Stop Calling It "Optimisation”

What makes waste elimination different from every other change initiative you've ever suffered through: there is no sting.

Most change requires sacrifice. You trade speed for quality. Flexibility for efficiency. Growth for stability. Someone always pays.

But eliminating waste? Pure upside.

When you remove the pointless meeting that could have been an email, nobody loses. When you stop creating reports nobody reads, everyone wins. When you eliminate the approval step that adds zero value, the only thing that suffers is bureaucracy.

You're not taking anything valuable away. You're removing friction that was slowing everyone down.

You're Avoiding It Because It's Obvious

The reason you don't eliminate waste isn't that it's hard to find. It's because it's embarrassingly obvious once you look.

That daily standup that runs 45 minutes? Waste. The three-person approval chain for a $50 expense? Waste. The monthly report that gets filed but never read? Waste.

You know exactly where the waste is. You walk past it every day. You participate in it. You might have even created some of it.

But calling it out feels like admitting you've been tolerating stupidity. So you don't.

Start With What Nobody Will Miss

Pick one thing this week that adds zero value to anyone's life. Not something that's "inefficient"—something that's genuinely pointless.

Kill it.

Don't ask permission. Don't form a committee. Don't create a process for eliminating processes.

Just stop doing the thing that serves no purpose.

The beautiful thing about eliminating waste is that when it's gone, everyone immediately understands why it needed to go. The only regret is that you didn't do it sooner.