Kaizen: continuous improvement

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Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David J. Anderson

airport security, anti-pattern, business intelligence, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, continuous integration, corporate governance, database schema, domain-specific language, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, performance metric, six sigma, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

I was unaware that Taiichi Ohno, one of the creators of the Toyota Production System had said, “The two pillars of the Toyota production system are just-in-time and automation with a human touch, or autonomation. The tool used to operate the system is kanban.” In other words, kanban is fundamental to the kaizen (“continuous improvement”) process used at Toyota. It is the mechanism that makes it work. I have come to recognize this as a complete truth through my experiences over the five years since. Luckily, Don made a convincing argument that I should switch from Drum-Buffer-Rope implementations to a kanban system for the highly esoteric reason that a kanban system makes a more graceful recovery from an outage in the bottleneck station than Drum-Buffer-Rope system does.

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The motivation for pursuing a pull-system approach was two-fold: to find a systematic way to achieve a sustainable pace of work, and to find an approach to introducing process changes that would meet with minimal resistance. Kanban is the mechanism that underpins the Toyota Production System and its kaizen approach to continuous improvement. The first virtual kanban system for software engineering was implemented at Microsoft beginning in 2004. Results from early Kanban implementations were encouraging with regard to achieving sustainable pace, minimizing resistance to change through an incremental evolutionary approach, and producing significant economic benefits.

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Significant improvements are possible by managing bottlenecks, eliminating waste, and reducing the variability that affects customer expectations and satisfaction. Changes can take time to take full effect. This first case study took 15 months to enact. Chapter 5: A Continuous Improvement Culture In Japanese, the word kaizen literally means “continuous improvement.” A workplace culture where the entire workforce is focused on continually improving quality, productivity, and customer satisfaction is known as a “kaizen culture.” Very few businesses have actually achieved such a culture. Companies like Toyota, where employee participation in their improvement program is close to 100 percent, and where, on average, each employee gets one suggestion implemented every year as part of on-going improvement, are very rare.

Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations by Garr Reynolds

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Hans Rosling, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

His point was that printed documents from a presentation tool tend to have less content and less clarity, and yet use more paper, more ink, and more time to produce. In the context of a challenging economy and an atmosphere of reducing costs, what would you say of any business practice that (1) takes more time, (2) costs more money, and yet (3) is less effective? In the spirit of kaizen (continuous improvement), even if the waste is small, it must be eliminated. Don’t confuse slides with documents The difference between slides and documents may be obvious to you. But for many people, it is not. Visuals projected onscreen in support of a live talk are very different from material created for print to be read and analyzed.

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But in the end, it’s always up to us to learn it, and most of our learning now is a result of our own efforts and our lifelong commitment to continuous improvement through education outside the classroom. Long-Term Improvement: Kaizen The Japanese term kaizen () means “improvement,” literally change + good. In relation to business processes, however, kaizen more closely resembles “continuous improvement.” Kaizen is rooted in the principles of total quality management brought to Japan after World War II by statistician W. Edwards Deming and others. Kaizen is key to the steady improvement and innovation of successful companies in Japan such as Toyota. In the book The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation (Free Press, 2006), author Matthew May says, “Kaizen is one of those magical concepts that is at once a philosophy, a principle, a practice, and a tool.”

The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides by Garr Reynolds

death from overwork, deliberate practice, fear of failure, Hans Rosling, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, mirror neurons, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

When you empty your mind of your prejudices, pride, and fear, you become open to the possibilities. 6. Commit to (continuous) growth. Bamboo plants are among the fastest-growing in the world. It does not matter who you are—or where you are today—you have amazing potential for growth. I often speak of kaizen (continuous improvement that is more steady and incremental), where big leaps and bounds are not necessary. Yet even with a commitment to continuous learning and improvement, our growth—like the growth of bamboo—can be quite remarkable when we look back at what or where we used to be. Even though the bamboo outside my window grows quite rapidly, I do not notice its growth from day to day.

