My World In Pictures

22 January 2009 Days Passing




I've spent time in the last month working with a team on a Kaizen event at my home site. Part of the event was clearing an old document area. I've been hands on because there are a lot of financial, legal, intellectual property, and hr records being reviewed. Early on, one of the participants commented that this is what it all comes down to, we generate paper to get an order, generate paper to make the order, and generate more paper until we get cash from the order. Then some number of years later, we throw it all out.

Over the last month, I've been more than a bit down. This week a colleague stopped by to review the documents he had in the area. He retired just recently. We had worked together over the years to build one of the products from nothing to an established, successful product line. He as the product manager and me as the engineering manager. When he was done reviewing the docs, the seven boxes were reduced to two. In a matter of minutes, the last twenty years were shrunk into two boxes. All other traces of getting up in the morning to come to the office or traveling for weeks at a time were gone.

We recently got a new office toy, a copy machine that scans and sends you an e-mail of the scan. I can load 50 or so pages and have an e-mail of the scan waiting before I return to my office. It is an amazing tribute to technology. Over the last few months I have been taking an extra hour or two after the day ends to review all the paper in my office. The keeper stuff gets scanned and shredded. Everything else just gets shredded. It's been really effective. Over a third of all the files in my office are now in cyber space. The newest stuff never becomes paper. It just gets organized as electrons. Maybe my melancholy is the knowledge that some day soon no one will even need to tip my files into a recycle bin. A simple select and delete will send them and my work away.

While cleaning the area, we also cleaned out a number of old marketing items. The posted image is a scan of a photo taken of the two of us years ago. It was for some marketing brochure. These things always look staged. At least as long as this blog remains in cyber space, this image will mark the work we did together.