muda
n.— «The Japanese word for waste is muda. In Japan, muda refers to any activity that is not value-adding. Taiichi Ohno, who introduced the just-in-time (JIT) production system at Toyota Motor Company, was the first person to recognize the enormous amount of muda or waste in the everyday work activities of an organization.» —“IQ and Muda: Information Quality Eliminates Waste” by Larry English DMReview (U.S.) Sept., 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...