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See also visuals imagination, stimulating, 158 “impatient optimists,” 188 improvement, 188 improvisation, leaving room for, 121 information determining amount of, 40 sharing via stories, 47 interested vs. interesting, 105 international audience, speaking to, 170–171 interruptions, avoiding during preparation, 30–31 interviews for jobs, expressing true self in, 77–79 J Japanese bath (ofuro), 5, 20–23 Japanese forest, seven lessons from, 70–73 Japanese hot springs (onsen), 5– 6 jazz, comparing to presentations, 8– 9, 11, 121 job interviews, expressing true self in, 77–79 Jobs, Steve, 75, 117, 139, 148–151 jounetsu (passion), 100 judo (the way of gentleness), 190 The Naked Presenter Wow! eBook <WoweBook.Com> K N kaizen (continuous improvement, 72 Kanji, 100 karoshi (death by overwork), 47 Kashima Shin School, 124 Kawasaki, Guy, 81 Keynote technology, 9 keynote, presentation tips from, 148– 151. See also presentations Ki (life force), 176 Kodo: Ancient Ways, 71 Nakamura, Masa, 112 naked approach, explained, 10 naked relationship, (hadaka no tsukiai), 5– 6 natural delivery, 25 natural expression of self, 13–14 naturalness, 6 of childhood, 195 speaking with, 7–8 nature Japanese affection for, 6–7 learning from, 6 negatives, overcoming in stories, 44 Negroponte, Nicholas, 129–130 nervousness, avoiding mention of, 74 Newman, Paul, 76–77 notes overcoming dependence on, 15–16 using, 54 Novel aspect of PUNCH, 66– 67 numbers, interpreting, 150, 153 L lavalier mic, considering, 86–87 learning by doing, 144– 145 process of, 72, 111 role of play in, 123 lectern, presenting from, 116 life force (ki), 176 Life in Three Easy Lessons, 176 lifelong learning (shogai gakushu), 186 lights, leaving on, 88 Lusensky, Jakob, 85 M Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, 164 Marsalis, Wynton, 8, 11 martial way (budo), 124 masks, removing, 21 material, knowing, 121 Maui photo of girl, 122–123 Road to Hana, 48 warning sign, 48 McKee, Robert, 43–44, 46 Medina, John, 32, 40, 108, 137–138 memory and emotions, 108 microphone, considering, 86 Mifune, Kyuzo, 190–191 mirror neurons, 110–112 mistakes, overcoming, 119 Miwa, Yoshida, 112 monotone, impact on speeches, 139 Monta Method, 157 Moon, Richard, 176 moving audiences, 34 moving with purpose, 83– 84 multitasking myth, 32 O ofuro (Japanese bath), 5, 20–23 onsen (Japanese hot springs), 5– 6 O-sensei (great teacher), 175 outline, introducing, 75 outside onsen (roten-buro), 21 P pace attention and need for change, 137–138 changing, 140–143 changing for speaking, 159 varying, 136–140 varying in keynotes, 151 participation, 144 asking for volunteers, 156 asking questions, 152 audience activity, 144– 145 building with hands, 156 conducting brainstorming activities, 155 discussion groups, 157 encouraging, 152, 154– 159 showing visuals, 154 sketching ideas, 156 stimulating imaginations, 158 Index 203 Wow!

Agile Project Management with Kanban (Developer Best Practices) by Eric Brechner

Amazon Web Services, cloud computing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data science, DevOps, don't repeat yourself, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, loose coupling, minimum viable product, pull request, software as a service

Examples of improvements include a more rigorous acceptance criteria definition, modification of development practices such as code review or unit testing procedures, testing in a staging area that mirrors production, or including a user acceptance test stage before releasing to a wider audience. The act of practicing continuous improvement is often called kaizen in Lean and Agile development circles. Note Kaizen is a Japanese term meaning “good change,” but it is often translated as “continuous improvement,” particularly in the business world. Kaizen involves observing a problem, ideally with metrics such as cycle time, determining the root cause of the problem, making a change to address it, monitoring and measuring the results, and infinitely repeating.

