Perfection is not attainable, so why strive for it?

“Perfection is not attainable.  But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.” – Vince Lombardi.

Who is Vince Lombardi, you might ask. He was a legendary American football coach, best known as the head coach for the Green Bay Packers during the 1960s. The NFL’s Super Bowl trophy is named in his honour. I suppose you could say he was an American Nick Mallet on steroids.

Lean is often criticized for chasing perfection. Lean requires the drawing of a future-state Value Stream Map of one’s processes. It then calls for improvement efforts to focus on continually moving closer and closer towards this vision.

Our vision for our foundry, for example, is a series of end to end continuous flow cells, each consisting of a melting furnace, auto-ladling into a holding furnace, feeding a cluster of casting machines (the dies of which can be changed in less than 10 minutes), after which the castings immediately have their runners removed before being conveyed through a cooling and drying station and then feeding directly into a fettling and assembly cell which spits out a complete product still warm to the touch.

As unattainable as this vision might seem, we’d agree with Lombardi that it is only by chasing such visions that we will “catch excellence”.

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