Category Archives: Management

Out of the Crisis

Entrepreneur.com has named their 9 best classic business books of the past 30 years including Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming: Deming’s teachings challenged American business practice at almost every point. Among his most revolutionary ideas were the … Continue reading

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Learn From Success and Failure

Toyota’s Win That Wasn’t, an interview with, Matthew E. May, author of The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation: Toyota had a goal of 15% of the U.S. market by 2010. They’ve exceeded that number three years earlier than … Continue reading

Posted in Management, Toyota Production System (TPS) | 1 Comment

Information Technology and Management

Dog Eat Dog [the broken link was removed, sadly even MIT can’t manage a website properly and they have broken the link] by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson The CVS experience is a microcosm of a pervasive trend toward using … Continue reading

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Toyota, Lean, Consultants…

Toyota’s success pleases proponents of ‘lean’ The publicity about Toyota becoming No. 1 will create another burst of energy to lean, even though a survey by management consulting firm Bain shows that just 19% of companies that have tried it … Continue reading

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Standardized Work Instructions

Standardized work instructions are in important part of Deming and lean manufacturing management systems. Processes need to be standardized and continually improved (kaizen). Without a documented standard process variation normally increases over time as processes drift away from the desired … Continue reading

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Womack: Toyota Now and the Risks They Face

Why Toyota Won and How Toyota Can Lose by James Womack Toyota’s great risk, the way it can lose, is that its new managers and the managers in its new suppliers will revert to the old, mass-production mentality of the … Continue reading

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Learning Lean: A Survey of Industry Lean Needs

A draft version of Learning Lean: A Survey of Industry Lean Needs [the broken link was removed] by Gene Fliedner and Kieran Mathieson is now available. This voice of the customer report is product of some of those involved in … Continue reading

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Management Improvement Carnival #9

Listening, Responding, Refining by Matt Cutts – “But you don’t need blogs or digg-like sites in this picture to respond to feedback; those are just tools. The important thing is the process. It’s a process that many groups at Google … Continue reading

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Lean is Not Mean

Lean and Not Mean: Simple Management Most Effective [the broken link was removed]: The “pull” rather than “push” point of view first pioneered by the Japanese car manufacturers means that, in lean, everything is seen from the customer’s point of … Continue reading

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Google Software Engineering

An interesting series of posts on Google NYC, Top Google engineer talks to NYC software industry [the broken link was removed]: Google NYC is not a specialized engineering operation, its 300 engineers work in teams of three on the full … Continue reading

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