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Most Lean journeys begin with Toyota. That is also, in Dan Markovitz's argument, why most of them fail.
The problem is not that Toyota is a bad role model. The problem is that Toyota is an absurd role model for an organization that does not yet have an improvement culture. Toyota has been refining its system for more than sixty years. Benchmarking your hospital, bank, or paper mill against Toyota is the operational equivalent of someone who has never been to a gym trying to follow Michael Phelps's training plan. You will get hurt, you will get frustrated, and you will quit -- not because the methodology is wrong, but because you picked an impossible reference point.
This session is about the alternative. Markovitz makes the case that the right reference point for most organizations is not the world's best athlete but a person trying to become fit -- starting small, embedding new habits into daily life, building capacity gradually, and accepting that the first month does not look like the third year. His book "Building the Fit Organization" translates Lean into the language of physical fitness, deliberately stripping out the Toyota stories, the Japanese vocabulary, and the jargon that he believes makes Lean inaccessible to the people who most need it.
The fitness metaphor is not a clever framing device pasted on top of standard Lean content. It is the argument. Every one of the six principles he walks through is built on the analogy, and the analogy carries operational weight. When you ask "how should we embed improvement into daily work," the fitness comparison gives you a usable answer. When you ask "how do we get senior leaders to engage," the comparison gives you Bill Belichick instead of Taiichi Ohno -- which, for most American executives, is the difference between a relatable example and a culturally distant one.
What follows is a working tour of the six principles, with the stories and examples Markovitz uses to make each one concrete.
Dan Markovitz is founder of Markovitz Consulting, which helps organizations apply Lean principles to knowledge work. He has worked with the New York City Department of Health, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, W.L. Gore & Associates, Abbott Vascular, and CamelBak. He is a faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute and teaches at Stanford University Continuing Studies and Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business. His first book, "A Factory of One," received a Shingo Research Award in 2013. He lived in Japan for four years, is fluent in Japanese, and holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
The gym is busiest on January 2nd. Within two weeks, attendance collapses back to baseline. Markovitz uses this every-year pattern to make a structural point about how most companies treat Lean: they show up once a quarter for a Kaizen event, then go three weeks doing nothing different, and wonder why nothing sticks.
Real fitness is not built at the gym four times a year. It is built by biking to work twice a week, taking the stairs, walking to the grocery store -- behaviors woven into the fabric of daily life. Improvement works the same way. An organization that does twelve Kaizen events a year and otherwise operates as it always has is the corporate equivalent of the January resolution-maker. The events produce visible results during the event week, and then the pattern reverts.
He showed a slide of a cereal box that has become a small internet curiosity: a child whose suggestion is to have Frosted Flakes four times a day -- breakfast, after school, with dinner, and before bed. The joke is also the point. The cereal has been embedded into the child's daily routine in a way that improvement work, in most organizations, never is.
One concrete starting move he recommends: get rid of the suggestion box. He noted that Mark had pointed out to him a year earlier that if you Google "suggestion box," every image that comes back is a box with a lock on it -- as if employee ideas were dangerous animals that need to be caged. A wall-mounted Kaizen board with backlog, in-progress, and completed columns sends the opposite signal. He showed an example from Catholic Charities in Fort Worth: a simple board, visible to everyone, communicating that improvement is part of how the place operates rather than an episodic activity managed by a committee somewhere.
The third-party logistics company he featured had taken this further, with a "Wall of Fame" of completed improvements running through their warehouse. Walking through that facility, he said, you understand that this is a serious commitment, not a poster on a break-room wall.
The argument for starting small is not motivational -- it is neurological. Markovitz cited Bob Maurer, the UCLA psychologist who wrote "One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way." Maurer's research shows that ambitious goals activate the amygdala -- the fight-or-flight response. Tell an obese smoker they need to lose thirty pounds and start going to the gym daily, and they freeze. Tell them to walk for one minute a day while watching TV, and they can do that. Next week, two minutes. The week after, three. Within a year, you have a different person.
The corporate equivalent is the language of "moving the needle." Every leader wants improvement work to move the needle. Markovitz argues this language is one of the most consistent causes of Lean program failure. When you tell people their improvement ideas have to be transformative, you trigger the same freeze response. People stop bringing forward the small daily observations that compound into real change, because the small observations don't feel big enough to qualify.
