“Experience by itself teaches nothing… Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.” –W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education – 2nd Edition The field of psychology, it seems, shares an issue with the field of operations management. Wilson [...]
Tommy raised an interesting question in his comment to Internalizing Outside Knowledge. He said: In my company we are working with the developing people concept. Our objective is to make ourselves redundant, but it is hard. What are the best ways of developing people? How do you do it? How do you do it indeed? [...]
In the last post I commented on Ron Popeil’s product development approach – to make the product easy to demonstrate drives making it easy to use, which creates more value for the customer. Let’s take the same thinking back to your internal customers. What if, rather than just writing a procedure, you had to go [...]
I will be the first to tell you that this is probably repetition of a fairly narrow theme you have seen here before. But I think of different ways to frame it, or get different thoughts, so I share them. “Problems first” is one of the mantras used by Phil Jenkinson, the CEO character in [...]
A couple of days ago I had an interesting session with an improvement team in a fairly large company. They have been working on this for almost 10 years, and believe that while they have made some spot progress, they are clear that they have spent a lot of money but not yet established what [...]
Back on “ How The Sensei Sees” I got a question / comment from an old friend and very early teacher of mine. I invite you to see the comments, my response, and to chime in.