In many cases, improvement is not about doing more good things, but  doing fewer bad things. 

 To understand what I mean, we have to take a trip to Japan.

 The strange case of Japanese television 

 In the decades following World War II,  manufacturing  in America flourished. Over the years, American companies grew in size and profitability, even though they produced many products of average quality. 

 This gravy boat started rolling in the 1970s. Japanese companies made a surprising series of  changes that helped them crush their American counterparts. As a New Yorker article said…

 “Japanese firms emphasized what came to be known as “lean production,” relentlessly looking to remove waste of all kinds from the production process, down to redesigning workspaces, so workers didn’t have to waste time twisting and turning to reach their tools. The result was that Japanese factories were more efficient and Japanese products were more reliable than American ones. In 1974, service calls for American-made color televisions were five times as common as for Japanese televisions. By 1979, it took American workers three times as long to assemble their sets.”

 Keywords like Kaizen, Lean Manufacturing, and Process Improvement are so common these days that it is easy to negate the subtlety of Japan's strategy. 

 The main idea I want to emphasize here is the difference between focusing on getting better and not getting worse. Japanese TV makers aren't looking for smarter workers or better materials, they're just saying, "Let's make the same product, but with fewer mistakes." Japanese companies get better by getting rid of things that don't work, not by creating a bigger, better, or more expensive product. 

 This is an important distinction that applies to habits, processes, and purposes of all kinds, not just TV.


Two Paths to Process Improvement

The distinction we make here is between advance with addition and advance with subtraction. The added bonus is to do more  work: make a faster car, make louder speakers, build a sturdier table. Subtraction improvements aim to do less of what doesn't work: eliminate errors, reduce complexity, and eliminate unnecessary. 
 These concepts of addition and subtraction apply to many areas of life.

Education 

  • Additional: smarter, increase your IQ. 
  •  Subtraction: avoid stupid mistakes, make less mental mistakes.

Investing

  • Additional: Earn more money, look for development opportunities. 
  •  Subtraction: never lose money, limit  risk.

 Web Design

  • Additional: Improve your call-to-action copy, increase conversions. 
  •  Subtraction: Removes elements from the page that distract visitors.


Many of these approaches sound similar, but they are not. Take the nutrition example above. Eating healthy foods and avoiding unhealthy foods seem to be very similar. However, in the first case, you focus  on "how to eat better" while the second case focuses on "how not to  eat worse". In one scenario, you are trying to chase the uptrend, in another you are focusing on limiting the downside.