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Use quick-solve meetings to rapidly reduce the queue of escalations that do not require code changes. Implement a SE workflow using Kanban. Track escalations in the top half of the signboard and bugs and other code work in the lower half of the signboard. Clearly define your done rules for the Kanban workflow. Practice kaizen (continuous improvement) by doing root-cause analysis when bugs are fixed to prevent similar errors in the future. Use work-item management tools where necessary, but give preference to a physical signboard. Tools that integrate the customer-support system and engineering work- item tracking systems can help.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

It’s a process that never ends, but the result is a system that is, most of the time anyway, predictable and consistent. “We’d do a lot of work to eliminate the root cause of a problem and then go into the kaizen, continuous improvement work, to eliminate the reason why things would be unpredictable,” says Marc. For people who don’t speak Japanese, the language of kaizen and lean production systems can seem like incantations. Instead of waste, practitioners of lean talk about muda. Instead of continuous improvement, kaizen. When a production line stops automatically because of an irregularity, that’s jidoka. Kanban is the scheduling system unique to lean production.

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A job posting for a health and safety manager at Amazon UK includes, under preferred qualifications: “You possess experience of Lean, 5S and Kaizen methodologies.” (5S is yet another name for lean.) Another posting for a site manager at Amazon Air in the United States begins: “By leveraging lean principles and kaizens, you will lead continuous improvement initiatives.” In a “fireside chat” in 2012, Jeff Bezos related this story, which by his account occurred in 2007 or 2008, soon after Marc arrived at Amazon: “I was in a fulfillment center . . . and we were doing a kaizen training session with a Japanese consultant . . . He was from the Toyota school of kaizen . . .

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

And since expanding workers’ range of knowledge and job flexibility required much greater investment in job training, employees received more than five times as many training hours under NUMMI (some on company time, some on their own) as they had under General Motors. Another big change was that the new management introduced the then unheard-of Japanese practice of kaizen: continuous improvement. With Toyota in charge, even the very lowest-ranking assembly-line worker could raise and vet proposals for improvements, which, if approved, became standard procedure. After a few years, Toyota introduced Problem Solving Circles, volunteer brainstorming sessions conducted informally, over lunch, which was provided by the company (never underestimate the power of free food).

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

One of the biggest differences, it turned out, between the two companies was that at Toyota, “when a worker makes a suggestion that saves money, he gets a bonus of a few hundred dollars or so. Everyone’s expected to be looking for ways to improve the production process. All the time. This is the Japanese concept of kaizen, continuous improvement.” One American GM worker was part of a group that traveled to Japan to try building cars on the Toyota assembly line, and the difference in the experience stunned him: I can’t remember any time in my working life where anybody asked for my ideas to solve the problem. And they literally want to know.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

But to create truly remarkable work, the most important factors were the same intrinsic factors cited by Deci and Csikszentmihalyi. W. Edwards Deming made the same argument in his work with Japanese firms, advocating creating more intrinsic motivation as the route to quality and continual improvement. His work, which was eventually brought over to America in the form of kaizen (or continuous improvement), created billions of dollars in value for companies around the world.56 What Deming, Deci, Herzberg, and Csikszentmihalyi all found can be summed up in two statements: We are naturally predisposed to be growing, goal-seeking, striving creatures. By following that impulse we can create more valuable work.

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest by Ted Seides

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, business cycle, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, diversification, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fake news, family office, fixed income, high net worth, hindsight bias, impact investing, implied volatility, impulse control, index fund, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Lean Startup, loss aversion, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, zero-sum game

The pump intake was clogged with metal shavings. 5. Why was the intake clogged with metal shavings? Because there was no filter on the pump. Each question in Ohno’s example mirrors a piece of the answer to a previous question. The Five Whys is rooted in the Japanese concept of kaizen, or continuous improvement. 2. Favorite questions Allocators investigate the key drivers of a manager’s success as they move along in the process. Some popular topics explore a manager’s incentives, competitive advantage, self-awareness, culture, competitive landscape, and expectations. Allocators cleverly ask simple questions, hiding the in-depth thought process that qualifies the answers.

Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

Start by Leaning on Lean If you are going to transform how your operations organization works, you might as well leverage a proven body of transformational knowledge. The Lean manufacturing movement has produced a wealth of design patterns and techniques5 that we can apply to improve any work process. In particular, it is the principle of Kaizen (which roughly translates to “continuous improvement”), born from the Toyota Production System, that speeds transformations and drives an organization’s ability to learn continuously. To bring Kaizen to an organization, there is a method called Kata, also based on Toyota Production System. Kata is an excellent methodology to apply to the challenge of eliminating toil, silos, and request queues.

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., We love interrupts and the torrents of information interviewing (job interviews), Interviewing Site Reliability Engineers-Final Thoughts on Interviewing SREsadvice for hiring managers, Advice for Hiring Managers and persons with mental disorders, Interviewing basics, Interviewing 101-The Funnel biases in, Biases funnel basics, The Funnel funnels, SRE Funnels-Final Thoughts on Interviewing SREs industry vs. university candidate profiles, Industry Versus University onsite interview, The Onsite Interview phone screens, Phone Screens selling candidates on your organization, Selling candidates take-home questions, Take-Home Questions walking away from a candidate, Walking away IPython, Installing Python, IPython, and Jupyter Notebook isolationand data durability, Isolation-Operational isolation logical, Logical isolation of failure domains, Isolated failure domains operational, Operational isolation-Operational isolation physical, Physical isolation J Jansson, Mattias, SRE Without SRE, SRE Without SRE: The Spotify Case Study-The Future: Speed at Scale, Safely job application/hiring processas funnel process, The Funnel benefits for applicants with mental disorders, Benefits-Benefits compensation and applicants with mental disorders, Compensation for persons with mental disorders, Interviewing interviewing SREs (see interviewing) onboarding packets, Onboarding job duties, for persons with mental disorders, Job Duties job function, on-call as, Application job postings, Application Joblint, Application Johnston, Bennie, Replies joint cognitive system (JCS), SREs Are Cognitive Agents Working in a Joint Cognitive System, Focus on Making Automation a Team Player in SRE Work Jones, Matt, Replies Jupyter Notebook, Installing Python, IPython, and Jupyter Notebook K Kaizen (continuous improvement), Start by Leaning on Lean-Start by Leaning on Lean Kanban, Unify Backlogs and Protect Capacity Kanwar, Pranay, Replies Kasparov, Garry, From Chess to Go: How Deep Can We Dive? Kata method, Start by Leaning on Lean-Start by Leaning on Lean Kelvin, Lord (William Thomson), From SysAdmin to SRE in 8,963 Words, Where Did SRE Come From?

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

But it remains most effective—indeed, necessary—in the massive and complex business of making cars, where every step in global supply chains is an opportunity for defects and inefficiencies to work into the system. One of the best known and most fundamental principles of lean manufacturing culture is kaizen, or continuous improvement. This goes in hand with another core value, long-term perspective. Both of these principles are part of Toyota’s managerial approach, called the Toyota Way. Not only are these principles the best method to improve performance in a business as large and complex as an automaker, they are also the only way to build a successful culture.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

Thanks to misguided acquisitions and persistently high costs in the United States, the division constantly struggled to turn a profit. But McNerney found other ways to ingratiate himself with Welch. In the mid-1990s, McNerney became one of the most zealous champions of Six Sigma, a new quality improvement methodology that Welch was pushing on the company. Inspired by the Japanese notion of kaizen, or continuous improvement, Six Sigma used a complex system of feedback and buzzwords to try and root out any lingering vestiges of inefficiency. Whether it actually helped or just created a lot of paperwork was a subject of fierce debate. But during Welch’s heyday, championing Six Sigma was a must for executives hoping to stay in the boss’s good graces, and McNerney embraced the cause with gusto.

