Toyota Production System

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Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production by Taiichi Ohno, Norman Bodek

book value, business cycle, Ford Model T, inventory management, Kanban, Toyota Production System

And kanban is the means used for conveying information about picking up or receiving the production order. Kanban will be described later in detail. Here, I want the reader to understand the basic posture of the Toyota production system. The system is supported by the just-in-time system, already discussed, and autonomation, described in the next section. The kanban method is the means by which the Toyota production system moves smoothly. ► Give the Machine Intelligence The other pillar of the Toyota production system is called autonomation - not to be confused with simple automation. It is also known as automation with a human touch. Many machines operate by themselves once the switch is turned on.

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When one looks up, the andon (the line stop indication board) comes into view, showing the location and nature of trouble situations at a glance. Furthermore, boxes containing parts brought to the side of the production line arrive with an attached kanban, the visual symbol of the Toyota production system. Here, however, I want to discuss the standard work sheet as a means of visual control, which is how the Toyota production system is managed. Standard work sheets and the information contained in them are important elements of the Toyota production system. For a production person to be able to write a standard work sheet that other workers can understand, he or she must be convinced of its importance. We have eliminated waste by examining available resources, rearranging machines, improving machining processes, installing autonomous systems, improving tools, analyzing transportation methods, and optimizing the amount of materials at hand for machining.

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This will meet with lots of resistance and requires courage. The greater the commitment, however, the more successful will be the implementation of the Toyota production system. In the 30 years since I moved from textiles to the world of automobiles, I have worked continuously to develop and promote the Toyota production system, even though I doubted my ability to succeed. This may sound presumptuous, but the growth of the Toyota production system has tended to coincide with the growth of my own responsibilities at Toyota. In 1949-1950, as manager of the machine shop in what is now the main plant, I made the first step toward the "Just-intime" idea.

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

Although I was aware of this mechanism, I was not convinced that it was either a useful or a viable technique for application to knowledge work and specifically software engineering. I understood that a kanban system would enable a sustainable pace. However, I was not aware of its reputation as a method for driving incremental process improvement. 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.

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In fact, in October 2003 I wrote to David, saying, “One of the great weaknesses of TOC is its underemphasis of the importance of batch size. If your first priority is to find and reduce the constraint you are often solving the wrong problem.” I still believe this is true. In our 2005 meeting I again encouraged David to look beyond the bottleneck focus of TOC. I explained to him that the dramatic success of the Toyota Production System (TPS) had nothing to do with finding and eliminating bottlenecks. Toyota’s performance gains came from using batch-size reduction and variability reduction to reduce work-in-process inventory. It was the reduction in inventory that unlocked the economic benefits, and it was WIP-constraining systems like kanban that made this possible.

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It was the reduction in inventory that unlocked the economic benefits, and it was WIP-constraining systems like kanban that made this possible. By the time I visited Corbis in 2007 I saw an impressive implementation of a kanban system. I pointed out to David that he had progressed far beyond the kanban approach used by Toyota. Why did I say this? The Toyota Production System is elegantly optimized to deal with repetitive and predictable tasks: tasks with homogeneous task durations and homogeneous delay costs. Under such conditions it is correct to use approaches like first-in-first-out (FIFO) prioritization. It is also correct to block the entry of work when the WIP limit is reached. However, these approaches are not optimal when we must deal with non-repetitive, unpredictable jobs; with different delay costs; and different task durations—exactly what we must deal with in product development.

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

An “impediment” is an idea that comes from the company that first formed a lot of the ideas Scrum is based on: Toyota. And, more specifically, Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System. I won’t go into all the details here, but one of the key concepts that Ohno introduced is the idea of “flow.” That is, production should flow swiftly and calmly throughout the process, and, he said, one of management’s key tasks is to identify and remove impediments to that flow. Everything that stands in the way is waste. Ohno gives waste a moral, as well as a business, value in his classic book, The Toyota Production System: It is not an exaggeration that in a low-growth period such waste is a crime against society more than a business loss.

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., 3.1, 3.2 Product Owner and, 8.1, 8.2 size of, 3.1, 3.2 Team WIKISPEED, 4.1, 4.2, 8.1 teamwork, at Zappos technical risk “Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades, A,” (Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, Welch) Therapeutic Resource Centers, 6.1, 6.2 Thorndike, Edward Lee 3M, 2.1, 3.1 thrivers time defects and as finite time boxes titles, elimination of, 4.1, 9.1 To Do, 7.1, app.1 Toyota, 1.1, 3.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1 Chief Engineers (Shusas) at continuous improvement (kaizen) at NUMMI and Prius and workers’ empowerment at Toyota Production System, 2.1, 3.1 Toyota Production System (Ohno), 1.1, 5.1 transcendence, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 transparency, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.1, 9.1 Twitter, 1.1, 1.2, 9.1 Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base Uganda, poverty in, 9.1, 9.2 Unreasonable Expectations USAF Weapons School Utah, University of value accountability for early termination and prioritization by in product development, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 192, 193, 8.4 and speed value curve, 191 Valve Valve Handbook, velocity, 3.1, 3.2, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 9.1, app.1 happiness and, 153 venture capital, 1.1, 3.1 revenue as metric of success for videogames, 9.1, 9.2 alpha access to Vietnam War, 2.1, 2.2, 8.1, 8.2 Wake, Bill Wall Street, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 warrior spirit Washington, D.C.

