Gemba Panta Rei

How do You Say "'No problem,' is a Problem." in Romanian?

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:29:41 -0800

A friend of mine recently took a position in an electronics factory in Romania. He sent me an e-mail and the photo above. One day he came in to work to find this sign on his computer. It says "We don't have a problem, only opportunities for improvement," which is what he tells people when they bring problems to him.

It is always good to teach new people what you know. Going into a new environment to teach is humbling because you have to do a lot of learning yourself rather quickly to adapt to the new students. As they say in Job Instruction, "if the student hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught". Taking others up the learning curve of thinking about and seeing work in a new way - developing the kaizen mind - it requires relearning for yourself what you already know. Another way to say this is that. We need to bring ourselves from unconscious competence back down to conscious competence so that we can be specific enough about what we want others to learn.

Simple phrases such as the one above are useful for doing this when they pack in a lot of meaning in a few words. Although Deming was against exhortations, slogans and posters as a way to encourage and motivate people, an expert on communications would probably argue that the importance of the message outweighs the medium. Certainly they should not be empty exhortations.

One of these days my fried will need probably need to teach the lesson is that the 'no problem' mindset is a far bigger problem than the actual problems themselves. Problems are opportunities, yes indeed. Changing attitudes in a way that leads to a positive awareness problems, a desire to recognize them clearly, to discussion and take action to correct even the smallest problems, this is the greatest opportunity of all. That's true, but too wordy to tape to a computer monitor.

By Jon Miller - July 9, 2009 10:29 AM

The Power of U

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:55:12 -0800

My Japanese teachers often spoke about making processes flow "like a single brushstroke". It was and still is a phrase difficult to translate. Often I would mimic picking up a calligraphy brush and sweeping it in a u-shape to demonstrate to others what the our sensei was trying to convey. To explain in a few words, the process should move continuously and smoothly as a brushstroke, not leaving the paper until the motion was complete, and when the brush returns to the original position the shape should be simple and elegant. When we design work as repetitive cycles that are easy to perform at a high value-added content, we experience this calligraphy brushstroke-thing the sensei talked about.

U shaped cells

At a nuts-and-bolts level, the u-shaped cell we see in factories, warehouses, and increasingly in transactional environments is an example of the power of the u-shape. Most students of lean manufacturing will have encountered the maxim that the workplace should be designed for "u-shaped" flow. There are many reasons for this, including having a counterclockwise flow instead of linear flow, establishing a clear and single "in" and "out" area for the connected processes, removing barriers to flow between the processes on the inside of the U, and allowing easy access for material logistics and equipment maintenance.

The fact that the u-shape brings people together is by far the most important factor, of which more here.

Change management U shape

Many lean implementations have struggled or been scuttled due to resistance to change. Even before stepping foot into a kaizen event, much less a full-blown lean transformation, people should be made aware that change is painful and that there is a natural human resistance that comes with this. Ideally a smooth change management transition would go from awareness of why the change is needed to desire to support and be engaged in the change, followed by an understanding of how and the skills and abilities to change, resulting in behaviors to commit and sustain the changes.

But this rarely happens without active upfront planning or massive downstream intervention. One recipe for effective change by John Kotter suggests an eight-step strategy for change management:

Establish a sense of urgency

Create a guiding coalition

Develop a vision for the change

Communicate the change vision

Empower everyone to act on the vision

Generate short-term wins

Consolidate gains and produce more change

Set the new ways as part of the culture

This broad-based prescription for change management is only as effective as the speed at which each person goes through their personal change curve, beginning with the guiding coalition in step 2 above.

This 4-stage u-shape personal change curve is based on the five stage Kubler Ross model on the transition people go through when they are grieving some personal loss. It's worth acknowledging where people stand and spending the time and effort to get people from stage 1 to 2 to 3 as quickly as possible. Until they are on the right side of the center line people are not adding momentum to the change effort but in fact they are putting on the brakes.

The four stages of competence

Even after people are in stage 3 of the personal change curve and open to exploration and learning, we are not out of the proverbial woods. As people emerge from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, they may experience another sense of loss, whether it be of power, self image, respect or control. One of the challenges with lean is that it requires leaders to learn a lot. It would be easy if all they needed to learn were Japanese words, formulas, and how particular problem solving tools are used; instead we need them to learn new behaviors. There is a classic u-shaped learning curve that in some ways parallels the personal change curve above:

1. Unconscious incompetence. The leader does not understands or know how to support the change or demonstrate the appropriate behaviors, and also does not recognizes this inability. As a result, they may not have a desire to address it.

2. Conscious incompetence. Though still unable to do what is needed, the individual recognizes this deficit. Only with learning, practice and effort can people exit this phase.

3. Conscious competence. The leader understands how to do what is needed, but can only do so through a great deal of consciousness effort. Most likely coaxing, encouragement and audits are needed to pass through this phase.

4. Unconscious competence. The leader has sufficient practice that the new behavior becomes second nature. They do what is needed without thinking most or all of the time. When enough people do and teach this to others, it has become part of the culture.

Understanding and knowing what these lean leadership behaviors are in itself used to be a challenge but increasingly there is a consensus on what these are, so ignorance is no excuse.

Bonus: Theory U

First there was theory X, then theory Y and now theory U. MIT lecturer C. Otto Scharmer has written a book on his approach to leadership called Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges.

At a glance the content looks good, with some notable commonalities to lean thinking:

Build common intent: harmony, consensus, and listening to customers and stakeholders
Observe, observe, observe: go see, gemba focus, keep an open mind
Connect to the source: not so sure about this one. perhaps reflection and hansei
Prototype the new: very much in line with experimenting and the hands-dirty aspect of lean
Embody the new in the ecosystem: the whole systems focus is a lean-friendly message

Theory U promises to encourage you to "step into the emerging future". Like change, the future is something that happens whether we accept it or not, so being aware and ready in advance is surely a good thing. I will have to learn more about Theory U and where it's going.

What is this power of U that attracts so many ideas to it?

By Jon Miller - July 8, 2009 6:55 PM

One Point Lesson: Kamishibai

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:35:04 -0800

Prof. Jeffrey Liker has uploaded an excellent slideshow from 2005 titled The Toyota Way: A Sociotechnical Learning Organization in Action. The image above is from this presentation in which Liker touches briefly on the kamishibai board and its use.

