VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [29]
“Before we get into all that, let me tell you why I personally think that Lean Six Sigma is meaningful. Lean, in particular, is about always looking for the better way. I’m sure that everyone here has at one time or another looked at the way things are being done – in the Oakton plant, or out in the community, or even in your own home – and wondered, ‘Why are we doing it this way? It’s dumb! It’s wasteful! It doesn’t make sense!’ Or, as a customer, you buy something and you pay good money, probably more than you feel you ought to pay, and yet this thing you’ve bought is really not the way you want it. And if you dare to question the way things are done, you typically get an answer like, ‘We’ve always done it this way,’ or ‘That’s just the way it is,’ or maybe even, ‘We have to do it this way; it’s policy; it’s regulation; it’s the law.’ Whatever.
“Well, the Lean way of thinking is a challenge to all of that. Lean is about never being completely satisfied with the status quo. It’s about continuous improvement. It’s about always seeking the better way to do things. It’s about identifying waste and eliminating it – or at least minimizing waste. Right now you probably think of waste as whatever is in the wastebasket. As trash, or scrap.
“But waste takes many forms – many of which are invisible to us. We just don’t see them. A big stack of materials just sitting, sometimes for weeks or months, that is waste – not the materials themselves, but the fact that they are just sitting in a warehouse. The waiting is the waste, because there is money tied up in those materials, and we have to ask the question, why are there so many items in this pile made so far ahead of when they are needed?
“Lean is about delivering to the customer – be that customer the final customer, like a consumer in a grocery story, or be that customer the next workstation on the plant floor – delivering exactly what that customer needs and wants, right when the customer needs or wants it, and passing along nothing that the customer does not value.
“And we do that by getting rid of – or by not creating – the non-essential. What do you have after the nonessential has been stripped away? You have … the essential. You have the essence. You have the essential, perfect thing delivered at the perfect moment for the perfect price. That does not happen often enough in our world. Yet that is what we are going to strive for here at Oakton and throughout Hi-T Composites.”
Off to the side, Amy Cieolara, watching Wayne pace and gesture before the assembly, thought to herself, Wow, he’s good.
And in the back of the cafeteria, Murphy Maguire nudged Jayro Pepps and whispered, “It’s worse than I thought.”
“What’s the matter?” Jayro asked.
“He’s an eye-dealist,” Murphy said from the corner of his mouth. “Look out.”
In his early childhood, Wayne had grown up in Fall River, Massachusetts, as the son of Edmundo Reis, an unskilled laborer of Portuguese descent who was quite intelligent despite having dropped out of high school in order to support his family, which at age seventeen was just beginning. Edmundo – Ed – had a passion for John Wayne movies, hence his insistence on the given name for his first son. After struggling a few years following Wayne’s birth, Ed got a good job in a factory that made brass hardware.
But when Wayne was eight years old, the brass factory closed and his dad lost his job. Ed got another job, this time at a plant in Boston that made printed circuit boards. The family lived in what the locals called an “Irish battleship,” a three-floor house on the fringes of South Boston. And to better fit in with the neighbors, Ed changed the spelling of the family name to the anglicized “Reese.” For Wayne, the new spelling didn’t help much; every day, it seemed, was a new fistfight as the kids he went to school with showed him that he, being an outsider, was nobody, or worse. After a couple of years, though, and a few lessons in karate, he showed them otherwise.
At the time, the future of printed circuit boards seemed