![\"Denise's](\"https:\/\/s32.postimg.org\/jahtjgmwl\/Frank_s_90th_404_2.png\")
<\/p>\nOur family traveled from near and far to celebrate my dad, Frank, for his 90th birthday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The only way I can make it through the 45 minutes of agony is to have an interesting diversion, so I watch a variety of business and personal development videos while speed walking at level 5 incline. On this morning four months ago, I watched a video presentation from the Growth Institute<\/a> by Paul Akers called 2-Second Lean<\/em>. I was absolutely blown away by the simplicity of what he had to say.<\/p>\n Lean, which was pioneered by Toyota, is all about the elimination of waste and the focus on continuous improvement. 2-Second Lean, an even simpler concept, requires every person on the team to makes a 2-second improvement every day. As Paul says:<\/p>\n Just give me a single 2-second improvement a day. That\u2019s it. That\u2019s all I ask for. A 2 second improvement. There is not a person on earth that can\u2019t figure out how to improve something by 2 seconds.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n On the way home, I told Curt that I just watched the most awesome video and he needed to watch it too. After some serious pestering, I got him to watch it with me during lunch. He was hooked- and believe me, he does not jump on board very easily. Our next step was to share the video at our weekly Leadership meeting. The Leadership Team also loved what Paul had to say and believed Benchmark could benefit greatly from implementing Lean. However, we still had to get buy in from one more very important group and that was our international managers. We had to be sure that the Lean concept would work across our nine languages, nine offices and diverse cultures.<\/p>\n We shared the 2-Second Lean video at our semi-annual international sales meeting held at our Los Alamitos headquarters and got an overwhelming thumbs up from the international managers.<\/p>\n\n