This book is a revision of my first book "The New Turnaround". I had to fix a few things to make it work with some issues clients pointed out. This book tells the story of a worker who goes thru my problem solving program. He starts out getting laid off at a company and then looks for work with his Dad's old buddy. The hero gets a job, his Dad's friend doesn't. Bad things follow. The CEO introduces everyone to Dr. Elbie, a modest avatar of the author. As the story unfolds, our hero becomes a believer in the approach Dr. Elbie delivers and the CEO goes thru his own learning experiences with Dr. Elbie. And this training leads to the book's paradox.
This book evolved from discussions with several client CEOs and several productivity and innovation consultants. It still tells the same story about our War on Waste (our Problem Solving Program) and the role that all employees play in business success. But it adds another dimension with the inclusion of the role that knowledge, particularly Tribal Knowledge, plays in any corporation.
But the real addition to this book and the issue that had been evading us over the years is the discussion that we get into in the book of what we have called the “War on Waste Paradox.” The owner of the business in the fictionalized story is the student of the book’s illustrious consultant who leads him to an understanding of what it is.

But why call it “The War on Waste Paradox?” What does Tribal Knowledge have to do with The War on Waste? It turns out that effective change requires an honest engagement of all people and a consequent understanding of the company Tribal Knowledge. And that observation is one of the major discoveries of this process.

Tribal Knowledge is the collective wisdom of the organization. It is the sum of all the knowledge. It is the knowledge used to deliver, to support, or to develop value for customers. But it is also all the knowledge that is wrong, imprecise, and useless. It is knowledge of the informal power structure and process or how things really work and how they ought to. It is knowledge of who constrains the process and who facilitates it. It is the knowledge that is squirreled away by employees who feel a need to protect their jobs by not sharing the information needed to do a job. This is part of the totality of the Tribal Knowledge. For example, it is the knowledge and the experience of the assembler who won’t tell others how he can put those two casings together (when no one else can). That knowledge is his job security. But more importantly, it is the untapped knowledge that remains unused or abused. This thought serves as one of the themes of this book.

We call this book “The War on Waste Paradox” because effectively engaging the rank and file is contrary to most corporate organizations and structures as well as outside the skill set of most managers. It is the actions of the executives and managers that create the various paradoxes noted in the book. And it is these same actions that create the grand paradox.

As employees become engrossed in solving their problems during the War on Waste, all aspects of the company are examined. When Tribal Knowledge is challenged, it is done so under the protection of No Blame, a safe haven for generating ideas. We trademarked the “No Blame” logo seen in the book, to illustrate to employees just how important the ideas generated during the War on Waste are to the company. They are so important that we want to generate “change without reprisal.”

As a tribute to the fact that the book comes pretty close to reflecting reality, I’ll share this story. I sent copies of the book’s final draft to some of my client CEOs. I scheduled lunch with three of them to discuss