What is a kamishibai?

In Toyota's system of jidoka or building quality in to each process, each person checks their own work. But this is not enough to guarantee 100% quality. It is a myth to think that "lean means no inspection" when in fact there are checks upon checks within a build in quality system. Kamishibai is an example of randomized as well as scheduled audits of those process checks and standards.

Among the visual management tools such as hour by hour boards, andon lights, gemba walks and shift-to-shift communication meetings which promote a workplace-focused lean management culture, the kamishibai system is lesser known. In fact the only complicated thing about it is the name, although from the point of view of the discipline required to actually use it, we could say that it is not a tool for lean beginners. The kamishibai board is particularly useful when there is a will and desire for managers to practice genchi genbutsu (go see what's really happening) but they are unsure how to structure day or even what to do when they are on the shop floor. The kamishibai system formalizes, prioritizes and schedules the checks to be made on the gemba. It is a simple and flexible visual tool to ensure the required checks are being completed.

Why do we need a kamishibai?

The main aim is not to catch people doing something wrong. Before using the kamishibai an organization needs a healthy "why?" culture and not a "who?" culture. For a manager, the proper use of a kamishibai is to train your eyes to see problems (deviations from the standard), identify improvements while they are still small, and teach others to see and solve these problems. In the kamshibai system the process is just as important as the result. In other words, faithfully completing the audits is as important as the result of the audit itself. The purpose is not to find faults, although problems should certainly be made visible; the purpose is to get in the habit of checking each day.

How is the kamishibai used?

Team leaders and above also have the responsibility to check the work of others working within their team or span of control. The work itself and the checking must be based on standard work. The checks performed by the team leader are specifically to audit the line and the performance of the team members working there. The key areas checked include safety rules and the proper use of personal protective equipment, adherence to standardized work, maintenance of accurate documentation, general workplace organization, as well as whether or not other routine activities such as TPM (lubrication, cleaning and checking machines) is being done.

The team leader picks out a card at random from the kamishibai board. This randomness is important to prevent the checks from becoming predictable. If the checks followed a predictable pattern in theory it would be possible for the team members to defeat the system if they so chose, by following the standard during the check but not at other times. The person pulling the card reads the instructions for the corresponding daily, weekly or monthly check and goes to that process to perform the check. After the check, the card is turned over and returned. If there are abnormalities, these are noted on a problem board. A two-color system can be used to indicate that a problem has been found.

While the team leader audit is focused on their immediate work area or zone and the daily, weekly and monthly check cards are pulled on a random basis, the kamishibai process for the group leaders, area managers and above differs slightly. They have a wider span of audit (multiple lines or zones for group leaders, sections or department for area managers, etc.) and the timing of the cards and checks are based on a schedule. This schedule is built into the leader standard work which identifies when the supervisors and managers spend time directly on the shop floor during the day. The checks performed by the group leader tend to focus focus more on systems such as kanban, andon response, or hourly performance tracking. There may also be specific checks on critical to quality processes.

How do we get started with kamishibai?

A basic condition for starting to use kamishibai is that people hold each other accountable for following standards. Without this, don't bother with kamishibai. This type of standard work for leaders is based on a longer cycle than an operator's standard work but the goal is the same: insure that work is performed in the best known way for a safe, productive and high quality outcome. Although the cycle of checking may be longer, the response to nonconforming conditions should be swift and immediate. Needless to say, these countermeasures (action plans) should be made visual at the scene of the problem and the responsible persons must follow up frequently until the issue is resolved.

A site could have as many kamishibai boards as it has team leaders, group leaders and area managers (per shift). Within Toyota factories which use the kamishibai system there may be as many as 100 such boards. One of the keys to success is to pilot this system on a limited basis across several zones or a section, rather than the entire site at once, in order not to create an immediate and unreasonable pull on the managers to respond to and solve problems. The pull should be persistent and strong but not unreasonable. The condition of the kamishibai board will tell you not only how robust your processes are, but how well lean culture has become part of management behavior.

By Jon Miller - July 6, 2009 3:35 PM

Boeing Gets a Grip

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:32:54 -0800

...on its supply chain, according to a Wall Street Journal article from July 2nd, 2009. Boeing is in talks to buy Vought and possibly other suppliers in an attempt to gain control over the supply of parts. It's about time leaders at this company remembered that they are a manufacturing company first and foremost, not a design, marketing and global logistics boutique like so many durable goods multinationals have convinced themselves they are.

Someday this will be a textbook case for what not to do in extending your supply chain to the edges of the globe in the pursuit of low piece prices or offsets against sales of airplanes to the countries supplying parts. The 787 aircraft is many months behind schedule and in no small part due to supply chain woes. The piece price cost savings may still put them ahead in traditional accounting, but not for long if they continue losing orders to airlines who haven't taken delivery, have been hit hard by the economic crisis, and are forced to cancel orders. It's hard to put a price on orders lost because you couldn't ship them on time. You can't make that up on volume.

A bit of million dollar consulting advice I will offer up as a public service; here is where a company like Toyota would put as much of their lean supply chain for the 787 as technically possible:

Image courtesy of Google.

From the WSJ article:

When Boeing first rolled out plans for its Dreamliner, it said that it was reinventing the way it builds commercial airplanes. Instead of manufacturing most of the plane at its Everett, Wash., facility, many parts would be made by suppliers around the world. The parts then would be shipped to Boeing's plant for final assembly.

Boeing, however, quickly discovered that keeping track of the different suppliers -- and keeping the whole project on schedule -- was more difficult than it had anticipated. Delays accumulated, and the plane is now two years behind schedule.

It was not the first time such a supply chain reinvention turned out to be a blunder. And by definition it was not a reinvention (unless we mean "making something that's already been made, again"). I fear this won't be the last time this blunder is "reinvented".

This was what Deming would call tampering: not kaizen - improvement based on a standard - nor innovation. It was an idea dreamed up as a result of consultant briefings and number-crunching, far, far removed from the gemba. In fact, this sort of thing has been tried before, long ago by a far more advanced lean thinker: Henry Ford. There is an abandoned industrial city in the middle of the Amazon jungle called Fordlandia. The Ford Motor Company built a city in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon in an attempt to supply their own rubber for tires, circumventing the established source of British Malayan rubber. How did that work out? Not so well. It's an interesting story, I recommend reading about it.