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But while Scrum has become famously successful in managing software and hardware projects in Silicon Valley, it remains relatively unknown in general business practice. And that is why I wrote Scrum: to reveal and explain the Scrum management system to businesses outside the world of technology. In the book I talk about the origins of Scrum in the Toyota Production System and the OODA loop of combat aviation. I discuss how we organize projects around small teams—and why that is such an effective way to work. I explain how we prioritize projects, how we set up one-week to one-month “sprints” to gain momentum and hold everyone on the team accountable, how we conduct brief daily stand-ups to keep tabs on what has been done and on the challenges that have inevitably cropped up.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

I began to search outside entrepreneurship for ideas that could help me make sense of my experience. I began to study other industries, especially manufacturing, from which most modern theories of management derive. I studied lean manufacturing, a process that originated in Japan with the Toyota Production System, a completely new way of thinking about the manufacturing of physical goods. I found that by applying ideas from lean manufacturing to my own entrepreneurial challenges—with a few tweaks and changes—I had the beginnings of a framework for making sense of them. This line of thought evolved into the Lean Startup: the application of lean thinking to the process of innovation.

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To translate those instincts into data, entrepreneurs must, in Steve Blank’s famous phrase, “get out of the building” and start learning. GENCHI GEMBUTSU The importance of basing strategic decisions on firsthand understanding of customers is one of the core principles that underlies the Toyota Production System. At Toyota, this goes by the Japanese term genchi gembutsu, which is one of the most important phrases in the lean manufacturing vocabulary. In English, it is usually translated as a directive to “go and see for yourself” so that business decisions can be based on deep firsthand knowledge.

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The team would be able immediately to assess the impact of their work, evaluate its effect on customers, and decide what to do next. For tiny changes, the whole process might be repeated several times per day. In fact, in the aggregate, IMVU makes about fifty changes to its product (on average) every single day. Just as with the Toyota Production System, the key to being able to operate this quickly is to check for defects immediately, thus preventing bigger problems later. For example, we had an extensive set of automated tests that assured that after every change our product still worked as designed. Let’s say an engineer accidentally removed an important feature, such as the checkout button on one of our e-commerce pages.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Air France Flight 447, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, digital map, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, index card, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, meta-analysis, new economy, power law, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

When Madrid showed up for this interview, however, he suspected things might be different this time. GM was partnering with the Japanese automaker Toyota to reopen the Fremont plant. For Toyota, this was a chance to build cars inside the United States and expand the company’s sales in America. For General Motors, it was an opportunity to learn about the famed “Toyota Production System,” which was producing cars of very high quality at very low costs in Japan. One hitch in the partnership was that GM’s agreement with the UAW dictated that the plant had to hire at least 80 percent of its workers from employees who had been laid off two years earlier. So Madrid and his friends were showing up, one by one, to interview with New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., or NUMMI.

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He expressed all these frustrations to his interviewers and then kicked himself on the long drive home. He really needed this job. He should have kept his mouth shut. A few days later, Madrid got the call. The Japanese executives had appreciated his honesty and were offering him a job. First, though, he would have to go to Japan for two weeks and learn about the Toyota Production System. Sixteen days later, NUMMI flew Madrid and about two dozen other workers to the Takaoka auto plant outside Toyota City, Japan, the first in a series of trips nearly every employee at NUMMI would take. When Madrid walked into the Japanese factory, he saw familiar assembly lines and heard the recognizable sounds of pneumatic tools hissing and buzzing.

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One day he shadowed a worker who, midway through a shift, told a manager he had an idea for a new tool that would help him install struts. The manager walked to the machine shop and returned fifteen minutes later with a prototype. The worker and manager refined the design throughout the day. The next morning, everyone had their own versions of the tool waiting at their stations. Madrid’s trainers explained that the Toyota Production System—which in the United States would become known as “lean manufacturing”—relied on pushing decision making to the lowest possible level. Workers on the assembly line were the ones who saw problems first. They were closest to the glitches that were inevitable in any manufacturing process. So it only made sense to give them the greatest authority in finding solutions.

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 mix of surveillance, measurement, psychological tricks, targets, incentives, sloganeering, Jeff Bezos’s trademark hard-charging attitude toward work, and an ever-growing array of clever and often proprietary technologies. Taken as a whole, this system is unique enough in the history of work that it deserves its own name: Bezosism. After Taylorism, Fordism, the Toyota Production System, and dozens of other sectarian management philosophies, it has come to this. There have been many attempts to describe Bezosism, or at least its constituent parts. That I find all of them insufficient in their scope and descriptive power is one reason you’re reading this book. Those who have come the closest talk about “digital Taylorism,” “neo-Taylorism,” “management by algorithm,” or “algorithmic despotism.”

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No other company on Earth today is as well resourced, talent-rich, ruthless, or fast-moving as Amazon when it comes to tightly coupled systems of machines and humans, AI and wetware, robots and bodies. Taylorism was developed by many, but it is deservedly known by the name of its most vocal proponent. Fordism was the product of a team of clever and hardworking engineers, but it is known by the name of the man without whom it would not have coalesced. The Toyota Production System evolved by trial and error on the part of a handful of the firm’s leaders, but it is known by the name of the company that pioneered it. In turn, Jeff Bezos deserves credit for and should be identified with Bezosism. At this very moment, Bezosism is diffusing through the world of work, rewriting the source code of the global industrial machine.

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Imagine what time and motion experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth could have accomplished had they been able to discard their film cameras and replace them with millions of hours of video captured from the digital cameras that watch every station at many of Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Imagine how much additional just-in-time efficiency in inventory levels, capital allocation, and automated reordering Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda, creators of the Toyota Production System, would be able to extract from a system that knew the precise moment an associate plucked an item from a shelf and sent it on its way. Amazon borrows directly from all of these systems, but the company’s special twist, that floating rate that all workers must hit, is what makes its facilities particularly Darwinian.