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life by Jim Benson, Tonianne Demaria Barry

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Bluma Zeigarnik, corporate governance, Howard Rheingold, intangible asset, job satisfaction, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Ken Thompson, pattern recognition, performance metric, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Lean is both a philosophy and a discipline which, at its core, increases access to information to ensure responsible decision making in the service of creating value. With increased access to information people feel more respected, teams are more motivated, and waste is reduced. Much of this waste reduction comes from Lean’s goal of a “kaizen” culture. Kaizen is a state of continuous improvement where people naturally look for ways to improve poorly performing practices. Personal Kanban facilitates kaizen. When we visualize our work, we adopt a kaizen mindset; we are weened from the comfort of complacency and actively seek out opportunities for improvement. Our brains become sensitized to patterns of waste and ineffectiveness.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

Agile methods have been at the heart of modern technology’s growth. While hardware advances have enabled more sophisticated software, such software would not exist without the particular working processes and collaboration methods that bind tech companies together. These processes that enable companies to run lean draw upon gemba kaizen, or the art of continuous improvement, pioneered by Japanese management consultants. Gemba kaizen emphasizes cutting away waste, and ensuring that workers and managers are aligned, decreasing miscommunications and wasted time, known as “thrash.” Originally used as a working process in Japanese manufacturing, agile methods in software are now spilling back over into other industries.

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

ADDING CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT While these successful acquisitions were building out scale and complexity, there was a separate effort going on internally to build more value from the purchased companies and create more sustainable competitive advantages for United Rentals as a whole. In 2013, the company began a series of kaizen events, a move pitched to Flannery by the employee base. This was the beginning of a formal process of continuous improvement and the creation of a true business system. Although some of the methods of continuous improvement come directly from manufacturing, as a tool it can be applied to anything. In the end, anyone can still dump in capital and attempt to replicate some of the scale that United Rentals has built, though it’s much harder now.

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However, the competitive edge afforded by doing thousands of things just a little bit better is hard to match. It began with eight kaizen events at eight branches. The response was hugely positive. Employee engagement in the process was strong, and soon the company was running kaizen events in every district. Above all, continuous improvement fundamentally needs employee engagement, but it is also a managed process, implemented by line managers and unlikely to catch hold without strong support from senior leadership. All the district managers at the company spent 30 percent of their time in the first six months on kaizens and on managing improvement.

The Talent Code: Greatest Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How by Daniel Coyle

Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, deliberate practice, experimental subject, impulse control, Kaizen: continuous improvement, longitudinal study, Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more an organization embraces the core principles of ignition, deep practice, and master coaching, the more myelin it will build, the more success it will have. Thirty years ago Toyota was a middling-size car company. Now it is the world's largest automaker. Most analysts attribute Toyota's success to its strategy of kaizen, which is Japanese for “continuous improvement” and which just as easily could be called corporate deep practice. Kaizen is the process of finding and improving small problems. Each employee, from the janitor on up, has authority to halt the production line if they spot a problem. (Each factory has pull cords on the factory floor, called andons.)

The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love With the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams by Tommy Baker

Cal Newport, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs

Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high-quality product or service, everyday progress—even a small win—can make all the difference in how they feel and perform.” This can’t be overstated. It is the basis of the ethos behind the 1% Rule. The 1% Rule stems from this principle and combines it with the Japanese philosophy of kaizen. This philosophy is about continuous improvement over the long haul. These two come together to create undeniable daily micro-progress. When combined with consistency and time, the compound effect takes over and we not only achieve the most audacious of goals, we go above and beyond our wildest dreams. The 1% Rule: 1% progress + daily application (consistency) + persistence (focus) + time (endurance) = success.

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

3 In some jobs, it is very hard to see the effects of one’s work. On an assembly line, a worker is just one cog in a huge production machine, and her role in the final product may be small. No wonder modern management techniques try to make each worker feel important both individually and as part of a team: the Japanese kaizen system of continuous improvement, for example, involves all workers in making changes to enhance productivity, no matter how small the changes might be. Many jobs in a competitive, arm’s-length financial system are problematic for two reasons: First, like the worker on an assembly line, the broker who sells bonds issued by an electric power project rarely sees the electricity that is produced: she has little sense of any material result of her labors.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, Jj Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, business cycle, call centre, clean water, death of newspapers, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, pets.com, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, work culture

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Step by step you get ahead. You build discipline by preparing for fast spurts.” —CHARLIE MUNGER It’s about commitment. It’s about steady and sustained improvement, versus sporadic effort that fizzles out. The term I like for it is “kaizen,” which is a Japanese word referring to the process of continuous improvement. The idea of kaizen is that big results come from many small changes accumulated over time. My challenge to you is to increase your income by 3 percent each month, at least for the first couple of years of your 5 Day Weekend journey. This becomes a 38.4 percent increase in income at the end of your first year.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

