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 [...]
Last week I
posted a story of a failed freezer, ruined food, and a customer support experience that could be summed up as “That’s how we do it.” I invited comments and asked:
“Is this a problem?”
And when I say “problem” I mean, is this a “problem” from the standpoint of the company’s internal process?
There are [...]
Not many people know that Amazon.com is one of the “places to see” if you are looking for companies practicing the TPS. The fact that their sales and profits are hitting records as most others are scratching and clawing to stay in business is telling.
This recent post by Kevin Kelleher on
Gigacom really sums the [...]
A couple of posts ago, I tried to emphasize “hypothesis testing” as the key, core thinking behind the TPS. For that matter, I think that anyone who truly understands any of the various improvement approaches out there will find the same thinking at the core. Certainly Six Sigma; Theory of Constraints; and TQM are all [...]
In the world of science, great discoveries simplify our understanding. When Copernicus hypothesized that everything in the universe does not
revolve around the Earth, explaining the motions of things in the sky got a lot easier.
In general, I have found that if something requires a great deal of detail to explain the fundamentals, there is [...]
Each day you are exposed to an unimaginable number of viruses and bacteria. Any one of them has the potential to overwhelm your body and kill you. But your immune system detects the foreign body, responds, swarms the source of infection, defeats it, and learns so that your immunity is actually strengthened in the process.
Some [...]
Greg Eisenbach, in his
Grassroots Innovation blog, cites a article that gets to the very root of organizational learning, respect for people, and a myriad of other issues.
The article,
Teaching Smart people How To Learn was written by Chris Argyris back in 1991. What struck me about it is that it packs a double-whammy to [...]
As I promised, I want to expand on a couple of great points buried in John Shook’s new book Managing to Learn, published by
LEI.
A while back I commented on an article,
Lean Dilemma: System Principles vs. Management Accounting Controls, in which H. Thomas Johnson points out that
Perhaps what you measure is what you [...]
This little gem is buried on page 54 of John Shook’s new book Managing to Learn, recently published by the Lean Enterprise Institute.
Although it is almost just a passing thought in the overall context, it really gets to the core of a people-supporting culture.
To me, the concept of “No blame requires no excuses” means that [...]
In honor of October being Fire Prevention Month (at least here in the USA), I’d like to talk about firefighting.
"We have a firefighting culture."
"We spend all of our time fighting fires."
We have all heard (and sometimes made) these statements. But I would like to take a couple of minutes and look at what real firefighters [...]