Fordlandia photos courtesy of Guilherme Carvalho's collection on Panoramio.

Henry Ford was a lean manufacturing visionary. He vertically integrated his supply chain and made great advances in industrial productivity. How did he go so wrong in this Amazon venture? One word: gemba. He didn't get enough of it. Like Boeing executives who made the decision to fly airplane parts from all over the world to Washington State, Henry Ford never went to see the Fordlandia site in Amazon for himself. One of the tenets of lean thought is genchi genbutsu or "go see the real thing" with your own eyes. Ford's rubber plantation gemba was totally unsuited for rubber production, the local workforce culture completely not adapted to Ford's method of labor management, and they failed to notice that the midday heat did not make the most motivating working conditions. Henry Ford never visited Brazil. He never went to gemba, and he paid the price.

Boeing can still pull their supply chain together. The world is not such a big place and no supply chain is so complex that it can't be simplified. But first, they need to get a firm grip - on their heads - and get their feet to the gemba with all speed.

By Jon Miller - July 2, 2009 5:32 PM

Saluting NUMMI

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:39:39 -0800

The New United Motor Manufacturing factory in Fremont, California was originally a General Motors plant opened in 1962. For the past 25 years it has been a successful joint venture between GM and Toyota. Bloomberg reports their uncertain faith now: Toyota Stuck With California Dilemma as GM Ditches Joint Plant. In fatter times Toyota may have done the right thing and picked up GM's half of NUMMI, but Toyota is signaling an uncertain future for their first and most successful joint venture.

When Toyota was making its first forays into manufacturing in North America, it approached GM to co-manage what would become NUMMI. The Fremont site reopened for production in 1984 and has run as a paragon of lean manufacturing and collaborative management in what was formerly dysfunctional factory. NUMMI won many awards for productivity and quality, ranking among the top Toyota plants in North America. Economic circumstances and the bankruptcy of the GM half of the joint venture notwithstanding, NUMMI was a great success and all of the people involved should be proud.

Much can be said from GM's failure to learn more from Toyota through this joint venture, but this is not the time or place to refresh that discussion. Instead, let's salute NUMMI at their best. A good place to start is an article about Lean at NUMMI from Manufacturing Engineering magazine in 2005. Mark Rosenthal who blogs as The Lean Thinker featured an article by Gipsie Ranney back in January titled Remembering NUMMI, a poignantly prescient title, perhaps. For a personal experience of touring and seeing the lean production system at work, visit Mark Graban's Lean blog for a six part series of NUMMI Tour Tales.

For an in-depth study on how Toyota approached the joint venture at NUMMI, the paper titled Evaluating A Joint Venture: NUMMI at Age 20 by Edwin and Mitsuko Duerr at San Francisco State University is highly recommended. They credit the success of the venture to the emphasis Toyota placed on the following five factors:

developing cooperative management-labor relations;

careful selection and extensive training of workers;

stressing teamwork and responsibility of the individual to the work group;

putting safety and quality first, assigning the responsibility for safety and quality to each worker, and giving them the authority to assure it; and

implementing Toyota's 'lean production system' upon the foundation of the first four key factors.

In other words, Toyota simply applied the basics of management. This is a moment that will test Toyota's new President Akio Toyoda. He has stated a return to Toyota's roots and core values, a "back to basics" if you will. Placing people at the center of their business plan has always been a basic precept at Toyota. Over the next weeks and months, we will see whether a profit pinch will cause them to make less fortunate decisions or whether Toyota is able to put their money where their mouth is in order to invest in NUMMI, the surrounding community and the long-term future.

By Jon Miller - June 30, 2009 9:39 AM

Agile Kanban Journal Day 8: Do We Need a "Done" Column?

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:09:02 -0800

I continue to benefit from the use of my Agile kanban board, if nothing else to keep my supposedly most important tasks in front of me (or behind me as it were, per layout of the office). I have faith and confidence that using this method persistently and diligently, I can build better working habits. Many questions still remain as to how to visualize the work, progress of work and problems with the work more effectively. One very simple question arose from a suggestion one of the readers had to add a "Done" column: do we really need a "done" column?

The Agile kanban board I use has no "done" column. When a task is complete, the tile is erased and recycled (attached to a blank area under the kanban board work area). This tile is then available to be assigned another task value. It could be a major task or something small. In a sense the tiles are like currency or a token, in the same way that the printing of traditional kanban cards in manufacturing are tightly controlled, much like money.

When something is done, presumably some value is created or realized downstream. From the point of view of the task board, the important thing is that capacity has been freed to add another task. The question of capacity is only loosely understood at this point, since there may be a lot of lost or hidden capacity inherent in my way of working. Hopefully the use of the Agile kanban board will ferret all of this out.

I consulted an old friend about the "done" column as it turns out that though our careers diverge, we share a timely interests in the Agile kanban board. David Moles is currently the Agile project lead at his software development company in Switzerland. The photo above is the Agile kanban he uses at his company. Here is David's take on the "done" column:

The "done" column is an interesting question. I hadn't really considered it till now, but I think you're right to turn the question around. Why (five times?) do we have a "done" column?

In a Scrum process (and that's still basically what we're doing here, though borrowing ideas from the Agile Kanban guys as I assimilate them) you work in "sprints" of say three weeks. For each sprint you set a sprint goal (deliver features x, y, and z) and break it down into tasks. At the end of the sprint you deliver the completed work to the (possibly internal) customer, the "done" tasks come off the board, and you start again. So I suspect "done" really means something like "ready for delivery."

David Anderson's team doesn't use sprints -- they prioritize the "to do" tasks every Monday and, if I understand / remember correctly, they just deliver each feature as it's completed. There's an "In Production" column on the taskboards pictured in his slide deck but it seems as though it's mostly empty, and I'm not sure what it's for.

There's a psychological benefit to having a pile of cards on the right-hand side of the board -- "look at all the work we're getting done!" But after reading your blog for a couple of years, I'm suspicious of this. Isn't a pile-up of cards in the final stage still a pile-up of cards, and an indication of some kind of bottleneck? "Ready for delivery" is a lot like "in inventory", isn't it? And we all know that a full warehouse shouldn't make you feel comfortable, rather the reverse.

I suspect that an ideal system a "done" column shouldn't be necessary -- done = delivered to the customer = off the board.

