William C. Wake's Blog

September 2005 Archives

Roots of Lean - Kaizen

Tom Poppendieck pointed this out on one of the lists. It's an article on how a WWII effort called "Training Within Industry" was the basis for the "kaizen" continuous improvement approach in the Toyota Production System.

Schwerpunkt = focal point

"But there's one word, a German word, that we haven't yet stolen that should be high on our list of targets: schwerpunkt. It means 'focal point' or 'concentration of effort point' or 'central point of attack.' It's a beautiful word because it expresses an idea that we just don't have in English: the notion that, in any effort, you may have many necessary tasks, but there is one central task that must take first place in your considerations."

Crawford gives an example of the army: the cook is important, but the soldier (and fighting) is the shwerpunkt. In games, he says, interactivity is the schwerpunkt. It leads me to ask, what is the schwerpunkt for what I'm doing?

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