Stagnant businesses are usually destined for failure. If you’re sitting still in this business climate, you’re really falling behind. But you don’t need exceptional growth to build a successful company. All that’s required is continuous improvement.
Embracing the Kaizen Mentality
In the business world, Kaizen is a term used to describe a state of continuous improvement – also known as constant and never-ending improvement (CANI). This word comes from two Japanese root words: “kai” meaning “change” and “zen” meaning “good.”
According to LeanProduction.com, “Kaizen is a strategy where employees at all levels of a company work together proactively to achieve regular, incremental improvements to the manufacturing process. In a sense, it combines the collective talents within a company to create a powerful engine for improvement.”
It’s both an action plan and a business philosophy. As an action plan, a Kaizen focus is all about systematizing core business tasks and processes so that they have an emphasis on CANI. The objective is to test, iterate, and constantly look for new opportunities to become more efficient, productive, or profitable.
As a philosophy, Kaizen encourages a culture where every single employee is encouraged to actively bring new ideas and suggestions to the table. Not only that, but they’re encouraged to implement ideas for improvement, track the results, and alert managers and other business leaders when it’s time to pivot in a new direction.
While the Kaizen philosophy has been around for centuries (and isn’t necessarily exclusive to business), it was originally made famous in the 1980s by the Japanese car manufacturer, Toyota. As the company scaled, they saw a need to develop airtight business processes that caught production issues as soon as they occurred.
Rather than waiting to discover an issue later in the process, they would shut down the entire production line at the first sign of an issue so that staffers could identify a solution. Once the solution was implemented, production would resume. This led Toyota to become one of the most efficient companies in the world.
Over the years, thousands of other companies across a number of industries have modeled Toyota’s approach and shared in the benefits of sustainable, long-term growth.
“The Kaizen approach is beneficial for a wide variety of business models and operational philosophies,” Rever explains. “It can improve work processes, eliminate waste, improve quality and increase the profitability of your company. Although it’s not a quick-fix, implementing Kaizen can lead to consistent and long-term growth.”
It doesn’t matter if you run a small business or a large-scale, multinational operation with complex assembly lines – a Kaizen-based approach paves the way for growth. Thus, we recommend adopting this mentality sooner rather than later.
4 Ways to Cultivate a CANI Culture
Transitioning from a traditional business to one that operates out of a Kaizen mentality requires you to roll up your sleeves and get a little messy at times. It doesn’t allow you to settle for the status quo or brush things under the rug.
With this approach, you never rest on your laurels. And though that might sound exhausting, it ultimately gives you more freedom and flexibility. It takes the pressure off any individual and spreads the responsibility of iterating across all team members.
The benefits of Kaizen are clear. The question is, how do you cultivate a CANI culture? Well, here are a few practical steps:
- Always Question Best Practices
Most businesses have an unspoken rule that you continue to do things you’ve always done – so long as there aren’t any serious or overt issues. In other words, most business leaders would rather stick with a below-average process or technique than rock the boat. Kaizen preaches the exact opposite.
In a Kaizen culture, you don’t justify the past or cling to “best practices.” Instead, you question all best practices and look for ways to improve. While there’s nothing wrong with an old practice (granted it works), you can’t let existing best practices become an excuse for the status quo. The goal is to question everything – especially the sacred rituals that seem to be cemented in stone.
If you hear someone say something like “that’s the way we’ve always done it” or “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” you need to reevaluate things. Rationalization is usually a guise for not addressing something that needs to be fixed. At the very least, you should ask why something is done a certain way.
- Invest in Continuing Education
While we often discuss Kaizen in terms of processes, the reality is that you need to take a CANI approach to managing your employees, too. They are malleable assets that can (and should) improve over time. One of the ways you do this is by encouraging/requiring continuing education and training.
Continuing education can be done in-house or outsourced to a training company or education provider. Take respiratory therapists as an example. Hospitals and healthcare facilities require annual respiratory therapy CE credits. But rather than invest resources into developing their own certified training programs, they just send their therapists to a provider like Last Minute CEU’s. This provides world-class continuing education without absorbing the excessive cost of building and maintaining an internal curriculum.
- Be Lean, and Iterate
Typically, when businesses identify a new strategy they want to implement, they spend months preparing. They set goals and objectives, identify workflows and processes, and have dozens of meetings to plan out every little detail. Then, once they think they have everything just right, they launch it. Sometimes it goes well. Sometimes it doesn’t. But either way, it’s typically an unnecessary waste of resources.
In a Kaizen company, remaining lean is the goal. If you want to implement a new process, you start with a minimally viable version. The objective is to implement it as quickly as possible and then gather results. Based on this initial feedback, you iterate. Sometimes this looks like doubling-down, while other times it looks like squashing the idea and pivoting. Either way, you move fast.
- See Problems as Opportunities
In the typical business, problems and waste are seen as huge sources of frustration. The average business owner or manager views friction as an inconvenience. But in a business that emphasizes CANI, problems are flipped around and viewed as opportunities.
Problems are ultimately a sign that something isn’t going right and can potentially be improved to unleash superior results. Problems represent opportunities to become better and stronger (faster).
Adding it All Up
If you’re ready to get your hands dirty and shape your business into the sort of efficient, highly-productive machine that it’s destined to become, it begins with a purposeful commitment to constant and never-ending improvement.
By adopting a Kaizen mentality, you can stop settling for average and start enjoying greater efficiency, productivity, and innovation.