He used Hydro Flask as the counter-example. The Oregon company that makes insulated beverage flasks started their improvement journey by trying to figure out why the coffee pot kept running out. Not a strategically critical problem. But solving it taught them PDSA, gave them a small win, and let them say "that was kind of fun -- let's do something else." That is how improvement muscle gets built. An Olympic weightlifter did not start with the full bar loaded. A marathon runner did not start with a thirty-five-kilometer run. They started with a single mile.
The patron saint of this principle is Paul Akers, CEO of FastCap and author of "2 Second Lean." His challenge to his team is simple: do your job today two seconds faster than yesterday. There is nothing frightening about two seconds. Almost anyone can find two seconds to save somewhere in their workflow. Compound that day after day, week after week, and you end up with an organization that operates fundamentally differently a year later -- without ever having scared anyone.
The fitness analog Markovitz uses here is the difference between building fitness and losing weight. Some people genuinely need to lose weight. But the logical extension of losing weight as a goal is anorexia. The fashion-model body is not a fit body, regardless of how successful the model is in their industry.
Organizations that pursue Lean primarily to cut costs end up at the corporate equivalent of anorexia. The case study he used was Chainsaw Al Dunlap, who in the 1980s and 1990s built a reputation for slashing costs at a series of companies before arriving at his final stop, Sunbeam. He cut staff by more than half, laid off six thousand workers, pruned the product line, and watched the share price spike. Five years later, Sunbeam was bankrupt. Cutting costs had improved no underlying capability.
McKinsey research that Markovitz cited supports the broader pattern: only about ten percent of cost reduction programs sustain their results past three years. Companies cut travel, eliminate catered lunches, stop bringing donuts to meetings, lay off staff, and ask the survivors to do the work of their departed colleagues. The crisis passes, the catered lunches creep back, the survivors burn out, and the laid-off positions get refilled. Nothing was learned. No capability was added.
The contrast is what value creation looks like in practice. He pointed to a nurse manager at Franciscan St. Francis Healthcare in Indianapolis who initially struggled with Lean because she thought she was supposed to be generating cost-reduction ideas and could not think of any. When the framing shifted -- Kaizen is about saving time, making work easier, improving patient care -- she suddenly had a long list of ideas. The framing matters because the framing determines what people see.
Several examples ran through this section:
Wild Things Gear, an outdoor apparel company, lets customers design their own jackets -- fabric, color, hood, cuffs, even which side the chest pocket is on. Most outdoor gear companies put chest pockets on the left because 85 percent of the population is right-handed. Ed Schmults, the president, asked why the other 15 percent should not get the same convenience. Sales went up. Closeouts dropped from around 40 percent to around 5 percent, which is unheard of in that industry. Manufacturing stayed in the United States.
Jumbo, a Dutch supermarket chain, asked why customers should have to walk a full lap of the store to buy ingredients for a single meal. They started merchandising entire meal sets together -- ingredients, recipe card, and a photo of the finished dish in the middle of the store. Sales went up because shopping got easier.
Bespoke Bicycles in London sells bikes that run from £3,000 to £15,000 and competes on services around the bike, not just the bike itself. They use motion-capture sensors on shoulder, hip, thigh, and knee to fit the bike precisely to the rider, and they run a separate program identifying the exercises a rider needs to do to avoid injury. The bike is the entry point; the value is in the ongoing relationship.
A children's hospital in Texas facing a sixteen-week MRI wait time and pressure to cut imaging staff reworked the process instead. Wait times dropped to two weeks, urgent cases got same-day or next-day appointments, and the additional throughput generated $5 million in annual revenue without adding staff.
Markovitz closed this section with a practical suggestion: build process-oriented KPIs rather than purely financial ones. HR can measure the percentage of new hires whose computer, passwords, and workspace are actually ready on day one. Product development can measure time from concept to first prototype. Customer service can measure renewal rate. Finance can measure the percentage of receivables under 90 days. None of those are revenue metrics, but every one of them, improved over time, drives revenue as a downstream effect.
If you were training for a marathon, an Olympic powerlifting event, and the CrossFit Games at the same time, you would not use the same training plan for all three. The capabilities are different. The events are different. The training has to match.