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

Edwards, 56 Department of Energy (DOE) loans from, 68–89, 118, 120, 121 as shareholder of Tesla, 82–86, 90 detractors, 102–108 Detroit, Michigan, 2, 4 Detroit Auto Show, 68 disruptive innovator, Tesla as, 195–197 DOE. see Department of Energy doors falcon-wing, 137–141 gull-wing, 136–137 Downey, California, 76 Drori, Ze’ev, 49–50, 65 Dunlay, Jim, 58 E Eberhard, Martin as advocate of Tesla, 67 founding of Tesla by, 21–24, 27–31, 35, 37–40 ouster of, 44–48, 50, 79 EBITDA, 215 Eisner, Michael, 45 Electrek, 97–101 electric vehicles (EVs), 3, 12–14, 24, 77, 202, 207 Energy Independence and Security Act, 67 Enron, 105 environmental issues, 112–113, 119 Esquire, 61 e-tron quattro, 203 EV1, 13, 24, 34 EVs. see electric vehicles F Facebook, 41 Falcon One, 28 falcon-wing doors, 137–141 FCW (Forward Collision Warning), 125 Ferrari, 60, 200–201 Fiat, 11, 34 financial crisis (2008), 75–76, 105 fixed costs, 54 Flextronics, 47 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), 72, 131 Ford, Henry, 56, 194 Ford Focus, 159 Ford Fusion, 75 Ford Motor Company, 3, 4, 56, 75, 181, 194, 204, 216 Forward Collision Warning (FCW), 125 Founders Edition Roadster, 215 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 72, 131 Fremont, California, 53, 206, 218 funding (fundraising), 29, 40, 44–47, 50, 69–71, 85 G Gage, Tom, 27–29 Galileo Galilei, 105 Gao Yaning, 128 Gartner, 175 gas prices, 11, 14 General Motors (GM). see also specific models bankruptcy and bailout of, 2–3, 88 and electric cars, 11–13, 34 Impact concept car, 24 and Lotus, 36, 37, 53 OnStar system, 194 Germany, 203, 204 Ghosn, Carlos, 197–200 Gigafactory, 77, 183–184, 189, 218 GM. see General Motors G170J1-LE1 screens, 228 Goodwill Agreements, 149 Google, 44, 120–124, 171 Graham, Paul, 41 “A Grain of Salt” (blog post), 152–153 Grant, Charley, 100 “green car” companies, 11 GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT), 95–97 gull-wing doors, 136–137 H Harrigan, Mike, 30 Harris Ranch, 115–116, 119 Harvard Business School, 195 herd mentality, 96 Hethel, England, 49 Hoerbiger, 138–140 Holzhausen, Franz von, 137 Honda, 201 “How to Be Silicon Valley” (speech by Paul Graham), 41 Hyperloop, 16, 88, 217 I IDEO, 38 IGBT (insulated-gate bipolar transistor), 49 Impact concept car, 13, 24 imperfection, 55 incumbent companies, 196–197 innovation, 193–210 by Citroën, 193–195 disruptive, 195–197 by Carlos Ghosn, 197–200 by Tesla, 201–210 “Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things” (Christensen), 196–197 The Innovator’s Dilemma, 197 insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT), 49 internal conflict, 29–32 InvestorsHub, 99 Israel, 4, 12 J Jaguar I-PACE, 202–203 Jivan, Jon, 98 Jonas, Adam, 172 K kaizen, 58, 60 Krafcik, John, 176 L Lambert, Fred, 98–101 Lamborghini, 204 Land Rover, 60 lead-acid batteries, 23–24, 197 Leech, Keith, 146–147, 156 Level 4 autonomous cars, 175–176 Level 5 autonomous cars, 170, 172, 175–176, 178 Lexus, 204 lithium-ion batteries, 22–24, 26, 34 “long tailpipe,” 110 losses, 11 Lotus, 36–37, 38, 43, 44, 49, 59 Lotus Elise, 28, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43 Lotus Evora, 59 “Ludicrous Mode,” 16 Lyons, Dave, 64 M Mac, Ryan, 218 Magna Powertrain, 48–49 Magna Steyr, 202 manufacturing, 180–192 of batteries, 183–184, 188–189 and continuous reiteration of Model 3s, 182–192 Elon Musk on, 180–182 preproduction as, 187–188 Marchionne, Sergio, 11 market saturation, 10 Marks, Michael, 47, 48, 50 Mars, 25 “Master Plan, Part Deux” (blog post), 164 McLaren F1, 25–26, 39 media hype, 88, 90–91, 93–95, 97–102, 130, 211–224 and base version of Model 3, 220–224 Elon Musk as cause of, 217–224 at Semi/Roadster unveiling, 211–215 as stock price stimulant, 215–216 Menlo Park, California, 28, 58 Michelin, 194 Miles, 11 Mobileye, 167–170 mobility technology, 11 Model 3, 8–10, 180–182 base version of, 220–224 production of, 182–192 Model S, 15, 74–75, 81–84, 90, 99, 135–137. see also Whitestar Model T, 56 Model X, 101, 134–145 Model Year 2008, 69 Moggridge, Bill, 38–39 Montana Skeptic, 105–108 Morgan Stanley, 172 Morris, Charles, 43 Motley Fool, 98 Musk, Elon on belief, 21 and branding of Tesla, 16–17 as cause of media hype, 217–224 childhood and personality of, 25–26 clientele knowledge of, 60 “cluelessness” of, 33–35 and culture of Tesla, 60 and Daimler, 68 detractors of, 102–108 and electric cars, 25–28 and Elise-Roadster conversion, 38–39 on financial viability of Tesla, 72–73 and fundraising, 44, 69–71 and loans, 70, 78 on manufacturing, 180–181, 190 on Model 3, 8–9 on Model S, 74 on Model X, 144–145 on obstacles faced by Tesla, 46 offers of, to sell Tesla, 120–121 on price increases, 71 and production process, 142, 165 as public figure, 15 on Series D, 47 and JB Straubel, 26 and stress, 64–67, 77–78 and Superchargers, 109–119 and Tesla cofounders, 29–32, 45, 47–48 on Tesla’s master plan, 21–22, 30–31, 58, 163 at town hall meeting, 70–71 and Whitestar, 51 Musk, Errol, 25 Musk, Justine, 25–26 Musk, Kimball, 65 N National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 