Rediscovering Personal Excellence Through Process Excellence

Ram Lonkar | [email protected]

Unique No.: 2015-2

Key words: Lean Six Sigma, Continuous Improvement

How do we connect meaningfully with family, community and with our personal life? How do we engage meaningfully with work? The methodologies that help us achieve process excellence; would that help us reach our own personal excellence?

Globalization, technological advances & deregulation had changed the whole world. Change occurs at an accelerating pace. The ground realities are terrible as we live in an over communicated society where technology changes continuously. This change demands change in our work culture, in our personal life. Change demands continuous improvement for process excellence and also for personal excellence.

Since change demands self-development, increasing the level of personal excellence and effectiveness, we may not have enough time for self-study, nor for attending paid courses and we may also want to go at our own pace and select the time that we may find to devote to self-development and choose the areas that would be relevant to us at that point of time.

We know that the path to excellence requires skill development and continuous upgrading. We know that to be the best and to succeed, we must constantly learn new strategies and techniques that will increase our knowledge and skill to move up the ladder. So, how do we create a culture of continuous improvement to reach our own personal excellence?

We all possess the potential to achieve personal excellence to lead a meaningful life. Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, Agile are some of the most powerful continuous improvement (CI) methodologies that can help us rediscover and reach our own personal excellence.

These CI methodologies have been helping organizations all over the world to achieve process excellence and can help us to reach our own personal excellence too with so many brilliant ‘easy to use’ tools to connect meaningfully with our own life.

Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, Agile help build competencies such as innovative thinking, strategic planning, problem solving, decision making that help us to make conscious, data driven decisions rather than simply reacting to emergencies in the dynamic business environment. When we start a project, we define early on the goal or vision that is specific, measurable and time bound. The same principle applies to leading a meaningful life where we can define what success means to us. We can plan where we want to be 10 years down the line.

CI methodologies are people empowering and help us create a culture of continuous improvement. We treat people as human asset, respect people and value suggestions. Similarly, we can respect everyone around us and value every suggestion in the family. CI methodologies focus on customers. Similarly, we can treat everyone we talk to or meet like they are the most important to us.

CI methodologies continuously eliminate waste and improve efficiency while balancing that with quality improvements. Similarly, we can create a culture of continuous improvement and eliminate different types of waste we may find in our personal life. Worry is one type of the total waste of time, it only keeps us busy doing nothing. Waste of overproduction simply means doing more than is necessary however we use 10 words when two will do. We make use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources and that is a waste of resources.

CI methodologies help us define a problem for example overweight, collect data, measure, analyze it. We decide to exercise regularly, plan our diet and daily routine. We also look at what is working, what is not working. We create a To Do list and review progress to improve health and control the extra fat around the waist.

Improvements have always made lasting impact on human life. CI methodologies help us list thousands of small improvements to connect meaningfully with family, community and with our personal life and to reach our own personal excellence. We can start to list thousands of small improvements to connect meaningfully with our global community.