Category Archives: Innovation

The Components of Genius

Posted on March 19, 2013 by John Hunter

Wonderful poster, by Grant Snider, on the question: what is genius. Related: Comic About Programers – You Have to Find What You Love To Do – Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation – Interruptions Can Severely Damage Performance

Posted in Creativity, Fun, Innovation | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Accept Taking Risks, Don’t Blithely Accept Failure Though

Posted on February 13, 2013 by John Hunter

For discussion by ASQ’s Influential Voices this month, Paul Borawski looks at Risk, Failure & Careers in Quality. There is a bias toward avoiding the possibility of failure by avoiding actions which may lead to failure or even any action at all. This is a problem. The need in so many organizations to avoid failure means wise actions are avoided because there is a risk of failure. Many times the criticism of such cultures however gets a bit sloppy, in … Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, Management, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

New Deadly Diseases

Posted on August 29, 2012 by John Hunter

Management and the economy keep evolving. Many good things happen. In the last decade the best things are probably the increased deep adoption of lean thinking in many organizations and the adoption of lean and Deming methods in software development (agile software development, kanban and lean startup [which I do realize isn’t limited to software development]). Sadly all the deadly diseases Dr. Deming described remain. And, as I said in 2007, I think 2 new diseases have become so widespread … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Economics, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, quote, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

You’ve Got to Find What You Love

Posted on October 5, 2011 by John Hunter

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Education, Fun, Innovation, Psychology, quote | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

The Need to Improve Management While Building Organizations Fit For Human Beings

Posted on September 29, 2011 by John Hunter

[embedded video link broken, so that code was removed but you can watch the video by following this link: Gary Hamel: Reinventing the Technology of Human Accomplishment. I agree with Gary Hamel that we need to adopt new management strategies. I happen to believe most of new strategies we need to adopt have been known for decades, we just fail to implement many of them. He argues it is hard to retain knowledge advantages (within companies). I agree. However execution … Continue reading →

Posted in Competition, Deming, Innovation, Management, Respect, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Sometimes Micro-managing Works

Posted on April 27, 2011 by John Hunter

Sometimes micro-managing works. That doesn’t mean it is a good strategy to replicate. If you benchmark Apple you might decide that you should have a tyrannical obsessive involved CEO who is directly involved in every detail of products and services. After all Apple is now the second most valuable company in the world with a market capitalization of $324 billion (Exxon Mobil is the top at $433 billion) and a huge part of that is Steve Jobs. Nice quote from … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, Innovation, Management | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Customer Focus and Internet Travel Search

Posted on March 24, 2011 by John Hunter

The internet should make finding airline flight information easy. Instead it is a huge pain. Hipmunk has taken on the challenge of doing this well, and I think they have done a great job. This video provides an excellent view of both web usability and customer focus. This is a great example of focusing on providing customer value and using technology to make things easy – which is done far to little at most companies. Related: Innovation Example (Farecast – … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, Innovation, IT, Management, Process improvement | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Learn by Seeking Knowledge – Not Just from Mistakes

Posted on March 7, 2011 by John Hunter

Being open to new ideas and new knowledge is what is needed to learn. Experimenting, seeking out new knowledge is even better. You can be successful and see an even better way to do things and learn from it. This seems the best way to learn to me – not to just learn from mistakes. Of course this means your goal has to be improvement not just avoiding more mistakes than before. Your actions are based on theories (often unconsciously): … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Creativity, Deming, Innovation, Process improvement, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted

Posted on December 6, 2010 by John Hunter

Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them. In fact, I believe most potential improvements efforts may well fail even before they start because people can’t get past this problem. I believe the way … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, Popular, Process improvement, Psychology, Quality tools, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

Annual Performance Reviews Are Obsolete

Posted on November 15, 2010 by John Hunter

Sam Goodner, the CEO of Catapult Systems, wrote about his decision to eliminate the annual performance appraisal [the broken link was removed]. the most critical flaw of our old process was that the feedback itself was too infrequent and too far removed from the actual behavior to have any measurable impact on employee performance. … I decided to completely eliminate of our annual performance review process and replace it with a real-time performance feedback dashboard.” I think this is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, IT, Management, Performance Appraisal | Tagged , , , ,

Why Don’t Football Players Just Thrown the Ball Out of Bounds to Stop the Clock

Posted on October 24, 2010 by John Hunter

I have never understood why players don’t lateral the ball out of bounds to stop the clock in pro or college football in the USA. If time is running out and the player is tackled in bounds the clock keeps running and time can expire. You can stop the clock by running out of bounds. Also if the ball goes out of bounds the clock is stopped. I figured maybe there was some rule against just throwing the ball out … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Change How Your Business Changes

Posted on September 13, 2010 by John Hunter

[They seem to have broken the webcast so I have delete it. How sad it is how poor a job well financed organizations to at maintaining what they put online.] John Kotter believes technology and globalization are requiring us to change more rapidly. “It is very difficult to innovate without requiring people to do something different.” If an organization culture is mainly avoiding making anyone uncomfortable, innovation and improvement are quite difficult. Improvement is required to stay in business today. … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation | Tagged , ,

Frugal Innovation

Posted on June 9, 2010 by John Hunter

First break all the rules The device is a masterpiece of simplification. The multiple buttons on conventional ECGs have been reduced to just four. The bulky printer has been replaced by one of those tiny gadgets used in portable ticket machines. The whole thing is small enough to fit into a small backpack and can run on batteries as well as on the mains. This miracle of compression sells for $800, instead of $2,000 for a conventional ECG … Frugal … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, India, Innovation, quote | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Net Neutrality, Policy, Economics and Intelligent Engineering

Posted on April 13, 2010 by John Hunter

I believe net neutrality should be championed to prevent decay of the usability of the internet. It seems to me internet connectivity is a natural monopoly that economic theory says should be a regulated monopoly. Smart countries have invested in providing much better internet connectivity that the USA has at much lower prices. Now in the USA we have companies that seek to control internet connectivity and then use that monopolistic control to favor higher margin efforts. So force those … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Google, Innovation, IT | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Toyota’s Journey to Lean Software Development

Posted on March 18, 2010 by John Hunter

Toyota’s journey from Waterfall to Lean software development by Henrik Kniberg Toyota builds cars (duh). In the past that didn’t involve much software, and the little software that was needed was mostly developed by suppliers and embedded in isolated components. Toyota assembled them and didn’t much care about the software inside. But “The importance of automatic electronic control system has been increasing dramatically year by year” said Ishii-san. A modern car is pretty much a computer on wheels! In a … Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, IT, Lean thinking, Management, Quality tools, Software Development, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , , ,

Observations of a New Googler

Posted on February 6, 2010 by John Hunter

Some interesting thoughts from a new Google engineer, Things I’ve learned at Google so far I would describe Google’s culture as “creative chaos”. There was some confusion about where I was supposed to be when I started. This resulted in the following phone call, “Hello?”, “Hello Ben, this is Conner (that’s my new manager), where are you?” “Mountain View.” “Why are you there?” “Because this is where the recruiter said to go.” “Good answer! Nice of them to tell me. … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Google, Innovation, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments