The Glade 4.0

Lazy schmucks want other people to work so they can look good? Inconceivable!

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I added a comma here, you should, too, in the future. "Lean" is a series of management philosophies relating to non-production workflows and personnel. It's how you get process improvement through your human systems in this day and age. "Six Sigma" is for your production lines: how to eliminate, reduce, or otherwise marginalize the defect portion of your production. "Lean" exists because idiots spent 20 years trying to achieve in management what "Six Sigma" did for actual goods production. But, this argument is neither new nor old; it's almost persistent.

Aizle:

The simple example is this: mixing raw chemicals in one specific order produces a useful end product chemical. Mixing them in a different order produces a catastrophic explosion. You cannot change the process. The vast majority of middle-management and non-production support jobs don't give two-shits about process control or process oriented workflows. They don't have to: all that matters is the work gets done well and on-time. If we're talking process for these jobs, then we start using things like Kaizen and TPS and Lean and any number of various management and work-management/efficiency/effectiveness paradigms that are little more than corporate or institutional culture shaping practices. For most jobs, process refinement can be reduced to three basic things:

1. Reduce waste
2. Eliminate redundant work while maintaining parallel verification
3. Eliminate extra people

Most jobs require less work than employees have paid time in a day. Process matters on a production line, and the lazy people you're talking about get people killed in those situations.

Of course, this kind of ties into the education part, too: I paid the ASQ quite a good bit of money in membership fees and testing/certification fees over the years. In all honesty, I cannot say as I attended any classes or receive direct and specific instruction when pursuing my four (4) ASQ certifications (including a Lean, Six Sigma Grandmaster Black Belt -- this says I can certify other SSBBs). I certainly had a whole bunch of material to learn, skills to demonstrate, and work to document/verify. And I failed one of those certifications once. I didn't think it was the certifying agency's fault.

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Meh, depends on what you're training your students for. I work with quite a few extremely detail-oriented people who would excel in a class/program like that. They're usually dedicated document-review attorneys and senior paralegals, and they have very narrowly defined roles. They pick up on screwy cross-references, orphaned defined terms, red flag words, and so on like Rain Man counting toothpicks, and big law firms couldn't put out the kind of high-quality work product clients demand without them. However, they're generally not as good at issue-spotting, deal negotiation, drafting, argumentation, etc. - all the things that front line attorneys do - precisely because they get bogged down in the details and miss the big picture.

*ETA: Using 1.25" margins instead of 1" margins, though, is clearly worth a downgrade. As you said, that's a significant reduction in the amount of content.\

*Edit #2: Adjusted tone to remove some snark (e.g. the reference to OCD that Khross notes below). I'm actually kind of in awe of the doc review / paralegal teams at my firm - their detail work is completely beyond my ability to emulate, and I couldn't do my job without them. Don't want to let my old college grudges against nitpicky profs cause me to give the impression that I don't respect the doc review / paralegal folks.

RangerDave:

That's not an issue of OCD. I can guarantee you that any degree path requiring APA-Style formatting and documentation includes a class on precisely what those things happen; and I suspect the required text for that class is the APA Style Manual. MLA dependent programs do the same thing. In some regards, it's professional preparation and training, should those people go into the appropriate publication field. If they don't, the classes still have value.

That said, I don't disagree with the rest of your post. Hyper-specialization, a relic of current educational paradigms, is disastrous.

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When I posted that, I did not mean to imply the students that failed to change their margins were intentionally trying to slip under the radar and get away with providing less content. Some were, sure, but in the class where this happened, (this was over 5 years ago) he blanket failed everyone who did this, even those who had good papers with many more pages than required. Unlike the other situation, I didn't get caught by this one, but I still thought it was grossly unfair. This is the kind of thing you take a few points off for, not outright fail an otherwise good paper.

As an aside, it's only about 6% less content, the MS Word defaults are 1.25" on the sides and 1" on the top and bottom, but I forgot to mention that before.

I'm also having a very hard time understanding Khross' position at all. Education is hard work even if it doesn't seem like it to me? Well I graduated with a 3.6, that's pretty good, I guess I must have been working my *** off and not realized it.

Hi, you must be new here. /bonk

I'll let you know if you were actually working at it or not based on the following:

1. A full transcript (official)
2. Actual distribution of grades relative to class weighting

With a slight better than 90 average (on a 100 point scale), I'm inclined to say you did the work required to pass. I'm inclined to say you probably did it better than most students given no other information. Those are just inclinations.

That said, you apparently don't know the difference between work and labor.

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I gotta stop reading threads that make me giggle after I'm already giddy.

I'll disagree that all that matters it the job gets done. What matters is getting the job done in a way that is better than you're competition (internal or external) and sometimes not (too much) better than your next higher up.

Also how do you see Kaizen as any more than the philosophy that stuff like SS and its iterations were developed to follow?

Maybe I'm just rambling since my head is jumbled from a bunch of stuffs and the days events and the tomorrows expectations but this page of this thread proved wonderfully entertaining and relaxing.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Elmarnieh:

You should probably stop reading threads while hallucinating; it's bad for reading comprehension.

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