Category Archives: Innovation

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

Management Improvement Carnival #1

Posted on December 7, 2006 by John Hunter

There have been a number of great post recently about management improvement: Amazon’s Long Public Haul by Kevin Meyer – “Amazon has now been around a while and has a loyal following. Their culture is apparently deep, at least for … Continue reading →

Posted in Carnival, Customer focus, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management | 5 Comments

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

Not Innovation but Still Interesting

Posted on October 5, 2006 by John Hunter

10 years of the most innovative ideas in business in not packed with ideas on innovation: it was obviously titled by someone hoping to catch the interest of those following the innovation fad. Still it has interesting stories originally published … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Innovation, Management | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

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

Quality Technology and Innovation

Posted on September 2, 2006 by John Hunter

The Future of Quality Technology: From a Manufacturing to a Knowledge Economy and From Defects to Innovations [sadly the link to ASQ fails, sigh, http://www.asqstatdiv.org/documents/newsletters/Winter06StatDiv.pdf] by Soren Bisgaard: we need to be good at both breakthrough and incremental innovation. Not … Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, Management, Manufacturing, Statistics | 2 Comments

Permanent Innovation

Posted on August 31, 2006 by John Hunter

Langdon Morris has written a new book: Permanent Innovation [the broken link was removed]. There is a blog [the broken link was removed] and web site too. The book builds upon his article, Business Model Warfare: Furthermore, the core of … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Innovation, Systems thinking | Comments Off on Permanent Innovation