Interesting News: State Department needs to be Lean with emails

Last week a news item caught my attention. I went on to read it and found to be very interesting. This news was about employees hitting the reply to all button of their emails and eventually sending that to thousands of people on the list. According to the news this has created very high system loads and plenty of embarrassment. I have given the link at the bottom of this page so that you can refer to the exact news item after complete reading this article.

Suddenly I remembered the series of posts I published describing the possibility of using lean manufacturing concepts in the context of communication. I think you will have to go through this series again and refresh yourselves so that you will never do these kinds of communication mistakes. We do live in an overly communicated world. In simple words it is too much of communication to add little or no value. If something doesn’t add value to the customer it is a waste. So it is very important for us to be lean in our communication.

Incidentally I found another interesting article on Mark’s leanblog on with the title 5S for email. I think this might give you some interesting ideas as well.

BTW I think this article is interesting, so you can hit the Forward button and send to your friends.

Original News Article
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090110/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/state_department_e_mail