Most organizations are designed the opposite way. They have functional silos -- design, engineering, production, sales, finance -- and they push every product for every customer through the same silos using the same procedures. That works if all your customers want the same thing. If they do not, you are forcing customers with different needs into the same standardized track.
The Aluminum Trailer Company example was the clearest. Steve Brenneman, the president, broke his customer base into three streams. Stream one was customers buying off-the-shelf trailers. Stream two was customers wanting minor customization. Stream three was customers wanting "snowflakes" -- fully custom designs like mobile emergency command centers or police SWAT trailers. Then he restructured his team to match: each stream got its own coordinator, salesperson, designer, and engineer working in a single room. Lead time on custom orders dropped from seven weeks to two. The communication problems that had previously sent emails ricocheting up and down two hundred yards of office space disappeared because the right people were now sitting at the same table.
Markovitz used his own work history at ASICS to illustrate the same principle in a different context. As a young employee, he became the de facto value stream manager for specialty running and triathlon stores -- small independent shops with terrible credit and unpredictable buying patterns, but with loyal customers willing to pay full price. The big chains like Foot Locker would discount any new shoe by five dollars the moment it arrived, which the specialty shops could not afford to match.
So ASICS built a different system for them. A dedicated shoe bank reserved inventory of the top two models in core sizes (men's 9, 10, 11; women's 7, 8, 9) for fill-in orders. Customer service calls from specialty shops went to a dedicated number staffed by the best agents rather than into the general queue. And new shoes arrived in specialty stores two weeks before the big chains got them, giving the smaller stores a window to sell at full price before discounting started elsewhere. None of those changes were possible inside a functional-silo structure. They required organizing around the customer type.
The diagnostic question, in his framing, is not "how is our department performing" but "what does this customer actually need from us, and is our structure designed to deliver it?" A credit department obsessed with reducing days sales outstanding may be hurting customers who need different payment terms to function as customers at all. A sales team pushing to hit the quarter may be shoveling work out the door that creates downstream chaos in manufacturing and logistics. Horizontal thinking starts by asking who the work is for.
The standard image of standard work is a one-page document next to a workstation showing the right way to perform a repetitive task. Markovitz showed exactly that example -- a customer service team that had documented standard procedures for handling shipping questions, written in the language of the people doing the work ("the customer service rep is not here -- how do I process and key an invoice on that account?"). The phrasing matters because standard work written by engineers in the language of engineers tends to sit unused on a shelf.
But the more interesting examples were higher up the organization. James Hereford, then COO of Stanford Health Care, has a standard work board in his office covering daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly activities. Each item is tracked with a red or green magnet showing whether he completed it. The board cascades down to his direct reports, each of whom has their own version. JD Machine in Salt Lake City uses a similar board on the shop floor: rows for supervisors, columns for the days of the week, color-coded cards showing whether each supervisor covered required topics with their team. Walking past the board, you can see immediately whether the routine work of leadership got done.
The argument for leader standard work is partly about discipline and partly about cognition. Markovitz cited Sheena Iyengar's research on choice (her book is "The Art of Choosing") showing that too many options paralyze decision-making, and the related concept of decision fatigue. He mentioned a Vanity Fair article on President Obama in which Obama explained that he wore only blue and gray suits and only a small set of ties: "I've got so many decisions to make during the day -- the last thing I need is to fatigue myself figuring out what I'm wearing." Reducing low-value decisions preserves capacity for high-value ones.
Leader standard work does the same thing for executives. It removes the question of what to do first this morning. It ensures that the gemba walk happens, the metrics get reviewed, the coaching session with the direct report does not get bumped for a sixth straight week. As Hereford put it, it keeps him from getting bogged down in trivia. The Simpsons, Markovitz added, called this problem out two decades ago in an episode about too many choices making shopping a baffling ordeal -- which was good enough that you did not actually need a Stanford PhD to publish a paper on it.
Every gym is full of mirrors. They are not there for vanity. They are there because if you are doing a squat with two hundred pounds on your back and you are in the wrong position, you will hurt yourself. The mirror is real-time feedback that lets you correct before damage happens. The same logic now applies outside the gym: Fitbits, Apple Watches, Nike Fuel bands, jawbone wearables, GPS running watches -- all of them exist because feedback while you are moving is more useful than feedback after the fact.
Most offices have the opposite condition. People sit in cubicles staring at screens, and there is no way to tell whether the work is ahead, behind, on quality, or off the rails. The only feedback arrives in monthly reports, by which point any correction is far too late.