66 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 127, 131–132, 149–162 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 132, 167 NDAs. see non-disclosure agreements Neil, Dan, 59 Neuralink, 16, 217 New Mexico, 48, 67 New United Motor Manufacturing, 53 New York Times, 2, 30, 66 NHTSA. see National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Nissan Leaf, 198 Nissan-Renault Alliance, 197–200, 207 Noble M12, 27 nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), 5, 149–151, 152, 155–156 Norway, 12 NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), 132, 167 NUMMI plant, 76, 81 Nürburgring, 203 NuvoMedia, 23 O Occupy Wall Street, 80–81 Ohno, Taiichi, 57 OnStar, 194 Opel, 36 Opel Speedster, 36 OpenAI, 217 operating profits and losses, 89 P Packet Design, 23 Page, Larry, 44 Paine, Chris, 13, 64, 71, 73–74 Panasonic, 77 Pandora, 41 PayPal, 16, 28 Peak Oil, 11 Pinnacle Research, 25 platforms, 135–136 Porsche, 24, 26, 39, 203–204 Porsche 911, 39 power electronics module (PEM), 49 Powertrain Technology, 58 Prenzler, Christian, 100 preproduction, 187–188 price increases, 71 Prius, 24 profitability, 81–82, 89 Project Better Place, 4–5, 11–12 public, going, 80–81 Q quality, 55, 59–60 Quality Control Systems, 131 R Ranger, 60 Reddit, 97, 99–100 reliability, 143 Renault Kwid, 207 Renault Zoe, 198 Reuters, 66 Revenge of the Electric Car (film), 64 Roadster as Elise conversion, 37–39 launch of, 14–15, 29, 42, 47–51, 59–61 new model of, 211–215 profitability of, 71–72, 81 securing investments for, 44, 45 and Tesla startup, 2–3 robotaxis, 166–167 Rogan, Joe, 219 Rosen, Harold, 26 Rosen Motors, 26 S Saleen, 99–100 San Carlos, California, 28 San Francisco, California, 59 San Jose, California, 75–76 Santa Monica, California, 45 Saudi Arabia, 218–219 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 45 Scion xB, 27 Seagate, 23 “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan” (blog post), 21 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 67, 160, 219–220, 224, 234 Seeking Alpha, 103, 105–107 self-driving cars, 120–133 Semi, 211–215 Senate Finance Committee, 67 Series A funding, 29 Series C funding, 40, 44–45 Series D funding, 46, 47 Series E funding, 50 S 40 model, 84 Shashua, Amnon, 167–170 Silicon Valley, 4, 14, 15, 17, 45, 53, 54, 58 Siry, Darryl, 65, 73 60 Minutes, 66 S 60 model, 84 “skateboard” chassis, 134, 202 Skype, 41 Smart (Tesla car), 68 software startups, 54–55 SolarCity, 110–111, 164 solar power, 109–114 Sorbonne University, 66 South Africa, 25 SpaceX, 15, 16, 25, 28, 39, 66, 78, 100 Spiegel, Mark, 102–103 Stanford University, 4, 26, 27, 28, 121 startups, 41–43, 59, 62, 76 “stealth recalls,” 160–161 stock price, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100, 102–103 StockTwits, 98 Straubel, JB, 26, 28, 48 SunCube, 146–147 Superchargers, 109–119 SYNC, 194 T TACC (Traffic Aware Cruise Control), 125 Tama, 197 Tarpenning, Marc, 21–24, 27, 31, 37, 43, 113 Tea Party movement, 80–81 “Tesla Death Watch” (blog posts), 3 Tesla Energy Group, 68 Tesla Founders Blog, 50 Tesla Motors. see also specific headings and barriers to entry, 35, 56 branding of, 16–17, 18, 59–63, 225–234 and collisions, 127–133 concept of, 34–36 continuous improvement at, 58 culture of, 51–52, 60 detractors of, 102–108 as disruptive innovator, 195–197 EBITDA of, 215 and environmental issues, 112–113, 119 “factory-less” model of, 35–36 innovation by, 201–210 internal conflict at, 29–32 legacy of, 19 Model 3 introduced by, 8–10 personal approach to public relations, xii raising capital for, 44, 69–71, 85 “shaky ground” of, 4, 5 as startup, 2–3 stock price of, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100, 102–103 strategy of, 22 and Supercharger network, 109–119 and whistleblowers, xii Tesla Motors Club (TMC), 95–97 Teslarati, 100 “Tesla stare,” 60 “Tesla Suspension Breakage: It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Coverup” (blog post), 151 Thailand, 48, 218 Think Global, 11, 67 Thrun, Sebastian, 121 TMC (Tesla Motors Club), 95–97 Too Big to Fail, 91 Toyoda, Akio, 76 Toyoda, Sakichi, 57 Toyota, 184, 201. see also specific models auto sales, 11 contract with, 81, 83 electric vehicles of, 159–160 and 2008 financial crisis, 76–77 pragmatism of, 209 safety scandal, 149–151 Toyota Previa, 214 Toyota Production System (TPS), 56–60, 76–77, 142, 183 Toyota Way, 58, 77 TPS. see Toyota Production System Traction Avant, 193–194 trading volume, 89 Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC), 125 The Truth About Cars (TTAC) (blog), 1–3 Tse, Bernard, 67 turnarounds, financial, 83–87 Twitter, 41, 98, 104–108, 113, 152, 156, 217–220, 224, 236 tzero, 23–24, 26, 27, 31, 37 V Valor Equity Partners, 47 Vance, Ashlee, 38, 47, 66, 73, 84, 120–121, 137, 227–228 VantagePoint Capital Partners, 66 variable costs, 54 V8 engine, 62 Volkswagen, 11, 171, 203–205 W Wall Street Journal, 2, 18, 100, 129, 132, 168, 187 Waymo, 173–174 Web 2.0, 41 Weintraub, Seth, 97–98, 101 Wharton School of Business, 25 whistleblowers, xii Whitestar, 46–48, 51, 65, 67, 68, 73 Who Killed the Electric Car?