Oh, and the skull is "dead", meaning "for some reason we decided not to do this after all." Like the "done" column, it may or may not be necessary and is probably of mostly psychological value.

Having a "done" column makes sense if there is a downstream team that is actively pulling tasks off of that column to begin their work. In that sense it would be much like a supermarket area in manufacturing terms. Having a stockpile of finished work to feel good about... it's human nature but not too lean.

David Moles is also a published science fiction author and a witty blogger. Check him out at Chrononaut.

By Jon Miller - June 29, 2009 12:09 AM

Seeking: Checklist for a Sense of Urgency

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:47:30 -0800

"The most important factors for success are patience, a focus on long term rather than short-term results, reinvestment in people, product, and plant, and an unforgiving commitment to quality."

This is a quote from Robert McCurry, former Executive VP of Toyota Motor Sales. It's a great quote which captures in broad brushstrokes some of the essential characteristics of successful lean companies: long-term thinking, a focus on developing people, and kaizen. At the same time, to companies struggling with short-term challenges, these words can seem like happy talk. Many of us feel like we need to take action now, ideally not at the cost of the long-term, people or quality but to see results today. This is a delicate balance. We need to think long-term, but act each day with urgency.

This has to begin with leadership. From Jeffrey Liker's book The Toyota Way:

The biggest crisis a company faces is when the leaders believe there is no crisis or do not feel a passionate sense of urgency to continuously improve the way they work.

FC is an in-house lean manufacturing consultant who coordinates the training and implementation. Lean is new to this organization, with most of the focus being on 5S for the past two years, with a recent interest in the other aspects of lean. A few weeks ago FC asked in an e-mail whether we had a checklist to gauge the sense of urgency of the staff. We don't have such a checklist.

Although by no means a full checklist on a sense of urgency, at a minimum I would ask the following of FC's leadership:

Do we have a clear and articulated vision of "the ideal"?
Do we have a firm grasp of our current situation based on facts we have confirmed with our own eyes?
Do we have a sufficiently strong consensus on the problem (the gap between ideal and current state) so that we can begin breaking down this problem into actionable chunks?

Harvard Prof and author John Kotter places creating a sense of urgency as job #1 in a successful transformation in his Why Transformations Fail:

Establish a sense of urgency

Form a powerful guiding coalition

Create a vision

Communicate the vision

Empower others to act on the vision

Plan for and create short-term wins

Consolidate improvements and sustain

Institutionalize the new approaches

We could view this as a high-level road map for implementing lean or any other major transformation. "It's all about the people" and "it's all about leadership" if we consider that steps 1 - 5 are PLAN in the PDCA cycle, all related to change management and getting the mindset right. Step 6 is the DO or implementation as a pilot, step 7 is the CHECK and 8 is the ACT.

The conventional wisdom is that at least 80% of the leadership team need to be removed safely from their comfort zone. We all strive for comfort, but in the comfort zone there is no sense of urgency. Leaders especially must venture out of this zone in order to lead. Safely, because otherwise they will find themselves in the fear zone and fight their way back to the comfort zone - not a productive use of leadership energy. Organizations that make it through a crisis emerge stronger and it is part of a leader's role to guide their team deliberately and safely through these fires.

According to Kotter, having a sense of urgency is at the top of the list for success or failure of a transformation effort. Yet a crisis (a gap that triggers a sense of urgency) is a relative thing, a question of how you perceive your circumstance. How do we measure whether we have a necessary sense of urgency?

What do you think? Please share your views and insights on the subject of how to gauge an organization's sense of urgency.

By Jon Miller - June 25, 2009 10:47 AM

The Funny Thing About Waste

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:33:45 -0800

The funny thing about waste is that it's all relative to your sense of scarcity.

At least that's how a Wired magazine article by Chris Anderson titled Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity starts out. As someone who spends the majority of their time thinking about ways to waste less and help others do the same, I don't find that notion funny at all.

The point of the article is one that has been made before: due to the very low cost of entry in online media, the traditional business models are being shaken up. What was previously a traditional economy of scarcity is now one of abundance. This sounds eerily like the pre-dotcom bubble New Economy. The fundamentals of economics don't change, just like the laws of nature. Unlike natural laws, laws of economics are often made up by people, and later proven wrong.

Speaking of nature, the article's author seems to think that nature is wasteful. This puts him in opposition with great thinkers such as Aristotle who said,"Nature does nothing uselessly" and also the astronomer Johannes Kepler who said, "Nature uses as little as possible of anything." Nature is quite elegant, frugal, and beautiful. Waste is ugly.

On the other hand, Chris Anderson thinks that humans are uniquely NOT wasteful. That came as a surprise to me:

Our brains seem wired to resist waste, but we are relatively unique in nature for this. Mammals have the fewest offspring in the animal kingdom, and as a result we invest enormous time and care in protecting each one so that it can reach adulthood. The death of a single human is a tragedy, one that survivors sometimes never recover from, and we prize the individual life above all.

As a result, we have a very developed sense of the morality of waste. We feel bad about the unloved toy or the uneaten food. Sometimes this is for good reason, because we understand the greater social cost of profligacy, but often it's just because our mammalian brains are programmed that way.

I haven't heard of animals in the wild killing thousands of buffalo only to leave their carcasses wasting to rot on the plains, or cutting off shark's fins for soup and throwing back the shark to die, or polluting their own habitat or that of the animals that neighbor them in the interest of pursuits not essential to their survival. Yet humans do these things in abundance. Humans may have a morality of waste, but as far as I know, we are the only animals with morality, period. In my experience humans are often quite unaware of the waste around them unless they are faced with personal scarcity and hunger. That is one of the reasons the theme and the language of this article disturbs me. The author continues:

However, the rest of nature doesn't work like that. A bluefin tuna can release 10 million fertilized eggs in a spawning season. Perhaps 10 of them will hatch and make it to adulthood. A million die for every one that survives.

A chart in the article shows that it takes one million fertilized eggs from a blue fin tuna to result in one viable offspring, while for humans it is 1.26. The author doesn't explain what happens to the other 999,999 tuna eggs. I always thought that they were eaten by prey or died in other ways before maturing. If so, nature isn't wasting these eggs at all but rather using them as a resource: food for other fishes. Perhaps a study of biology will show that this is not waste, but a necessary birth population based on a yield factor.

