. We have recently migrated the program to the Internet and call it High ROI Problem Solving. There seemed to be some problem with people and the term "War on Waste." And we have changed the name of our Internet company to "The Consortium of Problem Solvers." We really have a consortium of Problem Solvers with our facilitators. They delve into their various projects with the same verve that Dr. Elbie did in t...

At the end of the War on Waste, Mr. Grimes will have completed the first phase of the process that is required to create an innovation culture that we call the “Quantum Leap Company.” The War on Waste is Phase 0. It gets the company started but that’s all it does. If the process dies out after a couple of months, which most lean manufacturing initiatives that we have observed seem to do, then that is too bad. But we put the CRB into the system to make sure that change...

In a political war, treason is a capital offense punishable by death. A similar rule applies to the War on Waste. In a recent engagement, one of the CEOs who really understood what the War on Waste was about, stood up on the last day of class and gave a rousing speech to his employees. At the end, he said, “I am the General of our War on Waste. We are at war with our competitors who want to take business from us. There are some of these competitors who want to steal yo...

A number of different types of initiatives have been sponsored by different CEOs. For instance, Ray Dolby of Dolby Laboratories has a culture that flourishes on the energy created by the company’s fixation on audio sound system perfection. That environment creates its own sources of energy. Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines creates energy initiatives with his Wing Ding flings. He gets employees excited to deliver their services to their customers. The CEOs job ...