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Even after the Model T had become hopelessly outdated and rival companies started eating into its once-dominant market share, Ford’s formula of standardized parts, vertical integration, and economies of scale continued to define the car business for nearly a half century. Eventually, this too was surpassed by the Toyota Production System, or TPS. TPS grew out of the teachings of W. Edwards Deming and others and has now become the foundation on which every automaker’s culture is built. Starting with the concept of statistical process control, Deming developed a scientific approach to management that conceptualized companies as machinelike systems that could be optimized for ever-greater quality and efficiency.

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This unmatched growth was not the product of superior styling or performance, but the consistent reliability and quality of its cars. This modern miracle proved conclusively that most car buyers value reliable utility above sexy looks or exciting performance, and that culture rather than technological innovation was the key to this consistent quality. Today, every major automaker has embraced the fundamentals of the Toyota Production System—and so have businesses in every kind of manufacturing and beyond. Part of this success stems from the fact that TPS is values based rather than prescriptive, making it easily adaptable to almost any business undertaking. 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.

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

“Lean Management” and “Just-in-Time” Production Although one best practice is the outsourcing of production, another crucial operation is that of lean management. We saw that the Toyota production system aimed at reducing muri (overburden), mura (inconsistency), and muda (waste). According to Toyota engineer and visionary Taiichi Ohno, muda can be broken down into six subcategories: 1. Waste of time on hand (waiting) 2. Waste of transportation 3. Waste of processing itself 4. Waste of stock at hand 5. Waste of movement 6. Waste of making defective products29 An investigation of these apparent wastages, however, shows that management just might be too lean. What the Toyota production system labels “waste of stock at hand” might also be thought of as buffer stock.

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It more than doubled its production, from just over 4 million cars in 1990 to nearly 10 million in 2009, eventually overtaking General Motors as the world’s largest car manufacturer. Toyota’s profits grew accordingly, from around US$1 billion in 1990 to over US$17 billion in 2008.18 The ideas that enabled this growth were famously embodied in the Toyota production system, whose main objectives were to eliminate three unwanted inefficiencies: muri (overburden), mura (inconsistency), and muda (waste).19 The system became known as “lean management” as an excoriation of these three Ms stripped down supply chains ever further. Toyota relied on efficient transportation platforms and data exchange networks to deliver parts when they were needed but not before.

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On the industry level, however, such behavior reduces resilience and generates systemic instabilities in the same way that it drove the financial system into a state of homogeneity (with banks trading in similar assets using similar business models and making the same underlying assumptions) and complexity (with markets becoming increasingly opaque due to the high volume of complex securities traded). To see one manifestation of the risk ensuing from best practices, consider the case of a car manufacturer that profitably outsources the production of one of its key components, for instance, the steering system. We saw earlier how this practice formed a key part of the revolutionary Toyota production system. If only the industry leader delegates its production, there does not seem to be a sizable systemic risk. A failure at the production plant will affect the supply chain of the outsourcer but will leave the chains of its competitors intact. The industries dependent on the manufacturer (for example, logistics firms), as well as consumers, will have the opportunity to substitute the missing goods for competing products, leaving the market largely unaffected.

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

He often lets a person talk for quite a while before he makes up his mind what to say, and then he responds with something profound meant to make them think. This annoys some people, because they usually just want to know what “to do.” He has solid theoretical knowledge in all things Lean, agile, and about the Toyota Production System. And he has a lot of practical experience to go along with it, too. In his spare time, Joakim is a foodie and a movie buff, and quotes from obscure Danish dogma movies sneak into his conversations from time to time (much to the confusion of those around him). Joakim has four kids (ages zero to nine) and a wife (Anna) and still manages to be engaged in the progress of the company he works for (Spotify) and the Lean and agile communities in Sweden and around the world.

