In Go Rin No Shō (A Book of Five Rings), the 17th-century Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi recorded his approach to combat and strategy. Although written centuries before modern industrial management, the book contains principles that align closely with what we now call Lean thinking. One of his instructions is simple: “Do nothing that is of no use.” It is a directive to eliminate waste and focus only on what matters. In modern organizations, this principle translates into a simple standard: work that does not contribute to value should be reduced or eliminated.
Lean organizations define value carefully and direct their effort toward it, reducing or removing work that does not contribute to that outcome.
Understanding this principle is easy, but applying it is a challenge. Most organizations struggle to define value clearly, and as a result they tolerate or even encourage work that does not materially improve outcomes.
What is Value?
Valuable work provides economic or systemic benefits to the business. Economic value means that work improves or protects future cash flow. Economic value looks like:
- Increased revenue or margin
- Lower operating cost
- Reduced economic risk
- Strengthened competitive position
Systemically valuable work increases the organization’s ability to generate economic value later on:
- Organizational learning by activities that generate feedback
- Improved flow via increased throughput or reduced cycle time
- Improved quality
- Reduced technical debt
- Simplified architecture
- Increased adaptability
Value is not effort, output, or visibility. It is a measurable improvement in economic results or in the system’s capacity to produce them. It is a measurable improvement in financial results or in the system’s capacity to produce them.
Waste
Work that does not contribute to defined goals consumes capacity without improving outcomes. In Lean terms, it is waste. When waste enters the system, it competes with value-creating work for time, attention, and coordination effort. This increases work-in-process (WIP), expands queues, and lengthens cycle time across the system.
Low value work. Organizations generate work that does not materially advance their goals. Much of this work appears useful or satisfies a stakeholder preference, yet does not materially improve outcomes. Not every idea should be pursued. Not every defect requires correction. Not every problem justifies intervention. SSome issues cost more to address than they cost to tolerate. Decisions should be grounded in economic trade-offs rather than reflexive activity.
Too many things at once. Although most active work has some value, it is not of equal value. n practice, a small portion of work typically produces a disproportionate share of outcomes. Concentrating effort on the highest-value work improves economic return, while deferring or discarding lower-value work preserves capacity. Attempting to advance too many initiatives at once increases work in process, lengthens queues, and dilutes focus.
Process embellishment. When an organization solves a problem, it often adds safeguards to prevent the problem from recurring. The cost of those safeguards can exceed the cost of the original problem. Every additional step should be evaluated economically to ensure that the preventive measure does not introduce more cost than it removes. For example, adding a required approval to prevent last year’s mistake may reduce risk, but if that approval slows delivery, increases queues, and causes missed opportunities, the safeguard may be more expensive than the defect it was designed to prevent.
The disciplined allocation of capacity to the most valuable work is a structural advantage. Organizations that consistently allocate capacity to high-value work improve quality, shorten time to market, reduce overhead, and increase customer satisfaction. By reducing waste and limiting work in process, organizations improve quality, shorten cycle time, reduce overhead, and deliver outcomes customers actually value.
A clear illustration appears in the television show Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsay. On the show, he visits struggling restaurants, analyzes their operations, and recommends changes. Most failing restaurants he encounters have large, highly varied menus with dozens or even hundreds of dishes. He consistently advises them to narrow their menus. He urges them to master a small number of dishes, reduce inventory, simplify equipment, and streamline ordering. Narrowing the menu improves quality, lowers inventory costs, reduces operational complexity, and increases consistency.
The Most Important Work
If focus is a strength, then what to focus on? The most important work is that which advances economic outcomes or strengthens the system’s ability to produce them. Overfocusing on economic value alone can lead an organization to become a feature factory. A feature factory prioritizes new features while neglecting equally important work such as removing unused functionality, addressing technical debt, correcting costly defects, and improving the system. Each of these activities can materially improve economic performance or system capability.
Relative importance cannot be judged by immediate return on investment (ROI) alone. Focusing only on short-term ROI ignores opportunity cost, system constraints, and benefits that are not immediately revenue-generating.
Identify a small number of priorities, complete them, and then shift attention. Limiting concurrent work reduces work in process and coordination overhead. It decreases task switching, lowers cognitive load, improves quality, and shortens cycle time. Increased availability across the system accelerates delivery.
If Musashi Ran Product Development
What would Musashi emphasize as a product development leader?
- Focus on what is most valuable
- Defer that which is less valuable
- Execute the most important work with excellence
- Continuously improve both economic performance and systemic capability
The Complete Musashi: The Book of Five Rings and Other Works, translated by Alexander Bennett, Tuttle, 2018.