In jumping from fish eggs to electronic entertainment, the author finds firmer ground:

What this boils down to is the difference between abundance- and scarcity-based business models. If you're controlling a scarce resource, like the prime-time broadcast schedule, you have to be discriminating.

Scarcity of a resource makes people frugal, and less likely to take chances.

But if you're tapping into an abundant resource, you can afford to take chances, since the cost of failure is so low.

Abundance allows you to fail with less risk. The author's meme that technology is too cheap to meter does not ring true to me because it does not take into account the total cost of manufacturing, operating, and disposing of this technology. However, the central idea of abundance versus scarcity has relevance to the notion of continuous improvement itself. If we say that "ideas are too cheap to meter" we can encourage more creativity and problem solving. Our capacity for creative thought and invention is one of the most underutilized and most abundant resources. We need to encounter scarcity before we begin to use it. Taiichi Ohno said, "Your wits don't work until you feel the squeeze."

Waste exits if there is a customer or consumer who values a resource. Waste exists not merely when a consumer feels a pang of guilt, but when a resource is not respected. An infinite resource may not have a recognized value, until it is missed. Those of us who live in parts of the world without a lot of sunlight appreciate the sun only after the summer months have passed into autumn and winter. Yet holistically, the sun is vitally important to our health and life. If we looked carefully enough the same is probably true of any resource. It may not be possible to waste an infinite resource, but in order to come into being all resources by definition consume something: energy, time, space - physically or in our heads.

The trouble with this notion that waste is relative to our sense of scarcity is that it allows us to be as wasteful as the most abundant and least conscious one or group of us who is able to dominate the discussion. That only works for those who have access to or are effectively able to exploit those resources. If by this human-centered definition, everyone had everything they needed in abundance, then would there be no more waste?

Even in the case of a resource such as internet broadcast bandwidth where this is practically true there is a lot of time being spent, possibly wasted, on creating information and uploaded to the internet. These consumes people's time to make and to watch. It consumes energy to power the servers, routers, computers and monitors. It is far from free. Viewed narrowly as the cost to broadcast a piece of video on the internet, for example, we can say that it is free. But there is a definite cost, and the jury is out how much lower or higher this cost is from the model of the past.

The keen awareness of waste and the recognition of waste as a bad thing help motivate us to improve our world around us. It is true that often when there is abundance there is a lack of a sense of urgency to change the status quo. While great art and cultures have flourished under civilizations enjoying abundance, the lack of motivation towards improvement has often led to decadence and decline.

The funny thing about waste is that it's everywhere if you only look, but truly not there if you don't. Without human perceptions of time, space, value and morality there is no such thing as waste. But alas, we exist, and waste is with us. The French poet Baudelaire left us with the words, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Let's not let our thinking about abundance be the equivalent of waste's greatest trick.

By Jon Miller - June 23, 2009 8:33 PM

Agile Kanban Journal: Kaizens on Day 1

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:14:27 -0800

Kaizen is all about making small changes persistently every day and keeping the ones that turn out to be for the better. And so it is that with a little help from friends my agile kanban board evolves on the first day of its use. Last week I dumped all of my major projects and near-term tasks onto a simple erasable magnet board. Today I started my day, after taking care of a few e-mails and other interruptions, by looking at the right side of the agile kanban board, and working through the tasks from right to left. It felt like a fairly successful day.

The far right column is now simply "Delegated to". There were two tiles in the header previously, but one will suffice. The new rule is that there is no limit to the number of tiles that can be placed here. Theoretically, with 10-minutes per follow-up e-mail per day the limit is around 50 items per 500 minute work day, but in reality the space won't fit more than 7 in one column, 14 if doubled up, with very little space for notes on the board itself. I will be perfectly happy to dedicate more space on the board to delegated tasks: the day when all 20 items are in that column will be the day when I have successfully worked myself out of a job.

Right away I saw the need for some prioritization and categorization system. But I din't have all day to figure this out. Taking David J Anderson's advice, I kept it simple. I used materials close at hand: color white board markers. There are three categories of tasks on the board. The green indicates near or mid-term revenue-generating tasks. The blue indicate long-term or company-building tasks. The red are any of the above which are urgent or overdue. This allows me to always work on the red things first, then the green, then the blue. There is a risk that I will never get to the blue tasks, granted. We shall see.

I spent no more than 4 hours working the items on this board today. As a result, there were:

Movers = 3 (green, red x2); Items done = 2 (green, red); New items = 1 (blue)

So in terms of net reduction of tiles on the board, my output for the day was two. Who knows if that is good or bad, but it's a provisional standard. There were quite a few small changes made during the day as I was learning to use this agile kanban method.

The limit of all WIP items on the board is 20. The only reason for this is that the two dry erase panels were cut into a total of 24 pieces, and there are 4 used as headers for the columns. This is somewhat arbitrary but we need to start somewhere. It will take a few months of experimentation and measuring the trend of the lead times to complete items in order to see whether the number of tiles has an effect either way. Total allowable work in process in the second column from the left by the same name has now been reduced from 4 to 3, a 25% improvement! But seriously, having room below the top three items was just a way to cheat, to let things jump the queue to allow for cherry-picking and more task-switching. So I nixed that.

Limiting it to 3 pieces of WIP, and taking John Santomer's advice on marking the dates directly on the tiles has freed up room to the right of the tiles in the Work in Process column. This has proven useful as an area for working notes. It is used to break down the project (tiles) into smaller tasks. In fact what I call Work Items on the left column are all projects of some size and any single one could be managed through a traditional 3-column Scheduled-Working-Done agile kanban task board.

Summary of kaizens to my agile kanban board on day 1:

Color-coded prioritization scheme in trial. If these categories survive, the next step is to set a desired output level for each and then set limits for each one based on some balanced measurement of productivity and lead time.

Tiles now include start dates. At such times that they are completed, that date will be written below and the elapsed time recorded in a document TBD.

Work in process section redesigned, There are now three sections to limit WIP to 3 and to create space for writing task details.

Total cash spent on implementing these ideas: zero

I will try this out for a few more days and report new findings. Please keep the suggestions and questions coming. It has been very helpful so far.