Markovitz worked through several examples of what real-time feedback looks like once it is built. A golf club manufacturer with a color-coded board showing today's and tomorrow's work, so the team knows immediately whether they are ahead or behind. An accounts-payable team where Evelyn's and Sue's invoices are broken out in two-hour buckets so anyone walking by can see whether processing is on schedule. ThedaCare's education team tracking every task for an internal training event with a date by which it must be done -- red dots flagging anything missed.
Then there is visual management as a signal in itself. The green sash worn by nurses at Kaiser Permanente and other hospitals while dispensing medication is one of the cleanest examples. The sash means "do not interrupt -- I am doing something where a question I cannot ignore could cause a medication error." Medication errors fell dramatically because the visual signal eliminated a category of interruption that had been driving them.
A Stevens Patents specialty law firm runs its caseload on a board in the middle of the office. A red box holds two weeks' worth of work, each card marked with orange circles indicating how many days the managing partner expects the work to take. A green box holds work scheduled beyond two weeks. A yellow box lists the names of the six attorneys. A blue box organizes the headers for patent applications in critical filing stages. The managing partner can see, at any moment, what is happening and where attention is needed. A construction company building large office towers and hospitals runs their projects from a similar board.
Hereford's office walls at Stanford Health Care are the extreme version -- he wants real-time feedback on essentially everything happening in his domain, and his walls reflect that. Markovitz acknowledged it might be too much for him personally, but said it works for Hereford. The general point holds: visibility makes problems detectable in time to fix, and invisible work is uncorrectable work.
Markovitz framed his final principle as a triangle with three vertices: participation, going to see, and showing respect. Mark, the host, prefaced this section by warning the audience that as a New York Jets fan, he was about to suffer through hearing Bill Belichick praised.
Belichick is on the field. During games, during practice, during workouts. He models the drills and the moves he wants players to perform. Art Byrne, the former Wiremold CEO and author of "The Lean Turnaround," put it bluntly: you cannot send a memo, you have to lead it. You have to do it on the shop floor, by example, where people can see you doing it.
The exemplar Markovitz used was Paul Akers cleaning toilets at FastCap. Akers, the CEO, gets down on his hands and knees in the bathroom and cleans. One of the conditions of visiting FastCap, in fact, is that the CEO of the visiting company has to be willing to clean the toilets too. Mark asked Markovitz to elaborate on this, because for many viewers the obvious question is whether the CEO should be doing CEO-level work instead.
Markovitz pushed back on the framing of the question. It is a false choice. The CEO can do strategy, set vision, manage capital allocation -- and also, occasionally, scrub a toilet. The point of the scrubbing is not the cleanliness of the bathroom. The point is the signal it sends to everyone else in the organization. If keeping this place clean and organized matters enough that the president will do it on his hands and knees, it matters enough for the rest of us to take seriously. The TV show "Undercover Boss" is popular for the same reason in reverse: the running joke of every episode is that the boss has lost touch with the actual work, and the audience knows it. Akers is the inverse -- a leader who is conspicuously in touch with the actual work.
Mark added the point about humility. A CEO modeling humility about work he could easily delegate creates a culture in which other people in the organization can model the same humility without feeling diminished by it. Markovitz brought up the old story about General Motors having a private elevator in one of its Detroit headquarters buildings that ran from the underground parking garage directly to the 14th-floor executive suite, stopping nowhere in between. Akers, by contrast, is in the bathroom with his team.
The third vertex of the triangle -- respect -- got the deepest treatment. Markovitz cited Mike Rother's "Toyota Kata" and its five coaching questions. The power of the questions is not what they ask but what they prevent the coach from doing. By forcing the coach to ask rather than tell, the framework short-circuits the natural human urge to provide answers. The respect is in the assumption that the learner is capable of figuring it out with structured support. The disrespect is in giving them the answer.
He closed with a line from Carolyn Brodsky, the president of Sterling Rope, one of the last American climbing-rope manufacturers: the most powerful improvement tool you have is your employees' brains. The whole apparatus of fit organizations -- daily improvement, value creation, horizontal thinking, standard work, visual management, coaching -- exists to let those brains operate.
