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A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance

Daniel Markovitz

4.12 · Rating details · 208 ratings · 8 reviews

Most business readers have heard of the Lean principles developed for factories--a set of tools and ideas that have enabled companies to dramatically boost quality by reducing waste and errors--producing more while using less. Yet until now, few have recognized how relevant these powerful ideas are to individuals and their daily work. Every person at a desk, drafting Most business readers have heard of the Lean principles developed for factories--a set of tools and ideas that have enabled companies to dramatically boost quality by reducing waste and errors--producing more while using less. Yet until now, few have recognized how relevant these powerful ideas are to individuals and their daily work. Every person at a desk, drafting table, workstation, or operating table must (like a factory) deal with the challenge of reducing the waste that creeps into their work. The same Lean principles that have improved efficiencies on the factory floor can be just as powerful--in fact, far more so--in helping individuals boost personal performance.

Winner of a 2013 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award!

A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance describes how you can foster a new mindset and improve your performance by applying Lean methods to your work. It translates powerful Lean tools such as visual management, flow, pull, 5S, and kaizen to your daily work, revealing how they can help to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and link you ever more closely to customer value. This practice will help you develop better self-awareness, more disciplined problem-solving skills, and the ability to self-correct errors.

This book not only provides the tools, but also teaches you how to find the root causes underlying your inefficiencies so you can eliminate them permanently. It will enable you to immediately improve personal productivity while developing the skills needed for continuous improvement. It includes real-world examples that illustrate how these principles have been successfully applied across a range of industries. Providing the perfect mix of what-to-do with why-to-do it, the text details a step-by-step approach to applying Lean principles to your work.

Listen to what Daniel Markovitz has to say about his new book, A Factory of One.

Part One -- Part Two View the book's website at www.afactoryofone.com.

View the author's website at www.timebackmanagement.com. ...more

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Paperback, 177 pages

Published December 13th 2011 by Productivity Press

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Feb 12, 2012 Rick Austin rated it it was amazing

This book takes lean concepts and shows you how to apply them to create an intense focus on personal productivity. I found this approach to be clear and simple. As someone who is always looking for ways to improve my ability to improve my performance I found this book to off a refreshing and effective approach to do so. Especially compared to some of the other personal productivity methods I've run with in the past.

The author gets straight to the point, interjects humor throughout, and provides ...more

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Sep 30, 2012 Alain Burrese rated it really liked it

"A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance" by Daniel Markovitz is an interesting and new look at an old topic, productivity improvement. I'm not sure there was much "new" here, but rather some solid concepts presented in a different manner. I liked the book, and feel is deserves a place among the productivity and business books that line the shelves.

It's just under 150 pages long, which makes it a quick read. It's well organized and flows "A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance" by Daniel Markovitz is an interesting and new look at an old topic, productivity improvement. I'm not sure there was much "new" here, but rather some solid concepts presented in a different manner. I liked the book, and feel is deserves a place among the productivity and business books that line the shelves.

It's just under 150 pages long, which makes it a quick read. It's well organized and flows from topic to topic, providing solid advice on improving personal performance and productivity through the use of Lean principles originally designed to help Toyota factories outperform their competition. Thus, the title, "A Factory of One."

Using this Lean Thinking model, Markovitz addresses the topics of What's Your Job; Spotting Value, Spotting Waste; Flow; Visual Management; and From Bad to Good, and From Good to Great. All of these are important.

I liked the concept of gemba, in the chapter on defining what your job is. I think it is very important to determine what you should be doing that creates value vs. the incidentals and wasteful things that sometimes occupy our time. This chapter does a good job of getting you to look at that. The chapter on spotting value and waste introduces a 5S model which is okay for looking at how you are doing things. There are many of these kinds of models and this is no better or worse than the others. The key is to actually use a system and prevent your office from looking like the picture of Al Gore's office used in the book for illustrative purposes.

The author uses 4Ds to help process work and make it flow. Again, this will work if you actually use it. I did like the part about multitasking, but again, this is not really new. A number of books these last few years have looked at how inefficient multitasking is, but the other's take on the topic is good and I hope people listen. The chapter on visual management provided some good ideas for making one's tasks easier, more streamlined. This is probably something I had not thought to use outside of places such as the garage, but I see now how the concept and idea can be expanded to other areas.

And of course there is a bit on kaizen, the Japanese term for continuous improvement. Much has been written about this, but the section in this book is well done with some of the basics.

Bottom line, "A Factory of One" is a short, direct, and good book on increasing your personal productivity through the use of Lean principles. If you need a little boost in this area, give it a read and try out the principles. You're bound to increase your personal performance.
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Jan 22, 2016 Regina Brown rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2016, business

This is a great little book on applying lean principles and the Toyota method to your personal work set-up, whether you are self-employed, work for a small business, or work for a large enterprise.

The author makes good use of humor to get his point across.

I borrowed this book from the library, not knowing how good it would be, but determined to attempt to implement the ideas as I read the book. I have needed to reorganize my office and get rid of unnecessary items in it for quite some time, but ...more

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Dec 26, 2018 Nini K! rated it really liked it

Work-related

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Sep 25, 2017 Mike Thelen rated it really liked it

A great "individual Lean" book. Many simple tips and tricks for bringing Lean into your personal workspace.

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Aug 06, 2014 Bob Wallner rated it really liked it

Shelves: lean, personal-productivity, kindle

Over the last 6 months I have become engrossed in learning personal productivity through reading and podcasts. I looked at it as my own personal way of speeding up the value I provide, while un-cluttering my life. I wish I had read this book before I started. Factory of One covers everything that has taken me several months to unpack and it puts it into a connotation that "lean zealots" will understand and love.

The author does a great job of conveying:
1) Understand what you do that adds Value!! ...more

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Nov 11, 2012 loafingcactus rated it liked it

Shelves: sampled-kindle-2012, read-2016

A huge problem personal productivity books face is that they have very different audiences to speak to: people new to personal productivity, people well-versed in personal productivity concepts, and people who have made a fetish of personal productivity. The first group needs information. The second group thinks they need information but actually they need motivation, and the third group needs to be sent back to their craft tables.

This book does a good job of speaking to the first group, people ...more

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