Noise Between Stations

“There can be no successful monozukuri (making thing) without hito-zukuri (making people).” from the The Toyota Production System.

More notes from Flying High: “You can call every day to United and get a different price (for a ticket). The reality is you get nickel-and-dimed. And more importantly, the customer thinks ‘You’re screwing me.’ So it’s better to just ask one price. You want to keep the service offerings very simple. The whole key [...]

Just finished James Wynbrandt’s Flying High: How JetBlue Founder and CEO David Neeleman Beats the Competition… Even in the World’s Most Turbulent Industry. I’d give it 3 stars out of 5 for being engaging enough to finish (something I rarely do anymore) and educational while a little light in critical point of view. Wynbrandt is [...]

It turns out that intense, long-term cardio training actually enlarges the heart and therefore the amount of oxygen-rich blood that can be delivered to the muscles, according to this long-term study at the University of Texas… Lance Armstrong…improved his cycling efficiency by a phenomenal 8% as he matured from age 21-28 years… There is no [...]

If you’ve only seen Gordon Ramsay as the Donald Trump figure in Hell’s Kitchen, you’re missing out on what he really has to teach. In Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC he goes into a slumping restaurant and tries to turn it around in one week. As a manager he can see the whole system: kitchen, [...]

I’ve found the Agile Development community has a lot in common with the user-centered design community, and their methods — especially the spirit of them — is closely aligned. In case you haven’t been following their evolution, many different methods from Scrum to Extreme Programming sprang up and, seeing commonalities among them, the founders came [...]

I’ve heard some skepticism towards business design, which is healthy and quite justified given that no one has shown concrete examples of it yet. One reason for this is that examples are difficult to describe; the application of design thinking to business situations is highly contextual and — as the name states — has much [...]

Strong Lattes, Sour Notes at Starbucks: Starbucks’ adventures in media bars aren’t playing out as planned BusinessWeek, June 20, 2005 At Starbucks, a Blend of Coffee And Music Creates a Potent Mix: Chain Boosts Sales and Careers As It Co-Produces, Offers Selected CDs in Its Stores Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2005

I was just thinking it would be great to have summaries of all those books I’ll never get to read, and of course someone has done that already. But this company is emphasizing the variety of formats they offer, when I bet business people would most prefer a bound collection of these published once per [...]

Given the destructive human rights situation in China, how do we decide to interact with companies there? I don’t think no action is a choice; the sheer amount of influence the Western world and China exerts on each other through commerce alone makes it impossible for any one person or company to remain unaffected. Free [...]

In all the hoo-hah about China’s economy we almost never hear of the human rights situation there anymore. The reason is not that the situation has vastly improved, in fact it’s compared to South Africa’s apartheid. I’m reminded of economic bubbles past when big money clouded our view of everything behind it. Human Rights Watch [...]

In GM’s Design Push Picks Up Speed David Welch profiles Bob Lutz’s struggle to balance the priorities of accounting, engineering and design in an enterprise. This bit pressed the clutch down in my brain: One of the first things Lutz did on arriving in September, 2001, was push designers and engineers to stop fighting and [...]

Tom Peters just released his Re-Imagine Manifesto, Tomato TomA[h]to (.pdf) which captures the spirit of the book series and probably most of what he’s saying these days (and how he’s saying it). Such as… They say, “If it can’t be precisely measured then it isn’t real.” [And I suppose if it can be measured it [...]

An AIGA/Apple Store event… As designers, we have an extraordinary capacity to help any organization rethink and reinvent itself from within. Yet many of us unwittingly limit ourselves — by assuming that our value is limited to adding design at the end of strategic thinking, as a byproduct, or by focusing too much on artifacts, [...]

Karl, in The hidden value in Netflix, points out that Netflix has… 345 Million movie ratings… Netflix gains a valuable resource that is hard to duplicate, that is almost the dictionary definition of a “strategic resource”, or a resource that can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage. Now Netflix is going beyond recommendations in using [...]