Just in time

One of the most successful manufacturing principles has been lean manufacturing or ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing, where the objective is to produce items just in time for their consumption. This is a popular and successful method because it minimizes the time that items need to be held in inventory, thus reducing the associated costs with it.

While this is a fantastic principle to follow in manufacturing, the same approach can yield quite negative results when used in certain areas like raising investments and applying for jobs.

When Bruce Wayne offers to host a fund raiser at his palace for Harvey Dent, Harvey informs Bruce that he isn’t up for re-election for another three years, indicating that he doesn’t need to raise funds right now. And Bruce replies, “You don’t understand. One fund-raiser at my palace, and you won’t need another.”

When raising money for a startup, one can raise it at terms that are a lot more favourable to them if they are raising money when they don’t need it. However, if the startup doesn’t have enough money to cover salaries for more than a month and is in desperate need of funding, it will likely end up raising money at terms that are much less favourable.

Hence, my mentor’s advice has been that the best time to raise money is when you don’t need it and the best time to look for a job is when you don’t need it.

When there is an immediate need, like in just-in-time manufacturing, we lose leverage for arriving at the most favourable decision for us as even a bad deal begins to look a lot better than no deal. However, when there is no immediate need, then a bad deal is just a bad deal and has to compete only with good deals as the status quo can live comfortably with the no deal scenario.

Leave lean manufacturing to manufacturing and do the opposite while seeking out opportunities in life.

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Just in time was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.