• Liars, Blowhards, Con Artists, and Management Consultants by Marc Hersch – “Many years ago I had a conversation with Dr. Deming in which I asked him about what my role as a consultant, should be. He explained that my role was to provide my client with an outside perspective and a set of a methods for figuring out how to optimize their system of enterprise.”
• Distributed Software Teams by John J. Peebles – “it forced us extremely early on to invest in systems, processes, and a way of working that brought everything we did online. Project management, change control, bug tracking, issue tracking, source control, testing, collaboration, documentation, document management, communication, all of these things needed to be ubiquitous and consistently used by the entire staff.”
• The 5 Universal Laws of Gemba Management by Jon Miller – “The frequency of leadership going to the gemba is inversely proportional to the number of walls separating them from the gemba.”
• Intuition vs. Data-Driven Decision-Making: Some Rough Ideas by Bob Sutton – “The trouble with intuition is that we now have a HUGE pile of research on cognitive biases and related flaws in decision-making that show ‘gut feelings’ are highly suspect. Look-up confirmation bias — people have a very hard time believing and remember evidence that contradicts their beliefs.”
• A Tale of Two Leans by Bill Waddell – “it is very important for manufacturing management to know the difference between what is going on at places like Marlin and Lantech, and what is passing for lean at Dana.”
• Experiments for school now safer, but less educational by Mark J. Anderson “…students in a high school chemistry lab who are clearly thrilled by their production of a huge flame-ball. That seems very educational! Unfortunately, this sort of thing, such as making volcanoes, can no longer be tolerated.”
• Lean and Scrum – Chicken and the Egg by John Scumniotales – “This is where Scrum came from. We abandoned traditional planning and developed the notion of the ‘backlog’. We also re-used the notion of incremental development from Sprial and RAD/JAD and introduced Sprints. We found the Backlog and Sprint to be very effective tools in planning and managing work i our volatile environment.”
• Dr. Deming: There is No True Value by John Hunter – “The execution often glosses over the importance of actually understanding statistics versus using formulas. Just using formulas is dangerous. It may be inconvenient but learning about the traps we can fall into in using data is important.”

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