By Jon Miller - June 22, 2009 5:14 PM

Trying Out My Agile Kanban Board

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:02:28 -0800

One of the biggest challenges of doing kaizen in office work is to make the work itself visible so that waste can be clearly identified. Much of the time spent in office work is finding files or information, switching between tasks, finding one's place after an interruption, or deciding what to do next in the face of too much WIP. None of that is true work. We could argue that it is waste. The software development community has taken the idea of using kanban to limit WIP in an interesting direction. I am still a bit at a loss as to what to call the kanban boards used in Agile and other software development environments, since to me kanban has so much other meaning. Until instructed otherwise by a more senior member of the community, i will call them Agile kanban

Inspired by the examples I've found on the internet, and perennially challenged by a task board that is full and growing, I decided to give Agile kanban a try. I have a nice 48 inch wide magnetic whiteboard which until today was just used to write down tasks, attach documents by magnet, and otherwise manage my WIP. The only rules were that I would add things to the board and look at it each day. Being large and heavy, it doesn't travel well so when on the road the key items for the week go with me in my Moleskine. Inevitably, the list in the Moleskine grows rather than shrinks by the end of the trip.

I bought and cut up dry erase tiles, 12 inch x 12 inch, available in a 2 pack fo r$12.99. On the foam backing I attached business card-sized adhesive magnets. This freed me from paper, and also gave me the ability to move these tiles around on the board as needed simply by picking them up and attaching them magnetically within another column.

This is a brand new experiment so the basic idea is to limit WIP. My inbox was already full to bursting, so before anything further is added to my to-do list, I will need to move them towards the right into "work in progress" or to "delegated". When things are done, they will come off of the board and the tile will be erased for reuse. It's also clear at a glance that I am not delegating enough, and this is a combination of improvements needed in communication with the team, making sure people have the skills needed to take tasks off of my board, and making a habit to follow up each day. The blue arrow on the top right of the board is a reminder for me to start each day by following up and / or delegating items to others, and then proceed to the "waiting for" section to see if I can get anything unstuck and off of the board, then onto the actual work of the day. When there is a gap above the blue line, another task can be added. I am permitting myself to multi-task between 3 projects at any one time at this point.

The diagonal lines are there mostly to prevent me from cheating and adding more tiles to that space, and for now also show the "started / completed" dates to give an idea of how long something has been in work. The items below the blue line represent quick "do today" items and we will have to see how many are allowed there each day. Not everything will make it to this board, since making telephone calls or answering questions are not development tasks that belong on an Agile kanban board.

Open questions and remaining issues to be resolved in using this new Agile kanban board:

Defining the unit of work. Since this is brand new I did not make an attempt to categorize items by size or complexity. They are certainly not all equal. A few slow movers could prevent smaller projects from getting done, and this is real life. Hopefully this visualization will help projects move along quicker and the unit of work question will be less important. It's just blue electrical tape so if changes are needed to this board to accommodate separate streams by size of task, it will be easy.

Defining the limit of WIP. The limit set currently is arbitrary. This will have to be tested. WIP of one seems unreasonable due to the interrelationship between projects and the anecdotal benefit of capturing ideas and using the learning in one development project in another. This requires switching between projects and some loss of time, but I think this loss is the price of learning.

Measurement of performance. I have no good benchmark of personal productivity in the development area. This is something I will need to develop and tie to the volume and speed at which these tiles are being turned, or flowed through the Agile kanban process.

I haven't done a lot of reading on this and though it was best to try it since I'm guessing that the development work I do differs quite a bit from software development. If you are a a veteran at agile kanban compared to me, please let me know if you have any hints or key points to making this work.

By Jon Miller - June 19, 2009 12:02 PM

The Amazing Adventures of Kanban

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:57:44 -0800

Kanban was born nearly 60 years ago. It's creator, Taiichi Ohno, intended kanban to combat the evil overlord Overproduction, Mother of All Wastes and her Minions of WIP. The battle is far from won. During those six decades kanban has been through some amazing adventures.

Kanban Gains Superpowers

Pokayoke has the power to prevent mistakes. Jiodka frees people to run machines intelligently, rather than be run by them. Heijunka has the power to take choppy demand and smooth it out. Kaizen has the power to make infinite small improvements. All of these players and their many friends bring order and harmony to a production system. Yet one stands above them all: kanban.

Kanban was endowed with three major powers. First is the the power to instruct the production of goods. Within the Toyota Production System and its imitators, only the kanban has the power to cause things to be made. Second is the power to instruct the movement of goods. Like its first power, kanban can cause things to be moved. Third and perhaps most important, kanban can motivate people towards continuous improvement by reducing its own size. Within a kanban system, the less kanban there is, the more improvement is needed. Like a true hero, the power of kanban increases as it diminishes its own presence. Amazing.

Kanban vs. the Communists

From the beginning, the powers of kanban were awesome. Overproduction was stopped in its tracks, Work In Process (WIP) was slashed, and various hidden wastes were exposed and removed through continuous improvement. Almost immediately kanban extended its reach outside of Toyota, the enterprise within which it was born, to its suppliers.

But there was no way that such drastic action would go unnoticed in Japan, the Land of Wa (harmony). A Japanese communist party member accused Toyota of using kanban to make unreasonable demands on suppliers to deliver products right away. Taiichi Ohno was summoned to the Japanese parliament to testify in defense of Toyota's use of the cards to order suppliers to make deliveries of parts. In the end, the Japanese equivalent of the Fair Trade Commission instructed OEMs to limit the fluctuation of actual monthly orders to suppliers by no more than 10% from the firm monthly orders placed in advance.

Perhaps kanban was becoming too powerful. The government needed step in to curb kanban's powers, or at least insure they were always used for good. It was a lesson learned. None of the others, not pokayoke, not jidoka, no tkaizen have been called to testify in front of the government, or to face down the communists.

Kanban: the Fickle Hero

But for all its powers kanban was at times fickle. To kanban, jidoka, SMED and pokayoke were just sidekicks, enablers. Kanban treated both 5S and Visual Controls as givens rather than equals. Kaizen may be an equal partner to kanban, but in private kanban lorded over kaizen because of its power to motivate others to improve. While these various players toiled away at making improvements and building systems, kanban expected that their work was all foundation building for the kanban system. Kanban never said a word of thanks, nor asked for one.