It’s little wonder that Toyota is now the world’s largest and most valuable automotive manufacturer.4 Small helpful or harmful behaviors and inputs tend to Accumulate over time, producing huge results. According to Lean Thinking by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, Toyota’s approach is based on the Japanese concept of kaizen, which emphasizes the continual improvement of a system by eliminating muda (waste) via a lot of very small changes. Many small improvements, consistently implemented, inevitably produce huge results. Accumulation isn’t always positive. Think of what would happen to your body if you consumed nothing but fast food, candy bars, and soda for a decade.

Kanban in Action by Marcus Hammarberg, Joakim Sunden

Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, continuous integration, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Lean Startup, performance metric, place-making, systems thinking, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Two Sigma

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

British Rail by Christian Wolmar

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Beeching cuts, book value, Boris Johnson, COVID-19, driverless car, full employment, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, vertical integration, éminence grise

They also reflected an interest in learning some of the secrets of Japan’s ‘economic miracle’, including her enthusiasm for keiretsu (loose but effective conglomerate holding companies), the obsession with quality, first advanced by [the noted management consultant guru] Edwards Deming, and the kaizen (continuous process) approach to management-led improvement.6 In other words, British Rail was at the forefront of contemporary modern management thinking. In terms of staffing, one of the biggest effects of OfQ was to reduce the number of staff working at headquarters to just 640 from 17,000, most of whom were redeployed to the sectors, although there were a few redundancies.

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The modern, flexible Japanese kind relies on just-in-time delivery of parts and on workers capable of doing a number of different tasks. The system, introduced in Toyota factories, combined elements of American practices with indigenous approaches and original ideas (Fujimoto 1999). The Toyota production system (kaizen) rested on continuous product improvement and dedication to the best achievable continuous quality control. Again, the fundamental commonality of all of these actions is minimizing energy waste. The availability of inexpensive electricity has also created new metal-producing and electrochemical industries. Electricity allowed the large-scale smelting of aluminum by the electrolytic reduction of alumina (Al2O3) dissolved in an electrolyte, mainly cryolite (Na3AlF6).

The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance by Jim Whitehurst

Airbnb, behavioural economics, cloud computing, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google Hangouts, Infrastructure as a Service, job satisfaction, Kaizen: continuous improvement, market design, meritocracy, Network effects, new economy, place-making, platform as a service, post-materialism, profit motive, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh

Over time, we’ve observed that this methodology not only reduces the risk of bugs, but also leads to greater innovation. It turns out that making many small improvements continuously ultimately creates more innovation. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. One key tenet of modern manufacturing process methodologies, like kaizen or lean, is to continually focus on small, iterative improvements. As Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, comments about open source: “Because anyone can try anything, the projects that fail, fail quickly, but the people working on those projects can migrate just as quickly to the things that are visibly working. Unlike the business landscape, where companies have an incentive to hide both successes (for reasons of competitive advantage) and failures (to forestall any perception of weakness), open source projects advertise their successes and get failure for free.”8 Like so many other aspects of its management system, Red Hat has adopted this same principle for internal initiatives.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

However, one intriguing shift that suggests there are limits to automation was the recent decision by Toyota to systematically put working humans back into the manufacturing process. In quality and manufacturing on a mass scale, Toyota has been a global leader in automation technologies based on the corporate philosophy of kaizen (Japanese for “good change”) or continuous improvement. After pushing its automation processes toward lights-out manufacturing, the company realized that automated factories do not improve themselves. Once Toyota had extraordinary craftsmen that were known as Kami-sama, or “gods” who had the ability to make anything, according to Toyota president Akio Toyoda.49 The craftsmen also had the human ability to act creatively and thus improve the manufacturing process.

Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

Instead, embrace the surprising plasticity of the human brain and keep learning, evolving, and improving. This concept is similar to the Japanese concept of Kaizen or “good change” which was a key ingredient in the superior quality and productivity of the Japanese automakers as they eclipsed North American car makers in the 1980s. With Kaizen or Growth Mindset (aka, continuous improvement), you always look to make incremental positive changes and continue to grow. Without a growth mindset, this book is not going to help you much because you will wrongly believe that many of the traits, strengths, and weaknesses you possess are fixed or too difficult to change.

