“Waste is error” – Tanner Janesky
My son said this to me this year. I sure he got it from one of the 100+ books he reads a year.
It certainly made me think.
Materials….
Energy…
Time….
Effort….
Often we sacrifice one of these to save another that we value more.
But there is always a price – short-term or long-term, paid by you or all of humanity, now or in the future.
Let’s figure out how to eliminate waste and stop the error that is costing us so much.
One process or step at a time, we can get better.
We are greatful for you and sharing your knowledge. Thanks Doug
I agree and the opposite is also true. “Errors are waste”. In business if all else remains the same you can increase profits in two ways, 1) Increase efficiency, or 2) Reduce waste. Often it’s easier to reduce waste than to increase efficiency. In my mind reducing waste is the “low hanging fruit” of business profit. It’s something we should be doing regardless of all else.
This extends into our personal lives as well. We can either work more, hope to get paid more, move to a higher paying job, or we can reduce waste and work the same or less. In the end do we really need all of those “things” that we pay so much for? Reduce life to its simplest form, get comfortable and then work upwards from there.
To further clarify what I meant by “waste is error”:
In one context, if we want a certain result or output, we want to use as little material, energy, time, etc as possible. If we’re punching out shapes in sheet metal, for example, whatever steel is left over that goes to the trash or recycling is error. We can rearrange the pattern to minimize this waste.
In a different context, nature produces no waste. The apple tree blooms in the spring, providing pollen and nectar for pollinators. Successfully pollinated flowers turn into fruits. A strong wind knocks many apples off the tree. When the apples ripen, the birds come and peck some of the fruits. The remainder fall to the ground where deer eat some. Insects eat others, and the rest decompose by the activity of bacteria and fungi. All of the apples have fallen to the ground, but there is no waste. For without the birds and deer eating the fruit and spreading the seeds, there would be no apple tree. Without the bacteria, fungi, and insects, there would be no soil for the apple tree. Nature does not waste—it transforms, recycles, composts, renews. If our economy did the same, there would be no landfills, incineration plants, and forever chemicals. Waste is error, and humanity as a whole is producing much error. The Great Work of our time is to eliminate waste—to eliminate error from the activities of humankind—to close the loop and restablish the links we’ve broken in our take-make-waste economy.