Like a temperamental artist who wants just the right type of bottled water and sandwiches in his dressing room, kanban said "I will only work for you if once the workplace is clean and visually organized, quality is reliable, lot sizes are small and a logistics system is in place to support me." Kanban would not do the heavy lifting for you. Kanban would let you know when you're failing, but may not always come to the rescue. Kanban is a powerful but fickle hero, relied on at your own risk.

Kanban on the Global Stage

In the 1980s Taiichi Ohno was invited to the USA to speak about the Toyota Production System. Unfortunately the organizers confused kanban, the most noticeable feature of TPS, for the system itself. Kanban stole the show, overshadowing the shadowing even the system it was designed to enable. This was not what its creator Taiichi Ohno intended.

As kanban took the global stage with hubris, inevitably its powers were misunderstood or misdirected. Without the protection of the limits on demand signal fluctuation, OEMs abused suppliers with what can be best described as quasi-kanban. Kanban saw its name sullied by impostors and imitators. Even when kanban was called to use its powers, too often it was pressed into service without the support of its friends pokayoke, SMED, heijunka, visual controls and 5S. Even when they were nearby, they were prevented from working as a team.

Kanban of 1,000 Disguises

Kanban's powers were weakened as much was lost in translation. In order to effectively combat overproduction in its new and vastly diverging environments, kanban adopted a thousand disguises. Some were more effective than others. Each time kanban answered the call to battle overproduction, it seemed it was in a different form: a lamp, a card, a square on the floor, a box, a cart.

Kanban continues to be misunderstood even today, with many unsure of which is the true face of kanban. But the battles rages on against the evils of overproduction.

Kanban and the Builders of Invisible WIP

Early in the 21st century, kanban found an unexpected band of allies. These people were prolific builders of invisible but deadly WIP. They were software developers. Appearing not as information traveling with the manufactured work product itself but rather represented on a task board, kanban works tirelessly to control even the invisible WIP of lines of code.

Once again, kanban added a new form to its one thousand disguises in order to combat overproduction in on a new battlefield.

Yes We Kanban

Today Kanban finds itself in an uneasy but increasingly important alliance with the Coders through the Limited WIP Society. Flying the banner of kanban's creator and genius production system designer Taiichi Ohno, kanban has found a common aim with this league of mad scientists: to ultimately defeat WIP and it's overlord Overproduction.

How much progress will kanban's alter-ego of Agile Kanban make in exercising its three superpowers across the software development world? Only time will tell.

Kanban Meets Dr. Bahri the Lean Dentist

Kanban may have met its match in Dr. Bahri, the pioneering practitioner of lean dentistry. Dr. Bahri has applied the powers of kanban to instruct the work that dentists and dental hygienists do, to instruct the movement of patients, and to motivate continuous improvement. Wouldn't it be ironic if six decades into an amazing career, kanban goes for some dental work and finds the power of kanban applied to fixing its teeth?

The villains of overproduction, push and WIP never sleep. The amazing adventures of kanban continue...

By Jon Miller - June 17, 2009 12:57 PM

There is No Such Thing as Wasteful Work

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:33:31 -0800

I read an interesting article today in the Japanese paper nihon keizai shimbun. The topic was how white collar businesses men in Japan are adapting the Toyota Production System, or what we would call lean thinking, to their work. The conclusion is that at the level of principles and concepts, TPS applies just as well to non-manufacturing work as it does to improving how we make things. The important thing is to keep in mind not the tools but the underlying philosophies and behaviors that result in the so-called tools: the deliberately designed systems and processes that make up a lean workplace.

What are these principles and philosophies? Focus on the customer, improvement never ends, make problems visible, go see for yourself, involve everyone and their ideas, remove waste from all processes, and so forth. These ideas apply equally well to all situations. The one thing I took away from this particular article was a quote by Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe during a recent speech:

"There is no such thing as wasteful work in this world. It is either one or the other: work or waste."

On the one hand this may seem obvious. On the other hand, we spend a lot of time talking about type 1 or type 2 waste and debating "is it non value added or is it waste?" Even the term "value added work" seems redundant when "work" as defined by Mr. Watanabe above implies value, or at least "not waste". Agreeing on the definitions of waste and work is especially important when improving white collar work because the work itself is less visible than manufacturing. Realizing who our customers are, understanding what things we do which customers value, and then designing how we spend our time in minimizing waste and maximizing work (value) is the essence of good business in any business, by any name. By Jon Miller - June 16, 2009 1:33 PM

Free Gemba Academy Video: The 7 Deadly Wastes

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:25:27 -0800

It has now been three months since we launched Gemba Academy - the online learning center for continuous improvement. Each month we add new videos, quizzes, self-study materials and forum discussions. The School of Lean is currently available with 33 videos, or more than 7 hours of viewing plus many more hours of reading and self-test quizzes.

In addition to the Introduction to Lean, the 10 Commandments of Improvement, 5S Workplace Productivity and Transforming Your Value Streams courses we have now added nine videos in The 7 Deadly Wastes set. Based on customer feedback, these videos feature actual factory scenes as examples of each of the 7 types of waste.

Please click the triangle above to view the free 7 wastes overview video.

As we continue to add more videos on lean topics we will release the School of Project Management set of videos very shortly. For updates and to gain full access to all free videos, please visit www.GembaAcademy.com and sign up to receive our newsletter.

By Jon Miller - June 11, 2009 10:25 AM

Review of Follow the Learner by Dr. Sami Bahri, DDS

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:49:06 -0800

Follow the Learner: The Role of a Leader in Creating a Lean Culture by Dr. Sami Bahri, DDS is the best book on the subject of leadership and lean I have read in a long time. Written as a very personal account of the development of teh Bahri Dental Group into a lean learning organization, the 88 page booklet offers examples, insights and practical advice that applies to the small businessperson as well as large company leader.

In Part I: Creating a Lean Practice, Dr. Bahri shares his story, the 24-year journey of learning which began with the simple thought about his dentistry practice, "I wonder if other people have found a better way to do it?" With the aim of reducing patient waiting time, Dr. Bahri embarked on a personal learning journey, fearlessly tackling lean tools such as takt time, kanban, heijunka, changeover reduction and pioneering their application to dentistry. During this process, he learns as many of us have:

More important than mastering the tools, we were learning how to think as a team about our daily work.