…

The Japanese connection You should probably know something about the word kanban itself, if for no other reason than so that you can impress your friends with your knowledge of Japanese. Kanban is two Japanese words put together: kan, meaning visual, and ban, meaning card. Put together, it becomes something like “visual card” or “signaling card.” Kanban as a concept comes from Toyota, where it was invented as a scheduling system for just-in-time manufacturing in the Toyota Production System (TPS). When researchers in the West studied TPS, they called it Lean Production System, later Lean Manufacturing and Lean Thinking.[a] Kanban has its origins in the principles of TPS and Lean, which is why you’ll find a lot of references to these concepts throughout this book and in most other texts about kanban for software development.

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A one-piece continuous flow is a system in which each part of work that creates value for the customer moves from one value-adding step in the process directly to the next, and so on until it reaches the customer, without any waiting time or batching between those steps. Instead of building up inventories just in case, things are produced only when needed, just in time—at the right place and in the right quantity: no more, no less. 1 Toyota is the company that pioneered the Toyota Production System (TPS), which Lean is based on. This continuous flow turns every process into a tightly linked chain in which everything is connected. There is nowhere for a problem to hide, no inventory of other work or products to work on if something stops or breaks; so when things break, you immediately know what’s happened, and you’re forced to solve the problem together.

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Toyota broke from the auto industry’s norm of brutalizing OEM suppliers and committed to making them better off instead.22 The calculation was simple, clear-eyed, industrial math: more efficient suppliers would mean lower costs for Toyota. And so Toyota gave its suppliers access to the wisdom of its famed Toyota Production System (TPS). Suppliers got to learn from TPS how to lower their own operating costs, while Toyota got a progressively lower price on parts. This extraordinary learning partnership gave suppliers the chance to expand their surplus not only with Toyota, but also with every other client they served.

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Casey Newton, “TaskRabbit Is Blowing Up Its Business Model and Becoming the Uber for Everything,” The Verge, June 17, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/17/5816254/taskrabbit-blows-up-its-auction-house-to-offer-services-on-demand. 20. Lee, “On the Record: TaskRabbit’s Stacy Brown-Philpot.” 21. James K. Willcox, “Cable TV Fees Continue to Climb,” Consumer Reports, October 15, 2019, https://www.consumerreports.org/tv-service/cable-tv-fees/. 22. Steven J. Spear and H. Kent Bowen, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,” Harvard Business Review, September 1, 1999. 23. Shawn Achor et al., “9 Out of 10 People Are Willing to Earn Less Money to Do More-Meaningful Work,” Harvard Business Review, November 6, 2018. 24. Brittain Ladd, “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Believes This Is the Best Way to Run Meetings,” Observer, June 10, 2019, https://observer.com/2019/06/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-meetings-success-strategy/. 25.

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., 167, 168, 177 Scooby Snacks, 78 Scrub Daddy, 157 self-distraction, 6–8, 18–19 self-improvement, 20–21 self-trust, 56–57 severity, 61, 63, 64–65, 66, 67, 77 sexual harassment, 106 Shark Tank, 156–157 “sink or swim” approach, 109, 112 SMART goals, 79 Smith, Fred, 166 social media, 52 Southwest Airlines, 136–138, 161 standards-devotion matrix, 62–67, 70–87 standard setting, 78–80 Starbucks, 168 Stonewall, 110 strategic confusion, 135 strategic value stick, 145, 150, 151, 155 strategic wedge, 152–153, 154–156, 191 strategy, 12–14, 132, 135–163 changing, 162 communication of, 156–161 defined, 136–138 growth, 152–154 planning, 154–156 strategic trade-offs, 136–141 suppliers and, 144–148 value-based, 135–136 value creation and, 141–144 writing about, 158 Stripe, 14 Su, Lisa, 62 Sulla, 72, 73 Super Pumped (Isaac), 172–173 Super You, 139 suppliers, 144–148, 153–154 talent attracting diverse, 95–104 retaining, 120–122 task forces, 92 TaskRabbit, 5, 148–152, 161 Tatum, Lisa Skeete, 14 teams building, 54 diverse, 48–49 leadership of, 13 terminations, 84, 85–86 360-degree reviews, 117–119 “toe-stepping,” 178–179 Ton, Zeynep, 147–148 tough love, 62, 86–87 toxic employees, 123 Toyota, 153–154 Toyota Production System (TPS), 153–154 trade-offs, 136–141 Trader Joe’s, 44 trust, 12, 13, 31–58 attributes of, 34, 36 authenticity and, 34–37, 47–54, 57 diagnosing your own level of, 35–39 empathy and, 34–41, 51, 57 as foundation of leadership, 33–34 logic and, 41, 45–46, 51, 57 rebuilding, 1, 55–56 in yourself, 56–57 trust anchor, 35, 37 trust drivers, 34, 35 trust triangle, 34, 36–37 trust wobble, 35–39, 42–44 Twitter, 102 Uber, 31–32, 51, 54–56, 114, 172–174, 178–179 United States Army, 16–18 USAID, 43 US Soccer Federation (USSF), 121–122 ValMax.

Winning Now, Winning Later by David M. Cote

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business logic, business process, compensation consultant, data science, hiring and firing, Internet of things, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Toyota Production System, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation

“From Bitter to Sweet.” 3.Shawn Tully, “How Dave Cote Got Honeywell’s Groove Back,” Fortune, May 14, 2012, http://fortune.com/2012/05/14/how-dave-cote-got-honeywells-groove-back/. 4.Joe DeSarla (manufacturing head of Honeywell’s Automation and Control Solutions business unit), interview with author, November 5, 2018. 5.“Toyota Production System,” Toyota, accessed October 8, 2019, https://www.toyota-global.com/company/vision_philosophy/toyota_production_system/origin_of_the_toyota_production_system.html. 6.Joe DeSarla, interview with the author, November 5, 2018. 7.“Honeywell Performance,” Annual Report (2006): 10. 8.Joe DeSarla, interview with the author, November 5, 2018. 9.“Honeywell Performance,” 17.

