I am invited to a webinar (a new word for me, the web equivalent of a seminar apparently). This is from the Lean Enterprise Institute, an American self-promotion exercise for a Jim Womack, whose neatly grey-bearded photo and cv is offered alongside the blurb. I suppose the thing about a webinar is that you can have some involvement even a long way away from wherever it’s happening (precisely what involvement is not clear, or what a webinar involves come to think of it).

Lean thinking is an idea promoted for the profit of the originators beyond its calling. You can tell how management speak it is by the title of this webinar (I keep repeating it because I can’t get used to it): ‘The Power of Purpose, Process and People’. You just know you’re getting a man making a lot of money through management consultancy when you get a title like that.
However, it is not a wholly bad idea: the website is: http://www.lean.org/ To reproduce the basic principle:

The critical starting point for lean thinking is value. Value can only be defined by the ultimate customer. And it’s only meaningful when expressed in terms of a specific product (a good or a service, and often both at once), which meets the customer’s needs at a specific price at a specific time.

In other words, what you do in lean thinking is work out what the person you’re ultimately helping would most value, define what you need to do to get it to them, when and how and at what quality of service. All to the good, but it’s hard to see that this is actually going to change the social services world. Why do people who use management training need all these chavvy concepts in order to think useful thoughts? But then, I’m not going to bother to go to the webinar.