- How are stories of successful companies leading us astray? by Karen Wilhelm – “correlation does not equal causation, a inspecting a “sample” consisting only of good parts will not yield good information about a process, and anecdotal evidence is interesting but not acceptable as proof of a hypothesis.”
- SBTI Response to WSJ Article by Joe Ficalora and Joe Costello – “By and large the executives who have left GE and AlliedSignal (now Honeywell) and other Six-Sigma companies who became top executives have uniformly started Six-Sigma and Lean programs at their new companies, and nearly all successfully deployed it.”
- Mark Graban interviews Jim Womack: Machine Revisited (podcast): “The job of ‘Machine’ was to describe a complete business system… ‘the biggest disappointment… was to have people tell me it was a great book about factories.'”
- Why few organizations adopt systems thinking by Russell L. Ackoff – “To understand why organizations do not use mistakes as opportunities for learning, other than a disposition inherited from educational institutions, we must recognize that there are two types of mistake: errors of commission and errors of omission.”
- Kano Model by Robert Thompson – “Attractive quality attributes can be described as surprise and delight attributes; they provide satisfaction when achieved fully, but do not cause dissatisfaction when not fulfilled.” – Curious Cat on the Kano Model
- Jumping to Solutions by Lee Fried – “I hear solutions being thrown around by people that have not even gone to the Gemba to see. Worst of all, I am a Lean consultant that often display this behavior. Time to reflect and change.”
- Is Upper Management Support Enough? by Mike Wroblewski – “What we need is active participation; we need our Upper Management to ‘Lead By Example’.”
- How Do You Sustain Improvement? by Jon Miller – “You go to gemba. You water and feed it. You give it sunlight. It is your work. You sustain it. Personally. Persistently. Seriously.”
- Kanban in Action by David Anderson – “The kanban system allows us to deliver on 3 elements of my recipe for success: reduce work-in-progress (in fact it limits it completely); balance capacity against demand (as new CRs can only be introduced when a kanban card frees up after a release); and prioritize.” – discussion of this post
- Fishing for SCATE – “Business leaders too love Big Ideas—not the sloganeering kind, but those of the type that I call a SCATE: a Simple Complete Answer To Everything.”
- “Motivating Employees” by John Hunter – “When a manager thinks in a theory y way they assume people wish to do a good job. If the employees are not doing some task the way the manager wants, the manager needs to figure out what is wrong with the system that leads to this outcome (not what is wrong with the employees).”
