Category Archives: Creativity

Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way

Posted on January 9, 2007 by John Hunter

The Elegant Solution: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way (pdf) by Matthew May: One Million. That’s how many ideas Toyota implements each year. Do the math: 3000 ideas a day. That number, more than anything else, explains why Toyota appears to … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Creativity, Innovation, Management, Management Articles, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Comments Off on Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way

Google’s Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm

Posted on January 4, 2007 by John Hunter

Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm. First, from a “what should I do,” view, I believe, Kevin Meyer’s advice is more appropriate: The False God of the Almighty Algorithm. But Google can do some things well that are … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Creativity, Google, Innovation, Management | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

How to Prevent Innovation

Posted on December 19, 2006 by John Hunter

Top ten tips for preventing innovation give some great ideas many companies are already doing but you may find some your company hasn’t mastered 🙂 For example: Make performance reviews easy. Create some easy-to-measure metrics (like # of sick-days taken, … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, Management, Performance Appraisal | 1 Comment

Amazon Innovation

Posted on November 9, 2006 by John Hunter

I believe Amazon uses technology very well. They have done many innovative things. They have been less successful at turning their technology into big profits. But I continue to believe they have a good shot at doing so going forward Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, Management, Popular | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Simple Cell Phone

Posted on October 31, 2006 by John Hunter

Awhile back we posted about the lack of simple phones now Motorola is looking at this market. See: Motorola’s Dumb Phone: Looking for more customers, the company did extensive market research in poor countries. The result: the company’s slimmest phone … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Management | Comments Off on Simple Cell Phone

Management Improvement Search Engine

Posted on October 25, 2006 by John Hunter

Google has launched a nice new feature that allows users to create customized search results. I have talked about this idea before: Improve Google. Last year I posted about Rollyo, which allowed what Google now does (using Yahoo for the … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, curiouscat.com, Fun, Google, IT, Management | Tagged , | Comments Off on Management Improvement Search Engine

Evidence-based Management

Posted on October 3, 2006 by John Hunter

Bob Sutton’s writing includes the excellent article “Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap?” (which we discussed in: Management Advice Failures) and the Knowing Doing Gap. I just discovered his blog today which is quite good: Work Matters. A recent post includes some good advice on data and process improvement Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Data, Deming, Health care, Management, Process improvement | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Chaos Management (by design) at Google

Posted on September 25, 2006 by John Hunter

Chaos by design by Adam Lashinsky: Sandberg recently committed an error that cost Google several million dollars — “Bad decision, moved too quickly, no controls in place, wasted some money,” is all she’ll say about it — and when she … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Google, Innovation, Management | 4 Comments

Systemic Thinking

Posted on September 23, 2006 by John Hunter

Systemic Thinking by Gary Bartlett provides a nice introduction to systemic thinking compared to analysis. Analysis is very useful however, the strong tendency to focus on only breaking apart systems to analyze components does result in missing insight into improvement … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, Systems thinking | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Complicating Simplicity

Posted on August 31, 2006 by John Hunter

Complicating simplicity: Gah! Trying to read about the “Simplicity: The Art of Complexity” (er, what?) conference. But the description at the conference site is the exact opposite of simple, clear writing: An investigation of the essence of simplicity must necessarily … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Management, quote, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment