
40 ◾ A Factory of One
Table2.2 summarizes the different characteristics of these
file types.
But First …
The only way to make this work is first to toss all the gar-
bage that has accumulated over the months (years?) that
you’ve been in your office. That’s the first step. The Lean
gurus define this purging process as “sorting”—as in, sorting
the garbage from the value. I prefer to think of it as common
sense. There’s no point in paying rent on the square footage
occupied by cabinets jammed with files inherited from your
predecessor three years ago—files you’ve never looked at.
There’s no point in creating files for all that useless paper.
That would ...