Kaizen - Continuous Improvement

Kaizen is a Japanese word for economical, continuous improvement.

The philosophy of Kaizen can be summed up like this:

• Bad is better than nothing
• Good is better than bad
• Perfect is the enemy of good

Bad is better than nothing - Life rewards action, not perfection. Too often people don’t start tasks when they are afraid that they will not do well the first time through. Imagine if you allowed yourself to be stopped by the idea that you have to get it right the first time, every time… no learning would take place. It's often easier to make adjustments once you have started something than it is to get started in the first place.

Good is better than bad - People usually accept this idea easily.

Perfect is the enemy of good - People typically have a problem with this… weren’t you taught to seek perfection in everything you do? After all, in school you worked hard for those gold stars, and occasionally you got them. How could perfect be the enemy of good?

Two reasons:

One – If it needs to be perfect to be ok, you may never get started.

Two – If you ever declare something perfect, that means that you can  never improve it further.

How does this apply to an entrepreneur’s life?

Let’s say you're writing a business letter to a potential customer. You can agonize over such letters as you try to get it “right” on the first attempt. Entrepreneurs can take 3 to 4 hours on a single, two or three-page letter. Or worse still, you avoid the task all together, knowing that it will be painful to write “correctly”.

As an alternative, what would happen if you quickly jotted down your points in a first draft. If this was your final attempt, you might well consider it to be “bad”. According to kaizen, even a bad first draft is “a good start”. It's a lot easier to fix a poorly organized letter than to write a perfect one from scratch. By jotting down your ideas, you now have something to adjust.

It might take you 30 to 40 minutes to get the ideas out of your head, and then another 20 minutes to reorganize them into a sequence that makes sense. Another 10 to 15 minutes to format, check spelling and grammar, and you're done.

The same letter that took 3 to 4 hours to agonize over while trying for perfection, is done in a little over one hour when broken down into little parts.

Business Growth

It is quite common to see business owners overwhelmed by the notion of handling all there is to deal with when trying to grow your business… especially when you look at what is involved with large scale growth. There's too much to do! Where do you start?

Using the notion of kaizen, you build a simple outline of what is needed. Then, instead of trying to get it all done at once, you take it one step at a time. Kaizen is consistent with the old saying, “By the inch, it’s a cinch. By the yard, it’s hard”.

Safety Tip

One method of breaking your tasks down and keeping them simple is to measure and reward yourself for little wins, not just the big ones. Instead of depriving yourself of the feeling of having a good day unless you make a major sale or milestone, what would happen if you gave yourself credit for all the steps of progress you achieved along the way?

This way you're able to enjoy the journey, and the ultimate achievement of your goals.