#WordNerdWednesday
You may not know this, but I lead a quarterly book club that draws on insights from other domains to help customer-focused leaders find creative solutions to perennial problems. Our Q2 2025 book selection is “Reset” by Dan Heath, and I wanted to float one of the definitions from the book by this community to see what you think. The word is “waste.”
The whole book is business focused, so the way Dan defines waste in this context is:
Any activity that doesn’t add value for the customer.
His argument is that it’s possible to drive change, even with limited resources, by redirecting time and energy from waste to activities that create value for customers (and presumably the business).
I don’t disagree, but I wonder – how easy it is to know what counts as “waste” in a large, complex business? Things that are 2-3 levels of indirection from customers can still be critically important. They may add value for the employees that enables them to provide value to customers.
The question is reminiscent of something we’ve debated in CX for ages – how do you decide what impacts customers and what doesn’t? I’m curious what you think.
If you had to flesh out the criteria for “waste” in your organization, what would they be?
