Kaizen and 80/20 Principle

Use Kaizen and the 80/20 Principle for Success

How to loose 80 pounds with Kaizen, with just 1 Minute on the Treadmill

A guy called Yoav posted this little comment in response to an article about Kaizen, here is his story in his own words...

The Japanese word Kaizen, loosely translated means "continuous improvement". It is a very simply idea, of simply making small improvements everyday. Don't be a perfectionist - NOT TODAY - but eventually, every day. Simply keep taking small directions in the direction of where you want to go, and if you don't know which direction, simply make one small thing better today than it was before.

Pretty soon, a whole bunch of things in your life or business will start approaching perfection.

Einstein was quoted as saying that "Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe". When the Americans bought Manhattan from the native Indians for a couple of beads, everyone thought that the Indians got a raw deal - but if the money equivalent of those beads were simply left in a bank account to compound all those years till today, it would be worth enough to buy up most of America today.

Lots of simple everyday improvements compound similarly over the long term. Initially you don't see the impact, but it keeps adding up, and eventual everyone will want to know where your "overnight success" came from.

My own expression for this is: "Anything worth doing, is worth doing half-arsed". Get started, keep taking action, and pursue activities where you can always keep getting feedback so you can course correct along the way.

Kaizen is also great when you don't have a clear direction, then you simply start with everything that is in front of you, pick one thing up, make a small improvement, put it down, pick up the next thing, make a small improvement, put it down, pick up the next thing.... until you start to see signs of success in at least one direction, then you will have found your key direction - your key levers of success, which leads us to...

The 80/20 Principle

In any field, activity or area, there are a handful of levers that you can pull that can make a much bigger proportional difference to the outcome that you are seeking to achieve. Sometimes we don't know what these levers are, and we need to discover them (see Kaizen above).

Once you strike upon a pattern that works, the proverbial "pay-dirt" for the area where you are seeking success, you can get almost everything else wrong, as long as you focus on this key area, you will continue to make major strides forward.

For example if you deal with people, you will discover that 80% of your problems and hassles come from 20% of the people that you deal with. If you have business that services other businesses, you may discover that your top 3 (or top whatever) customers contribute the majority of your profits. You may also identify that the bulk of your head-aches and payment worries come from a handful of customers. Get rid of those bad apples, no matter how painful. This will free you up to look for more customers that look like your best 20%.

If you are trying to loose weight, out of all the eating habits and excercise routines, there could be a handful of elements that contribute the most to your weight loss. If you do just those things right, everything else can almost not derail you. Perhaps you have only one or two major "food weaknesses" and if you can only manage to avoid those two, your diet is 80% won.

Whenever you have more things to do than you have time and strength for, ask yourself which of these possible activities will give me the fastest result with the least effort - and do that first. Even if you never manage to get 2/3rds of your to-do list done, but always manage to get the 1/3 with the highest leverage done, you will see yourself move forward rapidly.

Finally try to leverage other people to do the things for you, so you can rid yourself of non-core low leverage activities in your life, and can focus your efforts on the higher leverage activities.