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“We’d never make progress because we just kept churning,” DeSarla said.4 If we could implement a uniform system for continuously improving operations in all of our plants, and if we could design that system to engage the brainpower of thousands of people in process change rather than relying on the weekend reading habits of individual managers, we could make sustained progress and over a period of years shift the entire company’s fortunes. But how, I asked myself, should we go about devising such a system? I thought immediately of the Toyota Production System (TPS), the automaker’s legendary system for improving processes at its plants to reduce waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness.5 I’d been reading about it for years, and from what I knew, this system wasn’t just about running plants better; rather, it was a way of structuring the workdays of managers and employees so that they would interact regularly.

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

As the Jake Brake grew in popularity, Koenigsaecker rose to head the Bloomfield facility. He became frustrated with its low productivity, subpar product quality, and delays in getting product to customers. He believed the company needed a desperate change or it would fail. In 1988, as he struggled to control Jacobs’s spiraling problems, he learned that two architects of the Toyota Production System were in nearby Hartford for a guest lecture. Their names were Yoshiki Iwata and Chihiro Nakao, two of the most well-regarded factory experts in Japan. Koenigsaecker attended their lecture and convinced them to meet for dinner. He desperately sought their advice, and as the wine poured, the men became curious about this mess of a factory they were hearing about.

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If the company delivered on its financial goals, business unit presidents, corporate executives, and numerous other senior managers stood to make a lot of money. GOING LEAN Beyond talent, David also saw the need to make bigger moves with regard to manufacturing. During his time at Otis, David came to appreciate the power of Lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System (TPS) after Otis had a falling out with its Japanese joint venture partner, Matsushita. Matsushita uncovered flaws in Otis’s quality control systems that were leading to frequent breakdowns of Otis elevators installed at Matsushita’s headquarters. The Japanese were appalled. Otis was an elevator company without working elevators.

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These companies are almost always far along the Lean manufacturing journey, and they benchmark internally and externally to best-in-class organizations. The best of the best go beyond the factory floor. They apply systematic tools to all their functions, including R&D, sales, purchasing, distribution, and back office. Danaher, for example, customized the Toyota Production System and created (or borrowed) more than a dozen tools to focus its employees. Each function has its own toolkit and is empowered to lever that toolkit to its fullest. Increasingly, we see these best-in-class organizations also utilize metrics around employee engagement and turnover. They focus as much on filtering out bad managers as they do on elevating good ones.

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely

AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, Great Leap Forward, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, work culture

I suggested at the time that if you worked at IBM Global Services, you should have asked your boss outright if you were on the list to be fired. It would have put the boss in a bind, sure, but might have led to a sort of Alice's Restaurant effect in which hypocrisy was confronted and exposed. The Toyota Production System—more magical thinking: IBM’s LEAN was supposed to have been based on another program called Lean (not LEAN) that characterized the Toyota Production System (TPS)—Toyota Motors’ answer to Henry Ford’s method of mass production. Academics from MIT had studied how Toyota became such a successful car company and discovered TPS, which they relabeled Lean Manufacturing, and described to the world.

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We create new opportunities by letting "extra" people work on continued lean efforts in other departments or we grow the business to create more work. As Jim Womack says, "Lean is about doing more with less, not doing less with lots less (people)." It's very sad for the IBM employees. I'm sorry you have lousy management. Don't blame this on real Lean, the Toyota Production System. Mark Graban | May 04, 2007 | 5:35PM IBM’s Lean a ‘perversion’ Lean works. Period. What IBM is doing is not lean. It is a perversion given an honorable name to make it appear more honorable. Lean is about removing waste--whether that's scrap, unnecessary motion, or wholly ineffective management.

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Certainly my lack of a manufacturing background or formal training in “the Toyota way” might have given them pause. But in the open culture at Toyota, these issues never came up. As we worked together, several early adopters within the company revealed why they thought Lean Startup could be beneficial when added to Toyota Production System (TPS). Toyota has become world-leading in its ability to mass-produce high-quality products on time, on budget, and with industry-leading cost. The company has had some very successful innovations, like the Prius hybrid drive technology, but at the time of my meeting, they had not had the same level of success incorporating digital platform–style innovations into their products.

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Clearly, somebody in the entourage had read it—it had just been translated into Japanese. But Tomoyama-san himself did not speak at first; I couldn’t read his body language to tell what he thought. When he finally broke his silence, he said something I will never forget: “This is the missing half of the Toyota Production System. We have a system that is outstanding at producing what we specify, with high quality, but we don’t have a corresponding system for discovering what to produce in the first place.” He explained that Toyota had become so advanced in its ability to efficiently produce existing products that it had lost something of its early innovative spirit.

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We added other tools, like a more disciplined growth-board process inspired by venture capital funding and cultural sayings. I think if you judge a culture by their communication, by the words they use, that’s how you know you’ve had a change.” Remember, it’s not even called “lean manufacturing” at Toyota—it’s the Toyota Production System. Learning to work in this new way is not about the rigid adoption of a series of practices; it’s about finding the ways the tools can be adapted and applied to each specific company. When people go to Intuit looking for a model of how to bring innovation into their companies—the company’s Design for Delight innovation process has been hugely successful—Bennett Blank, innovation leader at Intuit, explains, “They say ‘What can we replicate?’ 