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Benchmark Capital, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

While Russell had proved himself over the years and deserved to be rewarded for his successes, he would have control of the team only if he continued his winning ways and won the America’s Cup again, this time for Oracle Team USA. In the first two campaigns, Larry had operated under the Japanese business principle kaizen, a term used to describe continuous improvement or incremental change through constant work. Larry was starting over with someone who had never lost an America’s Cup race. “I tried kaizen,” Larry said, “It didn’t work. So we’re making radical changes, starting with a new leader for our team.” The two losses had taught many lessons.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Many of these deployments are of experimental features that may be rolled back or further modified. The capability to roll something back easily makes failure cheap and pushes decision making further down into the organization. Much of this work is completely automated. Hal Varian calls this “computer kaizen,” referring to the Japanese term for continuous improvement. “Just as mass production changed the way products were assembled and continuous improvement changed how manufacturing was done,” he writes, “continuous experimentation . . . improve[s] the way we optimize business processes in our organizations.” But DevOps also brings higher reliability and better responsiveness to customers.

The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt, Dave Thomas

A Pattern Language, Broken windows theory, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, continuous integration, database schema, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, Grace Hopper, higher-order functions, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Menlo Park, MVC pattern, off-by-one error, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, revision control, Schrödinger's Cat, slashdot, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, systems thinking, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, traveling salesman, urban decay, Y2K

asked the tourist. "Absolutely," replied the gardener. "Do that for 500 years and you'll have a nice lawn, too." Great lawns need small amounts of daily care, and so do great programmers. Management consultants like to drop the word kaizen in conversations. "Kaizen" is a Japanese term that captures the concept of continuously making many small improvements. It was considered to be one of the main reasons for the dramatic gains in productivity and quality in Japanese manufacturing and was widely copied throughout the world. Kaizen applies to individuals, too. Every day, work to refine the skills you have and to add new tools to your repertoire.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It requires a tremendous amount of patience, consistency, dedication, and a deep conviction in the power of compounding. One Small Step at a Time One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer is one of my favorite books. It talks about the power of compounding small daily positive actions. This small book talks about the big idea of kaizen, which is Japanese for “taking small steps for continual improvement.” The difference between those who fail and those who succeed is the courage to act—repeatedly. Most people, when faced with change, will feel at least some element of fear. Very often that fear can get in the way of actually making the change. The idea of kaizen is to make such small changes in your life that your brain doesn’t even realize that you are trying to change and therefore doesn’t get in the way.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Within a couple of years its founders refashioned it as an operational firm modeled on Toyota. Japanese firms were outperforming their American counterparts by large margins at the time, achieving impressive productivity on shop floors. Process improvement was the rage, terms like lean manufacturing and kaizen the buzzwords. Danaher embraced it all, and then some. Lean processes and continuous improvement became part of the company’s famous toolkit, the Danaher Business System, which it refined and enlarged during the next three decades and applied relentlessly across the businesses it acquired, “Danaherizing” them by sending managers at all levels through DBS training.

Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud by Jack Ewing

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 1960s counterculture, Asilomar, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, business logic, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, crossover SUV, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, McMansion, military-industrial complex, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis

Long an admirer of the Japanese, Piëch set about copying their manufacturing methods in much the same way that his grandfather had copied Ford when planning the Volkswagenwerk in the 1930s. New factories in Mosel, in East Germany, and in Martorell, a Spanish city near Barcelona, presented blank slates where Piëch could try out Japanese-style production methods. Under Piëch, Volkswagen copied the Toyota kaizen system of assembly line teams, where all workers were encouraged to continually look for ways to improve quality or save time and money. For example, female workers in a Volkswagen upholstery department complained that it was difficult to pull the covers over headrests. After employees and supervisors met to discuss the problem, someone found an unused machine that was modified to compress the foam padding on the headrest, so the cover could be pulled on faster and with less effort.