{"id":6889,"date":"2024-04-09T01:00:20","date_gmt":"2024-04-09T07:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=6889"},"modified":"2024-02-27T14:39:33","modified_gmt":"2024-02-27T21:39:33","slug":"whats-your-white-whale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/whats-your-white-whale\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s Your White Whale?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Are you afraid to tackle the biggest problem facing your company? Don&#8217;t be. Here&#8217;s why:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/909183173?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m Jay Arthur, author of \u201cLean Six Sigma Demystified\u201d and QI Macros [software].<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I have to admit I&#8217;ve never read Moby Dick. I&#8217;ve never gotten beyond \u2018My name is Ishmael,\u2019 but I think each one of us in our organization has a white whale. There&#8217;s some big hairy pressing problem that is so scary that we&#8217;re afraid to tackle it\u2026 afraid.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Now, I\u2019ll never forget when the head of Finance called me in and said \u201cPostage costs have gone up $20 million this year.\u201d I worked at US West, the phone company. That&#8217;s a lot of money, right? Why are postage costs going up? That was the pain, all right?<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So I had to go out and started digging around and looking for data. Eventually, we had all these returned bills that came back &#8211; 150,000 returned bills a month &#8211; because the address was wrong. That&#8217;s another whole problem, all right? That&#8217;s another huge story right there which we eventually started to fix, but you get the idea.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I took all these bills apart and found out why some of them went over a 1 ounce postage rate. It turned out there were multiple bills for multiple long distance services (that was a recent thing that had come along) which were driving up postage costs. I&#8217;ll tell you what, when I started that, that was scary\u2026 but we found ways to solve that problem by redesigning the bill and doing some other things.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;When I went to the hospital and they said \u201cWe have $12 million a year in denied insurance claims.\u201d Well, that&#8217;s kind of scary. I started drilling down the data and I eventually pinpointed exactly what was causing that problem. I got people together, we did root cause analysis in a couple hours, they implemented process changes on Monday and started saving $5 million a year.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t be afraid of the white whale! Very often, there&#8217;s more data about the white whale than there is about some minnow that&#8217;s swimming somewhere in a stream. Don&#8217;t be afraid to tackle big things, because there&#8217;s more information, more data, and more people [who] want it solved.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s your white whale? Why don&#8217;t you go out and tackle that one this week? That&#8217;s my Improvement Insight for you this week.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Are you afraid to tackle the biggest problem facing your company? Don&rsquo;t be. Here&rsquo;s why: &#65279; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma Demystified&rdquo; and QI Macros [software]. &ldquo;I have to admit I&rsquo;ve never read Moby Dick. I&rsquo;ve never gotten beyond &lsquo;My name is Ishmael,&rsquo; but I think each one of us in our [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6989,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290],"tags":[56,118,168,140],"class_list":["post-6889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","tag-improvement-projects","tag-lean-six-sigma","tag-qi-macros","tag-quality-improvement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6889"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7226,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6889\/revisions\/7226"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}