In this video, Steve Beauchamp dives into the concept of Muda (waste) in business, exploring how unnecessary actions or obstacles can hinder productivity and reduce value. Muda refers to anything that prevents you from efficiently completing tasks your customer is willing to pay for—whether it's time wasted, clutter blocking your workspace, or inefficient processes.
An obstacle to productivity
Nick: A word of which your book reminded me of, which is the Japanese word muda. So what is muda?
Steve: Yeah, so if you think about like a definition, could think about it in terms of, like, uselessness or pointless. Often in the business context, it's referred to as waste—these things that are not necessary, no matter what those happen to be, whether it's adding more time to accomplish a task, whether it's like physically having to move around things to get somewhere.
You can think about it in this context; imagine you need to get to your desk in your office, and you have all these boxes in the way, and so you either have to walk around them, crawl over top of them, or move them just to be able to get to your desk—well, that's just an example of waste, an example of muda.
It's basically preventing you from being able to accomplish, really, what is necessary, that you the customer is willing to pay you for.
Nick: Yeah, this was helpful, because I always associate the word just to waste, but it I learned from your book that it's obviously something that impedes process.
Steve: Yeah, exactly.
Nick: It's a waste of time and energy. So that's something to think about: how are you creating muda? And going back to file management, that does get to a point where I've got to stop and organize and delete files and find their appropriate places, and that can take a long time to solve.
Steve: Yeah. And, you know, there are really seven different types of muda, traditionally. There's a bunch of different schools of thought on how many there actually are. But I'm more of a purist, I guess, so I'm stuck on the seven.
But there's this idea, and it forms an acronym, so if you want to think about a way to remember it, the individual's name is TIM WOOD—so you have Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing, and Defects.
So any time you have any form of muda in your process that falls into one of those seven categories, is really taking away from you being able to produce what your customer really wants, and typically not something your customer is willing to pay you for. They're not willing to pay for your defects, right?
I mean, let's be honest, nobody likes things that are broken or quality defect. And I unpack muda a little bit in my book as well, for those that want to dig in a little bit more on that.