A question came in during the Q&A about a survey showing that 55 percent of global CEOs cite culture and mindset as the main barrier to becoming more innovative -- and what tools or techniques can close that gap.
Markovitz, to his credit, did not pretend to have a clean answer. He punted to Mark, who started with the diagnostic point: most people talking about "changing the culture" have not actually diagnosed the current culture. They are using "innovative" and "culture" as nouns that mean nothing operationally. Lean problem-solving applies to culture change too -- understand the current state before deciding what to do about it.
Markovitz built on that with a reference to Edgar Schein's framework on culture and visible artifacts. You cannot proclaim a new culture from a mountaintop. You can only change the small artifacts and behaviors that, over time, shift how the place feels. The suggestion-box-to-improvement-board move is one of those small artifacts. The 24-to-48-hour response commitment is one of those small behaviors. None of them, individually, change a culture. Together, repeated daily, they do.
The John Shook quote Markovitz cited -- "it is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting" -- is the operating principle. Doing precedes believing.
The argument running through this session is that improvement has to be daily, visible, small, distributed, and embedded in the routine work of both frontline staff and leaders. Almost everything that comes up against that argument in real organizations is a tracking and visibility problem.
The suggestion-box-with-a-lock that Markovitz uses as his opening illustration of what not to do is a tracking-and-visibility problem. The Catholic Charities improvement board that he holds up as the alternative is the same problem solved with a wall. At small scale, a wall works. At the scale of a multi-site health system or a multi-plant manufacturer, the wall stops working -- which is where infrastructure comes in. A system that captures every submitted idea, makes status visible to the person who submitted it, routes work to the right owner, and tracks whether the 24-to-48-hour response commitment is actually being met is doing for an enterprise what a wall-mounted board does for a single department.
The leader standard work boards that James Hereford and JD Machine use map onto the same principle. A magnet-on-a-whiteboard system works for one leader's office. A system that lets every leader across an organization run the same routine, with visibility into whether the routines are being followed, scales without losing what made the local version useful.
The horizontal-thinking argument -- organizing around customer value streams rather than functional silos -- also lands here. Knowing which improvements happen in which value stream, what their impact looked like, and which ones could be replicated across streams requires a way to see improvement activity end-to-end rather than department-by-department. That is what makes improvements spreadable rather than locally trapped.
None of this changes the underlying argument. Markovitz is correct that no software produces a fit organization. The improvement muscle has to be built behaviorally, daily, with leaders who model the work. What infrastructure does is remove the structural reasons that the behavior fails -- the lost ideas, the invisible workloads, the impossible-to-track response times, the local improvements nobody outside the department ever hears about. Once those friction points are gone, the behaviors have somewhere to land.
Why is benchmarking against Toyota the wrong starting point for most Lean programs? Toyota has been refining its production system for more than sixty years. Treating Toyota as a model for an organization that is just starting its improvement work is like asking someone who has never been to a gym to follow Michael Phelps's training plan. The gap between the current state and the reference point is so large that people either get hurt, get discouraged, or stop trying. A better reference point is the version of your own organization that exists six months from now -- modestly fitter than today, with a few new habits in place.
What does "starting small" actually look like in a Lean program? Paul Akers's standard at FastCap is to do your job today two seconds faster than yesterday. That is the right order of magnitude. Hydro Flask started their improvement work by figuring out why the coffee pot kept running out. Neither of those is dramatic. Both are starts. Trying to launch with a goal of "moving the needle" tends to trigger the fight-or-flight response in employees who do not believe they can produce that kind of change, and the program stalls before it begins.
Why does cost-cutting tend to fail as a Lean strategy? McKinsey research cited in the session indicates that only about ten percent of cost reduction programs sustain their results past three years. The pattern is consistent: a crisis triggers cuts, the cuts produce short-term savings, the crisis passes, the cut categories creep back, and the remaining staff burn out. No new capability was added during any of this. Cost-cutting without value creation is organizational anorexia. The Sunbeam Corporation under Chainsaw Al Dunlap is the cautionary example -- six thousand layoffs, share price spike, bankruptcy five years later.
What is the difference between cutting costs and increasing value? The Franciscan St. Francis Healthcare nurse manager who told Markovitz she "couldn't think of any ideas" when Kaizen was framed as cost-cutting, but had "tons of ideas" when it was framed as improving patient care, captures the difference. The activities may look similar from outside. The energy, ideas, and sustainability are radically different. Value creation also generates revenue as a downstream effect -- the Texas children's hospital that cut MRI wait time from 16 weeks to 2 weeks added $5 million in annual revenue without adding staff.
