by ROBERT MAURER, Ph.D. who lives life one joyful nionient at a time thank you for your love and inspiration "Small things with great love.... It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into the doing. And it is not how much we give, but how much love we put into the giving. To God there is nothing small." -Mother Theresa PREFACE ......................................................1 One Small Step CHAPTER ONE ......................................21 Why Kaizen Works CHAPTER TWO 3 ........................................... 5 Ask Small Questions CHAPTER THREE ........................................6 7 Think Small Thoughts CHAPTER FOUR .......................................8 5 Take Small Actions CHAPTER FIVE ...................................... 119 Solve Small Problems CHAPTER SIX ...................................... 145 Bestow Small Rewards CHAPTER SEVEN .........................................159 Identify Small Moments CHAPTER EIGHT ......................................1 73 Kaizen for Life ABOUT THE AUTHOR ....................................182 Japanese corporations have long used the gentle technique of kaizen to achieve their business goals and maintain excellence. Now this elegant strategy can help you realize your personal dreams. ost of psychology and medicine is devoted to studying why people get sick or don't function well in life. But throughout my career as a psychologist, I've always been intrigued by the opposite of failure. When a dieter loses ten pounds and keeps it off, I want to know why. If a person finds love after years of unsatisfying relationships, I'm curious about the strategies that made this happiness possible. When a corporation stays on top of its game for fifty years, I want to understand the human decisions behind the success. And so there have been two questions that have occupied my professional life: How do people succeed? How do successful people stay successful? Of course, there are as many ways to achieve success as there are successful people. But over the course of twenty-two years in practice, I've had the satisfaction of watching countless clients use an unusual method to create lasting change. They've applied the same simple principles to improve their lives in just about every way. They've lost weight (and kept it off); begun an exercise program (and stuck with it); kicked addictions (for good); created strong relationships (the kind that last); become organized (without sliding when things get hectic); and improved their careers (and continued to do so, long after their performance reports are filed). If you'd like to make a change-one that sticks-I hope you'll read on. This method is something of an open secret, one that's circulated among Japanese businesses for decades and is used daily by private citizens across the globe. It is a natural, graceful technique for achieving goals and maintaining excellence. It can slip into even the tightest of schedules. And in this book, I'll share this strategy with you. But first, I want you to meet Julie. JULIE SAT IN THE EXAMINING ROOM, her eyes cast downward. She had come to UCLA's medical center for help with high blood pressure and fatigue, but the familypractice resident and I could see that much more was going on. Julie was a divorced mother of two, by her own admission a little depressed and more than a little overwhelmed. Her support system was shaky at best, and she was just barely holding on to her job. The young doctor and I were concerned about Julie's long-term health. Her weight (she was carrying more than thirty extra pounds) and soaring stress level put her at increased risk for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and deeper depression. It was clear that if Julie did not make some changes, she was headed down a spiral of disease and despair. We knew a cheap, proven way to help Julie, and it wasn't a bottle of pills or years in psychotherapy. If you read the papers or watch the news, you can probably guess what I'm talking about: exercise. Regular physical activity could improve nearly all of Julie's health problems, give her more stamina to sustain her through her grueling days, and boost her spirits. Once, I might have offered this free and effective treatment with all the zeal of a new convert. Go jogging! Ride a bike! Rent an aerobics video! I might have said. Give up your lunch break, wake up an hour earlier if you have to, but just get up and make that commitment to your health five times a week! But when I looked at the dark circles under Julie's eyes, my heart sank. We'd probably told hundreds of patients to exercise, but very few of them made it a regular habit. They found it too time-consuming, too sweaty, too much effort. I believe that most of them were also afraid of breaking out of their comfortable ruts, although not all of the patients were aware of this fear. And here sat Julie, who worked almost constantly just to keep her kids housed and clean and fed. Her only solace was relaxing for a half-hour or so on the couch most evenings. I could predict what would happen: The doctor would tell her to exercise, Julie would feel both misunderstood ("How am I going to find time to work out? You don't understand me at all!") and guilty. The resident physician would feel frustrated to see her advice ignored one more time-and possibly start to become cynical, as so many hopeful young doctors eventually do. What could I do to break this sad cycle? Charging Uphill: Innovation hen people want to change, they usually turn first to the strategy of innovation. Although you may usually think of innovation as a type of creative breakthrough, I'm using the term here as it's defined by business schools, where the vocabulary of success and change is highly specific. According to this definition, innovation is a drastic process of change. Ideally, it occurs in a very short period of time, yielding a dramatic turnaround. Innovation is fast and big and flashy; it reaches for the largest result in the smallest amount of time. Although the term may be new to you, the idea behind it is probably quite familiar. In the corporate world, examples of innovation include highly painful strategies such as mass layoffs to strengthen the bottom line as well as more positive approaches such as major investments in expensive new technologies. The radical changes of innovation are also a favorite strategy for personal change. If Julie had wanted to apply innovation to her weight problem, she might have embarked on the kind of rigorous exercise program I mentioned. This program would require serious life changes. She would need to get her heart rate up for at least half an hour, five days a week. She'd have to find the discipline to rearrange her schedule, cope with some serious initial muscle soreness, perhaps budget for some new clothes or shoes, andmost of all-she'd have to commit to her new program through those tough first weeks or months. Other examples of innovation for personal change include • diets that ask you to cut out all your favorite foods at once • quitting an addiction "cold turkey" • austerity plans for getting out of personal debt • jumping into risky social situations to conquer shyness Sometimes innovation produces amazing results. Most of us can recall making a successful change