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Category Archives: Interesting Reading

What Nukes?

Warning to Reader: This piece has a lot of free-association flow to it!
Oops. A few weeks ago a story emerged in the press that a B-52 had flown from North Dakota to Louisiana with half-a-dozen nuclear armed missiles under its wing. The aircrew thought they were transporting disarmed missiles. This is a rather major oh-oh [...]

Invert the Problem

One very good idea-creation tool is “inverting the problem” - developing ideas on how to cause the effect you are trying to prevent. This is a common approach for developing mistake-proofing, but I just saw a great use of the idea for general teaching.
Ask “How could we make this operation take as long as possible?” [...]

Do Your People Solve the Problem or Work The System?

This
article by Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson at Harvard highlights a problem that is as common on the manufacturing floor as it is in the hospitals they studied:
When people encounter a problem that stops their work, they work the system, get what they need, and continue their work.
A lot of people call this initiative, [...]

Is Your Lean Implementation Sticky or Slick?

My
posts about “
Made to Stick” and visual controls created some interesting responses on Jon Miller’s
Gemba Panta Rei blog, so I want to continue the great dialog. Jon asks the great question “Is your lean deployment made to stick?” and extends the context from just visual controls to the entire concept.
Of course this [...]

Made To Stick

Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
In
Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath have addressed head-on one of the biggest problems with implementing change in people’s thinking and behavior — crafting the concept in a way that makes it compelling.. “sticky” in their words.
The book is an extension of the concept described in [...]

Be Sure: What Are You Trying To Accomplish?

And how will you know you have accomplished it?
This article on
Tech Republic is about defense against a hacker strategy called “Social Engineering” wherein the hacker uses a ruse to gain someone’s trust. The goal (for the hacker) is to leverage human nature and get information or access.
So what does this have to do [...]

Lean Dilemma: System Principles vs. Management Accounting Controls

Today I came across an article called
Lean Dilemma:Choose System Principles or Management Accounting Controls, Not Both by H. Thomas Johnson.
It is, or it should be a thought-provoking read, especially for a CEO or other senior manager.
The author also wrote “Profit Beyond Measure” which I have not read, but based on this article, [...]

Is The MRP Algorithm Fatally Flawed?

Robert Johnston, now at the University of Melbourne, did his PhD work at Monash University. His dissertation, “
The Problem With Planning” presents a thought provoking thesis.
- Early robotics and computational intelligence models were built on a model which research at MIT debunked as unworkable in the 1980’s.
- The MRP algorithm uses the same model.
- Therefore, [...]

The Essence of Just-In-Time

The Essence of Just-In-Time
This is a working paper by Steven Spear of Harvard Business School. Spear’s PhD work was summarized in a landmark and well-circulated Harvard Business Review article titled “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System.” I will leave it to the reader’s Google savvy to turn up the DNA article for yourself.
This [...]

Toyota on the TPS

TOYOTA: Company > Vision/Phillosophy
Where better to learn about the Toyota Production System than Toyota? Their web site has always been a good source of basic learning. And like all things TPS, it is improved on a regular basis.