What is horizontal thinking, and how is it different from how most organizations operate? Most organizations are built as functional silos -- design, engineering, sales, production, finance -- and they push every product for every customer through the same silos. Horizontal thinking asks who the work is for and organizes around that. Steve Brenneman at the Aluminum Trailer Company split his customer base into three value streams (off-the-shelf, minor customization, full custom) and built dedicated cross-functional teams for each. Lead time on custom orders fell from seven weeks to two. The structural change made communication local rather than email-based across two hundred yards of office space.
What is leader standard work, and why does it matter? Leader standard work is a documented routine of what a leader should be doing daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. James Hereford at Stanford Health Care uses a magnet-tracked board that lets him see what he has and has not done. It matters because executives face dozens of competing demands every day, and without a defined routine, the high-value-but-not-urgent activities (gemba walks, coaching conversations, metric reviews) get displaced by whatever is loudest. Standard work for leaders does the same thing Obama's blue-and-gray suit policy did: it preserves cognitive capacity for decisions that actually require thought.
Why does Paul Akers clean toilets, and what does it have to do with continuous improvement? The cleaning itself is not the point. The signal is. When the CEO of a company is willing to get on his hands and knees in the bathroom, it tells everyone else in the building that keeping the place clean and organized matters at the top, and that the work of keeping it that way is not beneath anyone. Mark added that it also models humility -- the CEO is not signaling that he is too important to do the work, and that license extends to everyone else. The argument is not that every CEO should clean toilets weekly. The argument is that occasional visible participation in ordinary work changes how people see the leader and how the leader sees the work.
What are the three elements of the coaching triangle? Participation, going and seeing, and showing respect. Participation means the leader is involved in the work, not delegating it from a distance. Going and seeing means observing the actual conditions where the work happens rather than relying on reports. Showing respect, in this framing, means believing in people's capacity to learn and resisting the urge to give them answers -- which is why frameworks like Mike Rother's five Toyota Kata questions are powerful coaching tools. The questions force the coach to ask rather than tell.
Why is "we have to do something that moves the needle" a problem in a Lean program? The language sounds aspirational, but it activates the amygdala -- the fight-or-flight response. Asking employees to come up with needle-moving ideas tells them that ordinary improvements do not count, which causes them to stop sharing the small daily observations that compound into real change. Bob Maurer's research on small steps supports the alternative: ask for the smallest possible change someone could make today, build the habit, and let the bigger changes emerge over time. Two seconds today, two seconds tomorrow, and after a year the organization operates differently.
How do you reduce fear in an organization launching a Lean program? Start small enough that participation feels safe. Respond to every submitted idea quickly -- silence is a form of rejection, and people will stop participating if they feel ignored. Replace locked suggestion boxes with visible improvement boards so people can see that their ideas are being acted on. Avoid public criticism; praise publicly and coach privately. And make the early wins small and frequent, so people learn that the system rewards participation rather than punishing imperfect ideas. Organizational change, like physical fitness, builds tolerance gradually.
Why do KPIs matter, and what kinds work better than financial metrics? Process-oriented KPIs give you something to improve on a weekly cadence in a way that financial metrics often do not. HR can measure the percentage of new hires with computer, passwords, and workspace ready on day one. Customer service can measure renewal rate. Finance can measure receivables under 90 days. Product development can measure time from concept to first prototype. None of these are revenue metrics directly, but each of them, improved consistently over time, produces revenue as a downstream effect. Tracking only financial metrics tends to push organizations toward cost cuts -- the easiest lever -- rather than the value creation that sustains performance.
What is the relationship between standard work and decision fatigue? Decision fatigue is the documented psychological phenomenon where the quality of decisions deteriorates as the number of decisions a person makes in a day increases. Markovitz cited Sheena Iyengar's research on choice paralysis from her book "The Art of Choosing," and the Obama suit example from Vanity Fair. Standard work for leaders preserves cognitive capacity for high-value decisions by removing low-value ones from the day. If your routine tells you to walk the gemba at 9 a.m. and review the daily huddle metrics at 10 a.m., you do not have to decide whether to do them.
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