Word: leanness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Evans is the tip of the spear on what may be the most ambitious business effort in the 231-year history of the U.S. Army: an attempt to adopt a management theory, Lean Six Sigma, across the entire service. More comprehensive than the attempt in the 1960s by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to introduce the highly quantitative "system analysis" to the Pentagon, this is an enormous experiment: the Army has an annual budget of $160 billion, with 1.1 million men and women in uniform, and it employs an additional 230,000 civilians. "This is the largest deployment of management science...
...concepts of Lean and Six Sigma have been around the private sector for decades, and some parts of the Army have been using them since 2002. Lean is an outgrowth of the Toyota production system, developed in the 1930s, which focuses on increasing efficiency and reducing cycle time by eliminating waste. Six Sigma was first used on a wide scale by Motorola in the 1980s as an approach to improving quality through statistical measurements and benchmarking, Evans explains. Six Sigma entered the U.S. business lexicon in a big way in the 1990s when CEO Jack Welch embraced it at General...
Today on the bookshelves of nearly every Army office in the Pentagon, alongside military-history tomes, sits a stack of business books that try to decipher what Lean Six Sigma means. Harvey, the spiritual godfather of the Army's transformation, tries to cut through the jargon. "We used to call it 'quality and productivity improvement' or 'total quality management,'" says Harvey, who worked for Westinghouse for nearly three decades. "The bottom line is, you take the extra steps out of the system, and improvement should be ongoing and forever...
Such powerful connections become even more important as the inevitable illnesses or widowhood of late life lead us to lean on the people we've known the longest. Even siblings who drift apart in their middle years tend to drift back together as they age. "The relationship is especially strong between sisters," who are more likely to be predeceased by their spouses than brothers are, says Judy Dunn, a developmental psychologist at London's Kings College. "When asked what contributes to the importance of the relationship now, they say it's the shared early childhood experiences, which cast a long...
...series The Tudors, he has to learn some new skills. As Henry VIII, Rhys Meyers will tackle "jousting, lute and a minimum of six languages," alongside Sam Neill as Cardinal Wolsey. Even draped in jewels befitting the portly, much married monarch, "I look nothing like Henry," the lean Match Point star admits. "I have to make him my own." Funny, that's just how Anne Boleyn felt...