My personal reviews:

Paul A. Akers book, 2 Second Lean:

I Thought it was very interesting how he was very people focused, and not profit focused. Whether its serving the customer, or training, growing, and uplifting his employees. he was very passionate about having a humble curious attitude. After all, when you are relying on your employees to be implementing lean ways for the success and growth of your company, they need to be willing to learn, and recognize that the people around them also know stuff that you don't, and also have a huge potential. He even said it himself, that no matter how much experience you have, no matter how much you know, you must always be willing to have a humble attitude, and learn from the people around you. And I think that's what summarizes it, having a lean company involves growing a lean culture, which involves being very focused on serving your customers, and growing your employees.

Personal key takeaways:

I love how he specifies over and over, just make things simpler. In fact that is the essence of lean, to make things less complicated so that anybody can learn it, and it makes things much more efficient. He really drives this home with a story about a struggling business owner, who was losing tons of money every year. Until he, as a last resort, decided to implement lean into his company, the results were astounding. In the end, he understood lean so well, that he took the 5s's (5 basic rules of lean), and shortened it to 3s's, just to make it simpler!

Another thing I noticed is he was very passionate about working hard, and serving others (putting others before yourself). Due to my research I believe he is  Christian, though I can't attest to his theology, it makes perfect sense! Because the bible calls us to be diligent workers, and to put others before ourselves. And that is exactly what he explicitly said in his book!

Things that were counter intuitive then what I originally thought:

In some cases a one piece flow, or doing batches can be more efficient, or lean. In the case of Paul A. Akers at Fast Cap, it was a one piece flow. This at first, but was obvious after, was very counter intuitive to me. Because for me it always made sense to make tons of extra parts while you have your machines setup for it, then store it so that you can fill your customers orders right away. But this was then obviously full of waste, just due to having to keep inventory, waste of space, and your actually making parts that a customer hasn't even ordered/paid for. Not to mention if there is any kind of defect on a single part in a one piece flow, it is easy to fix and correct the errors right then and there. But if you have even a single defect in a huge batch of say a hundred parts, then you will not only have to keep track of the defective parts in inventory, but you will have to go back and fix those parts. This of course leads to overprocessing, waste of motion and time, and certainly does not add value to the customer.