As his understanding of the lean system grew, Dr. Bahri realized that "a dental practice is not unlike a factory" and pursued one-patient flow, as he puts it providing our patients with the correct treatment they need, when they need it, in the right quantity that they need it, while eliminating anything that interrupts or delays this flow. Dr. Bahri credits this focus on one-piece flow as the beginning of real improvement in his business.

The photos and illustrations within Part I of this book are presented neatly, with a summary at chapter end of lean manufacturing concepts and their dental practice equivalents. The first 34 pages of the book by themselves are an excellent introduction to lean. These pages dive right into the thick of Dr. Bahri & team's lean dental practice but never strays too deeply into jargon to leave the beginner unsure of what they are reading.

In Part II: Leading the Transformation there are several key lessons within its 10 brief pages. Dr. Bahri writes about the importance of establishing the proper mindset, agreeing on base definitions with his team, self-study as a leader to gain sufficiently deep understanding to lead the change, and the importance of a collaborative approach to making change happen. Thinking things through with his staffed helped Dr. Bahri because, "I knew they saw opportunities for improvement in our work that I could not always see." It takes humility for a leader to ask, truly listen, and then respect the ideas of subordinates. For the leader who is a learner this is easier.

The most important quote in the book for me as I constantly face the doubts and challenges from creative and non-manufacturing people on the applicability of process discipline to their work was when Dr. Bahri wrote:

Implementation essentially means asking your employees to continually change their lives at work, and be happy about it. Lean has given me the practical tool that I needed to keep myself and my staff constantly intellectually stimulated.

In Part III: Discovering the Principles of Lean Leadership spends nearly half of the book sharing his personal learning journey including the people, books and ideas that influenced him. These are all presented concisely enough to invite the reader to further self-study and learning. Worth noting is the space Dr. Bahri commits to describing his personal approach to respect for people and how he puts this into practice.

Early in the book, Dr. Bahri writes:

Selflessly helping each other when needed, in the amount needed, is at the heart of just-in-time.

This small book is packed with value and will surely help the reader in understanding lean, how to communicate it, how to affect change as a leader and how to grow personally through the process. It's just right.

Follow the Learning is available for purchase from the Lean Enterprise Institute.

By Jon Miller - June 10, 2009 11:49 AM

How to Engage People in Kaizen

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:41:08 -0800

As always, thank you for your questions, comments and improvement suggestions. Today one of our readers shared via email a challenge with getting people engaged in kaizen. Whether it is an improvement suggestion system, a software system to track customer inquiries or a new forum for peer-to-peer communication, the success of any good idea is 95% dependent on how engaged people are with it and not the quality of the idea itself. For the people who have caught the kaizen bug it can be particularly frustrating to face people who cannot see that the solution to their problems is right in front of them for the taking. However, part of the problem in gaining full engagement from people can be due to the passion and conviction that the promoters of kaizen have. Sometimes we need to back off and make some space. Just as world class material and information flow systems are triggered by pull and not push, the flow of kaizen ideas and actions should be based on pull.

Find a way to make it their idea. There is a saying "people support what they create" and this is very true. When people generate or help to develop an idea they are more likely to be engaged and to support it. Many times the kaizen leader has a great idea, or sees a golden opportunity to apply a textbook lean concept to a process. The people working in that process may not see it that way. Rather than fight over an idea, grapple with resistance and cause people to disengage from kaizen it is best to clarify and agree on the problem and ask them for ideas. Even if it is 30% wrong, let them try it.

I remember one instance when the veteran mechanic in an aerospace firm was so used to not having their idea heard that it took him some time to realize that we were actually listening to them. When we said, "OK, let's try your idea" they had to stop arguing, and there was a slightly comical and awkward moment when he nearly argued with us against his own idea.

Frame all actions as experiments and not permanent or irreversible changes This allows people to think that they are not really changing something, only "trying it". In fact if the method is demonstrably better, it may become the new way. It is not meant as a trick but rather a reassurance that we will take people's input each step along the way. The short path of kaizen is to "blitz" or make changes so fast that there is no time for resistance. While this may look exciting on a Friday afternoon, the feeling doesn't always survive Monday. The long path is a path built on a series of experiments. Different situations call for both approaches.

When we told the mechanic in the example above, "Try it. If the kaizen doesn't work, we can immediately put it back to the way it was" they were suspicious but saw that there was no choice but to give their idea a try. The result was not half bad, and he liked part of the change and did not want it put back to the old way. Soon he was taking the lead in making small changes that were not completely in line with the lean concept but were better than before. We got the ball rolling. We spent some time praising their 17% productivity improvement and then challenged them to 50% improvement. It was not long until this person was asking his colleagues about lean methods others were using to get to 50% improvement.

Be open to admitting you are wrong. Many kaizen leaders are so used to fighting to make positive changes that we become fighters. Even when we are wrong, we may be fighting out of habit. Even when we are right, sometimes it is good to let the other side win a few. Integrity and credibility require us to do what is in the best interest of the customer and the people who do the work, not necessarily what the textbook tells us or what we learned in class or online. Only after being right a time or two (the experiment worked), admitting that we were wrong, and being open to the ideas of others do you earn the respect to say "now let's try it my way".

Get on the same side of the problem. If possible this is really the first place to start. However people often take "trying to get on the same side of the problem" to mean "pull the other to my side" and that does not work unless the other side uncrosses their arms first. So it is best to try some things first together to demonstrate that you are on their side, or even better that both of you are on the customer's side, and then expand on the common ground. It is really not necessary to fight if both sides of the argument are trying to solve the same issue, be it cost, safety, quality, or delivery. It is just a question of not arguing about how, but of trying something.

Break the task into smaller ones. When all of the above is done in some cases there may still be no action. Or there may be good initial engagement by the people directly involved in the kaizen, but less as the managers and support groups are asked to implement and complete the system changes needed to make the new method sustainable. Rather than insist that they give resources towards a major project, we may simply need to ask these people "What can you do today?" and the answer may be something extremely small. Thank people for the smallest task they perform towards kaizen. Ask this question every day. Slowly but inevitably you will make progress towards implementing the changes you need, both physically and in the culture. You will also gain a reputation for persistence, and eventually a measure of respect.

None of the above may work for you. Who knows? People are unpredictable. You will have to experiment. I am sure there is at least some small part of it that you can test today.

By Jon Miller - June 9, 2009 12:41 AM