The-Slight-Edge

148 The Slight Edge
Knowing the Slight Edge, you make the adjustment automatically. You
make those right choices, the ones that serve you. You do those simple, seemingly
insignificant things that forward your progress up the success curve. You read
good books. You listen to motivating tapes. You hang around successful people
who empower you. You’re a five percenter, a winner, a success.
Once you know the Slight Edge, you know that in getting from point
A to point B you’ll be off track most of the time. And you know that it’s the
adjustments—those little, seemingly insignificant corrections in direction—that
have the most power in your life.
Kaizen: Plan, Do, Review
You know this saying: “Ready ... aim ... ” and what comes next? “Fire!”
right? That’s the way it’s usually put—but there’s a better way.
Ready, fire, aim!
The problem with “Ready, aim, fire” is that in the real world, where
everything is in motion and things are constantly changing, by the time you’ve
finished all that readying and aiming, the target is long gone!
Here’s another way of saying ready, fire, aim: plan, do, review.
“Plan, do, review” is an approach to learning that began gaining credibility
in educational institutions toward the end of the twentieth century, and it’s used
in some of the better schools today. It’s a Slight Edge strategy.
Students plan what they’re going to learn and create their own activities and
experiments for study. Then, they do what they planned. And then they review
their planning and doing to see if anything was missing to help them learn what
could be done to improve the process and the results they’ve accomplished. Then
they plug those new insights into their next plan, and they’re off and running up
the Slight Edge curve to success.
The operative Slight Edge strategy at work here is the constant and
consistent back-and-forth of doing actions and correcting those actions—course
correction, just like the moon rocket. What this strategy produces is what
business management philosophy has come to call “continuous improvement,”
a concept that the Japanese call kaizen.
This idea was introduced to Japan after World War II by an American, W.
Edwards Deming. A remarkable statistician, Dr. Deming consulted and lectured
Japanese industrial leaders about “total quality.” He taught that “the system is
the solution”—and showed how it’s always the source of the problem as well.
Remember what happened to the Japanese and American auto industries in
the ’70s and ’80s? The Japanese ate America’s lunch in the marketplace. Know
why? Slight Edge strategy. They had it; we didn’t.