36 ◾ Lean Management System LMS:2012
buying an airline ticket. “Waste of the time of people” applies, on the other
hand, to inefficient activities by the airline’s employees.
Waste of the Time of People
Physics defines work as the product of force and distance, so labor and
exertion do not always translate into value-adding work. Atlas, the mythi-
cal Titan who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, would have
been surprised and outraged to discover that he had performed no work—at
least not as defined by physics—whatsoever during the thousands of years
he had been at this task. Frederick Winslow Taylor observed that many if
not most steel mill workers used the same shovel to move materials ranging
from iron ore to ash. A full load of ...