Lean Sustainability

What is good for our planet can be good for business and its shareholders

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When We Measure The Wrong Things

GDP is a poor met­ric for eval­u­at­ing invest­ments to increase effi­ciency. Every­thing else equal, more effi­ciency means that GDP is reduced. This is totally con­trary to any lean man­age­ment approach.

Lean Means Sustainability — Step 4 — Improve

In ear­lier posts I wrote about “Define”, “Mea­sure” and “Ana­lyze” as part of Lean Six Sigma’s DMAIC cycle. The exam­ple I used in these pre­vi­ous posts showed that our office is not energy effi­cient, and we also ana­lyzed where and why. Remem­ber, the most impor­tant results of the Analy­sis phase are well deter­mined prob­lem causes. […]

You Can’t Control What You Can’t Measure

I am still con­cerned about what’s going on with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mex­ico. Pre­vi­ous esti­mates were that 800,000l oil spill into the sea every day. Some sci­en­tists come to the con­clu­sion that it is more likely to be 10 times more! It seems to be con­sen­sus that right now nobody knows […]

Setting Goals Not Methods

In a press release today Google is said to lead the charge against tougher energy effi­ciency stan­dards for data cen­ters. Google? Is this not the com­pany tout­ing green ini­tia­tives and try­ing to not be evil? It is worth to dig a lit­tle deeper into this issue. Data cen­ters house tons of heat pro­duc­ing com­puter equip­ment, and […]

There Is An App For That

In an ear­lier blog entry I was mus­ing if cor­po­ra­tions gain ben­e­fits if they are act­ing respon­si­bly and in a sus­tain­able way. Being lean reduces waste and saves money, so there you have it. How­ever, another poten­tial big ben­e­fit would be to dif­fer­en­ti­ate one­self as the greener com­pany, let the con­sumer know about it, and […]