Dr. Seuss' Creative Path to Kaizen 101

At first glance, putting Dr. Seuss and Kaizen in the same sentence might sound like pairing green eggs and red peas with a corporate handbook—impossibly odd and an eyebrow-raiser.

- REY ELBO

For one, Dr. Seuss was Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904–1991), an American author and cartoonist of 60 popular children's books, including The Cat in the Hat (1957).

Dr. Seuss was not a management guru but was widely recognized for his playful rhymes, imaginative stories and iconic but fictional characters, such as the talking cats, green eggs and fantastical lands intended for children.

On the other hand, Kaizen is the ultra-practical, efficiency-obsessed Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement that nudges believers to get by with a one percent improvement every day.

By doing a deep dive, we can see Dr. Seuss as a Kaizen master proclaiming to the whole world the beauty of 5S, fishbone analysis and five whys, among other tools, without even mentioning them by their tag. Here's one classic example.

The popular The Cat in the Hat literary gymnastic was written using only 236 unique words that resulted in a linguistic low-carb diet. It wasn't just a writing challenge. It was an act of creative rebellion against soul-numbing children's primers. It became a successful masterpiece that led his publisher to challenge him to write another book using only 50 different words.

Random House co-founder Bennet Cerf (1898–1971) made a $50 bet with Dr. Seuss, who accepted the task and won. The result was the 1960 book Green Eggs and Ham, a tale of culinary curiosity that became a crafty, funny and compelling story about trying new things despite obstacles.