Wolf of Wall Street

Recently my wife and I had our “Date night”; movie and drinks. We saw the movie “Wolf of Wall Street”, for those who haven’t seen it let me give you the 10 sec run down: Borderline soft-core porn about a stock broker who is an alcoholic, drug addict, sex addict without one stitch of morality and unlimited supply of money…yea, we loved it!

As you probably know by now I can’t hardly do or see anything without finding the application of Lean Six Sigma tools, this movie is no exception. Instead of enjoying the train wreck of this guy’s life and the gratuitous nudity…I see the application of Lean tools as the foundation of Jordan’s success (Main character).

Jordan was a gifted stock broker (salesman), he was earning around $70k a month on his own efforts and skill. Within a year he was making millions per month. So how did he get to be so rich?

The first thing he did was develop a detailed script for the other brokers who worked for him, then provided hands on training. As Lean practitioners we recognize this as creating standard work and training people to the standard; a foundational first step in creating process predictability. Standard Work can take many forms; pictures, layout diagrams, flow charts and sometimes even words. In Jordan’s case he wrote the words for his brokers to say making them nearly as skilled as he was. This enabled him to multiply his success by the hundreds. That is how he went from wealthy to stupid rich, as he lived up to the stupid part. The remainder of the movie is how an unscrupulous drug addict lives with that kind of money.

Make no mistake he was not a good guy and he broke many laws…but he did follow a few key ideas of Lean. So the first ever “Lean Movie Review” gives Jordan Belfore in the Wolf of Wall Street a two thumbs up for the deliberate implementation of Standard Work…the nudity helped too.

Enjoy the movie, Erik