Popular Mechanics online has a nice little article describing how the infamous accelerator pedal actually works. I am posting the link here so that we might be better informed when fielding the inevitable questions that seem to come the way of “lean experts.”
http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/how_to/4347704.html
Fellow blogger Mark Grabon recently posted “
10 Things I Wish Lean Practitioners Wouldn’t Say in 2010” on his leanblog.org.
I like it enough that my thoughts won’t fit in an appropriate comment on his blog, so I’ll write them here. Go back and read his post first, though, or you won’t make sense of this one.
Added [...]
I am reading Malcom Gladwell’s somewhat new book
What the Dog Saw. It is an anthology of articles he has written for New Yorker magazine over the last few years.
The
first chapter is about Ron Popeil, the icon of infomercials and “Set it… and Forget it.” Gladwell describes a fascinating product development slant – make the product easy to [...]
Michael Ballé made me aware of a new site, http://theleanedge.org, that he has started.
Its tagline is “a site for lean dialogue with the authors.”
He has assembled a panel of some of the most prominent names in the field including:
Michael Ballé
Art Smalley
Jeff Liker
Mike Rother
Robert Austin
where they are discussing issues and answering questions.
It is just getting started, [...]
Grassroots Innovation: The 3rd Way.
Greg captures a concept in 183 words that entire books have utterly failed to explain.
When we are trying to solve a problem, there are always people involved. And people have positions, feelings, and are always emotionally tied to this-or-that outcome.
It is critically important to find “The 3rd Way” when working on [...]
Joe Friel’s Blog: Excellence.
I’m a couple of months late picking this up (it was published in September, and reported by
Greg Eisenbach with the observation that “nothing is listed about talent.” ). But I think it is relevant here because Joe Freil’s predictors of excellence in an athlete translate directly to business performance. Only the [...]
I remembered reading this years ago, and thought I had lost my copy. In the midst of my current file purge, I came across my photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy that was passed around Boeing with the hand written notation “Hey team, this is a good read – enjoy!”
Even better, though, is that [...]
Background -
In
my original comments on The Lean Manager, I compared The Lean Manager’s story structure to that of Eli Goldratt’s classic The Goal.
This started a rather deep email exchange with Michael Ballé that goes far deeper into the book and the thoughts behind it than any review I could ever write.
With Michael’s permission, here [...]
John Shook’s latest column on lean.org is titled “Was NUMMI a Success?” He adds some interesting thought to the mix of the ongoing post-mortem on GM and NUMMI.
John argues (successfully, I think) that Toyota’s objectives for NUMMI were to learn how to take their system outside of the safe cocoon of Toyota City in Japan; [...]
This is Part 3 of a multi-part review.
Part 1 is here.
Before I get into it, I will break the rules of blogging and acknowledge a time gap here. I did finish the book shortly after I wrote part 2, in fact, I didn’t want to put it down. So now I am going back [...]