Hi,

Dashing off a quick note as I’m about to go away on vacation--see below. Feeling very grateful for you, my regular clients, as this has been a highly productive spring and the summer is setting up with an abundance of projects. When I’m as busy as I have been recently I have to be more productive, and this month’s newsletter is about a new productivity tweak I’ve been using. Hope it helps you!

Best,

David

I created a short video where I describe some unique features of a financial model that I developed for a client that raised over $350 million. You can see it at brodetelecom.com/model-overview.

Kaizen - Continuous Improvement

I’ve long been interested in productivity and organization. Recently I’ve added an item to regular note taking: Kaizen. Kaizen is a Japanese technique for continuous improvement.

So I’m about to go on a camping trip to Alaska. I’ve long had a pre-camping checklist to make sure I have all the right materiel and now I have a detailed list in Excel.

For me, one key insight to kaizen is that it’s easier to do numerous small changes than to do a few large ones. I always THINK I need to update my grocery list but after 14 years I’m on v12. Still, every week I think about updating it.

Now I’ve added a Kaizen section to my camping list and the first time through I’ve found fully twelve things to change for next time--including things I’ve re-created at least ten times before.

In a professional context this is similar to a part of the classic Agile division between a product review and a process review at the end of a sprint. Just by keeping notes on how to improve the recurring processes I do lets me update the checklist and be quicker or better the next time through.

Kaizen: I’m a fan.