through the kind of dramatic means listed above, with immediate effects. With much-deserved pride, you may be able to describe examples of innovation in your personal life, such as giving up smoking one day and never, ever returning to it. I applaud innovation as a way to make changes ... when it works. Turning our lives around on a dime can be a source of confidence and self-respect. But I have observed that many people are crippled by the belief that innovation is the only way to change. We ignore a problem or challenge for as long as possible, and then, when we are forced by circumstances or duress, we attempt to make a large leap toward improvement. If the big leap lands us on greener territory, we congratulate ourselves, and rightly so. But if we slip and fall, the resulting pain and embarrassment can be devastating. Even if you are a highly disciplined and successful person, I'll bet you can remember many times that you have tried innovation and failed, whether it was a crash diet that crashed or an expensive relationship "cure" (perhaps a spontaneous trip to Paris) that left your romance in the same ill health. That's the problem with innovation. Too often, you meet with success in the short term, only to find yourself falling back into your old ways when your initial burst of enthusiasm fades away. Radical change is like charging up a steep hill-you may run out of wind before you reach the crest, or the thought of all the work ahead makes you give up no sooner than you've begun. There is an alternative to innovation. It is another path altogether, one that winds so gently up the hill that you hardly notice the climb. It is pleasant to negotiate and soft to tread. And all it requires is that you place one foot in front of the other. Welcome to Kaizen his alternative strategy for change is called kaizen. Kaizen is captured in this familiar but powerful saying: "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with the first step." -Lao Tzu Despite the foreign name, kaizen, small steps for continual improvement, were first applied systematically in Depression-era America. When France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, American leaders realized how urgently the Allies needed shipments of our military equipment. They also were forced to acknowledge that American soldiers might soon be sent abroad as well, requiring their own tanks, weapons, and supplies. American manufacturers would need to step up the quality and quantity of their equipment production, and quickly. This challenge was intensified by the loss of many qualified factory supervisors to the American armed forces, which were busy making their preparations for war. To overcome these tight time and personnel constraints, the U.S. government created management courses called Training Within Industries (TWI) and offered them to corporations throughout America. One of these courses held the seeds of what would, in another time and place, become known as kaizen. Instead of encouraging radical, more innovative change to produce the demanded results, the TWI course exhorted managers toward what it called "continuous improvement." The course manual urged supervisors to "look for hundreds of small things you can improve. Don't try to plan a whole new department layout-or go after a big new installation of new equipment. There isn't time for these major items. Look for improvements on existing jobs with your present equipment." One of the most vocal advocates of continuous improvement at this time was Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a statistician who worked on a quality control team that aided American manufacturers as they tried to find their wartime footing. Dr. Deming instructed managers to involve every single employee in the improvement process. The intense time pressure had transformed elitism and snobbery into unaffordable luxuries. Everyone, from those on the lowest rungs to the men in the catbird seats, was encouraged to find little ways to increase the quality of their product and the efficiency of creating it. Suggestion boxes were positioned on factory floors so that line workers could suggest ways to improve productivity, and executives were obliged to treat each of these comments with great respect. At first, this philosophy must have seemed shockingly inadequate under the circumstances-but, somehow, these little steps added up to a brilliant acceleration of America's manufacturing capacity. The quality of American equipment and the speed of its production were two of the major factors in the Allied victory. "When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. When you improve conditioning a little each day, eventually you have a big improvement in conditioning. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens-and when it happens, it lasts. " -John Wooden, one of the most successful coaches in the history of college basketball This philosophy of small steps toward improvement was introduced to Japan after the war, when General Douglas MacArthur's occupation forces began to rebuild that devastated country. If you are familiar with Japan's corporate dominance in the late twentieth century, you may be surprised to hear that many of its postwar businesses were run poorly, with slack management practices and low employee morale. General MacArthur saw the need to improve Japanese efficiency and raise business standards. A thriving Japanese economy was in MacArthur's best interest, because a strong society could provide a bulwark against a possible threat from North Korea and keep his troops in steady supplies. He brought in the U.S. government's TWI specialists, including those who emphasized the importance of small, daily steps toward change. And, at the same time that MacArthur was holding forth on small steps, the U.S. Air Force developed a class in management and supervision for the Japanese businesses near one of its local bases. The class was called the Management Training Program (MTP), and its tenets were almost identical to those developed by Dr. Deming and his colleagues at the beginning of the war. Thousands of Japanese business managers were enrolled. The Japanese were unusually receptive to this idea. Their industrial base destroyed, they lacked the resources for sweeping reorganization. And it wasn't lost on Japanese business leaders that their country had been defeated by America's superior equipment and technology-so they listened closely to the Americans' lessons on manufacturing. Viewing employees as a resource for creativity and improvement and learning to he receptive to subordinates' ideas was an unfamiliar notion (as it had been for Americans), but the graduates of these programs gave it a try. These entrepreneurs and managers and executives went on to work in civilian industries, where they excitedly spread the gospel of small steps. In the U.S., Dr. Deming's series of strategies for enhancing the manufacturing process were largely ignored once the troops were home and production was back to normal. In Japan, however, his concepts were already part of the emerging Japanese business culture. In the late 1950s, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) invited Dr. Deming, the wartime proponent of quality control, to consult further on their country's economic