After Kyoto and Johannesburg, only an idiot would say it was easy to save the planet. But the dizzying irony is that it is. All the posturing at political level ignores a prosaic truth. Every company in the world would directly benefit - in lower costs and higher profits - by doing its bit for the earth. And it would cost nothing except the energy to shift office furniture or a few machines around the factory floor.
All it takes is for managers to start tackling the waste in which their companies wallow. Companies are almost inconceivably wasteful. Most obviously, they directly waste raw materials and energy. But less obviously, all companies actively generate waste - masses of it. One form of self-generated waste is rework - correcting errors that should not have been made in the first place. Another is making things that people don't want to buy. Half of all the books printed in the United States are pulped unread.
But even less obviously and worse still, all of these conspire to create a nightmare spiral of yet more waste, endlessly feeding on itself - more space, heat, light, people, conveyors, paperwork and computers to track it, all to deal with stuff that would be better off not being done at all.
It's uneconomic growth - activity that adds no value and profits no one except perhaps the economists who add it up. And the more that is wasted, the more effort has to go into managing its byproducts and pushing harder against the friction on the flywheel.
Waste on this scale is the treacherous legacy of mass-production techniques and thinking that have long outlived their usefulness.
Ever since Adam Smith, manufacturers have been in thrall to the twin notions of specialisation and economies of scale. They have assumed that the only efficient way to make and process things is by "batch-andqueue": laying out factories so that parts and assemblies queue up to be processed in high-volume batches on one specialised machine, then queue again to pass on to the next.
Most industrial processes are slaves to this model. So are offices. Batch production is fine for products that use a few simple processes and parts, and for very long runs of highvolume products - cans of Coke or household goods. But the effort and expense of tracking, managing and moving many parts through more complex systems multiply exponentially. Shorter product lifetimes and changing tastes add to the pressures.
The conventional response has been to fight complexity with complexity - tracking materials with enormous computer systems and processing them on automated multipurpose machines. The expense is colossal and the results mediocre.
But there is an alternative. Suppose instead of batch-and-queue, products can be made to flow continuously, one by one, from one workstation to the next, without stopping,
Managers need to start tackling the waste in which their firms wallow right through the production process. In that case two things magically happen. First, since there are no batches, you don't need warehouses to store piles of work-inprogress between each stage, computers to track it, expediters to ferret for lost parts or orders, or storemen to manhandle stuff around.
Second, you can make them to real customer order, not guesswork. So no wasted production, either.
Better yet, the process is dynamic. Companies adopting these principles discover that just as waste is a vicious circle, eliminating it is joyously selfreinforcing. Because the main change is attitudinal, it is also lowcost - initial changes are often a matter of straightening out the production flow on the shop floor.
Less is more - and more. Porsche, a near basket case as an old-style manufacturer a decade ago, has driven this route to become one of the most profitable (that is, least wasteful) car manufacturers in the world.
Of course, when companies start stripping out waste, they often discover that some jobs are surplus. But with a lower cost base and improved
responsiveness, they usually find they can cost-effectively manufacture a much wider range of products, often using the space vacated by nonproductive storage.
Bureaucracy is the defining monument to non-value-adding cost. This means that truly stupendous potential for improving public services lies in removing the entire cost-inflating apparatus of audit, inspection, regulation, rule-devising and targetsetting, and instead redeploying people into activities that the public actually wants and can afford.
In the long term, lean manufacturing needs supplementing with other measures, of course - above all with a radically changed accounting system that prevents companies from externalising their costs and treating natural inputs as free. Emissiontrading mechanisms are a precedentsetting step in that direction, and more will surely follow.
Meanwhile frugal manufacturing (and management) is self-evidently better than the profligate kind. It buys time, it's available to everyone, and it's free. How hard is that as a decision? Just this once there really is a free lunch. So eat it.
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