Lean Logic

Nov 05

I love dictionaries. And I love to collect them. Earlier this year, my wife and I spent a weekend in Victoria. We had about an hour before we had to board our seaplane, so we took a stroll nearby the terminal. By chance, we came upon a used bookstore, and there I found and purchased a beautiful nineteenth century volume of Barclay’s Universal English Dictionary. It was a hefty book, and there was a very strict weight limit for the luggage on the seaplane. As we prepared to board, I was filled with quite a bit of anxiety (and images of having to choose between keeping my wonderful impulse buy or missing our flight). Fortunately, we did not exceed the limit (whew!).

I first read about David Fleming’s dictionary in a Design Observer post by John Thackara. It’s hard to describe what’s in this book, but read Thackara’s post, if you want to get a sense of it. If there is a central tenet, I believe it’s the application of Lean Thinking to our world society and economy. It’s a frame of reference derived from Taiichi Ohno’s Lean Manufacturing principles. Given the current state of the world economy, the level of unrest that we’re witnessing in movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, etc., perhaps it’s time to consider alternative ways of managing our general welfare.