Do Improvise: Less push. More pause. Better results. A new approach to work (and life) (Do Books) by Poynton, Robert

Berlin Wall, complexity theory, Gene Kranz, Hans Rosling, iterative process, off grid, Skype, TED Talk, Toyota Production System

Not only does everyone have an opportunity to lead, but if the group is to fulfil its potential everyone has the obligation to lead, when required. This isn’t unique to the stage. I once had a former soldier in a workshop. He observed, wryly, that in combat ‘the person leading is the person who can see best’. The same idea is in play in the famous Toyota Production System where any worker can stop the line. Every individual, at whatever level, is given the chance to lead and the power to exercise it. The person who sees best, leads. If this is an advantage in manufacturing, in a knowledge business it is vital. There is more information than anyone can absorb, so you need to be able to take advantage of many points of view.

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48–9 your own baggage (shadow story) and 42 complexity theory 118 ‘connective tissue’ 99 control: changing attitudes towards 116–17 companies which give employees 121–3 exerting influence without 31 imposing in areas where it isn’t appropriate 9, 11 as neither sensible or desirable 30 new ideas and 79§ paying attention to what you can 12, 52, 113–14 creativity 65–88 all creativity is co-creativity 85–6 and solving future world problems 66 creative doing, not creative thinking 72–6 creative process 67 ‘creativity is the new literacy’ 85 embracing constraint and 80–6 Game: Object Taps 87–8 importance of 66, 85–6 importance of play 69–72 ‘last letter, first letter’ 80, 81 popular image of 66–8 putting flow first 77–80 sets humans apart 85 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 66 ‘Dance Your Ph.D’ (TED talk) 76 discomfort, accepting 10, 94, 96 eatbigfish 20, 138 Edison, Thomas 102 education 30, 114 either/or, seeing things as 114 Everything’s An Offer (EAO) 17, 18 ‘Facebook effect, the’ 23 ‘fit and well’ 35, 102 Fleming, Alexander 70 flexibility 90–1, 107, 121 future-proof 30, 101 games, killer 12–13, 27–8, 32, 33–8, 59–64, 78, 79, 81–2, 87–8, 99, 108–11, 112, 117, 118, 120, 125–37, 138 see also under individual game name General Motors 103 Gore Associates 121 Heifetz, Professor Ronald 107 Hirsch, Gary 27, 38, 45–6, 49, 61, 71, 88, 111, 118 Hollywood 67, 89, 93–4 Honda 122–3 ideas, generating new 10, 12, 70, 87, 88, 113 acting first 72–6 constraint and 80–6 creating a flow of 31 finding in areas your competitors don’t notice 20, 21, 22–5 flow and 77–80 games and see games in spite of how things are organised, not because of them 116 leaders and see leadership new ideas as combinations of old ones, re-expressed 14 play and 69–72 practice and 94, 95, 96 re-designing organisations and 121 using other people’s 98–100 IDEO 75 IKEA 28, 102–3, 111 image bank 85 improv in action 112–24 analysis, nature of 113–15 building into the design of an organization 119–23 education and 114 either/or ‘yes, and...’ 114 enthusiasm for taking things to pieces and 115–16 journeys and 115 order without control 113, 116–17 planning and 114–15 improv theatre 31, 112, 119 improvisation, nature of 8–13 incorporations (game) 135–7 intuition/hunch 30, 100, 101, 115, 123 journeys, improv and 115 Kamprad, Ingvar 28, 102–3 Keating, David 42–3 Kelleher, Herb 85 knee-jerk conclusions/reaction, resisting 18, 23–4 Kranz, Gene 100 leadership 89–111 accepting discomfort and 94, 95 distributed 91–2 ‘fit and well’ 102 flexibility and 107 fluid approach to 90–1 focus on your own experience 93 Game: Swedish Story 108–11 intuition/hunch and 100, 101, 123 level of trust in 99 looking for offers 101–3 mistakes and 93–4, 95, 102–3 new ideas and 98–9 no single leader 89–92 paying attention to others and 97–8, 99–100 practice and 93, 94–6 presence and 96–7 status and 104–6 value ‘connective tissue’ 99 Let Go 15, 16, 17, 18, 22–5, 29, 34–5, 55, 56, 70, 84, 91, 96, 101, 117, 119, 122, 125, 127, 129 listening 20, 21, 29, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 55–6, 60, 62, 81, 96–8, 107 Mandela, Nelson 97 Michelangelo 79 mistakes 26, 27, 54, 93–4, 95, 101, 102–3, 105, 113, 114–15, 123, 127 Morgan, Adam 20, 42, 51 Morning Star 121–2 Nike 48 ‘no’, saying 28, 42, 51, 54 Notice More 15, 16, 17, 18–22, 35, 81, 96–7, 119 Object Taps (game) 87–8 offer/offers: blocking 37, 40–2, 54, 56–7, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 76, 78–80, 103, 120 errors and mistakes as 26–8, 103 Everything’s An Offer (EAO) 16, 17, 18, 26, 102–3 failure and breakdowns as 28–9 seeing objections as 56–7, 101–3 On Your Feet 38, 49, 71, 82, 84, 119, 122 One to Twenty (game) 125, 131–4 Pascale, Richard 122–3 paying attention 19, 22, 24, 96–8, 99–100 Pert, Candace 22 planning 9, 51–2, 62, 63, 81, 113, 114–15 practice, improvisational 12, 13, 14–31 Let Go 15, 16, 17, 18, 22–5, 29, 34–5, 55, 56, 70, 84, 91, 96, 101, 117, 119, 122, 125, 127, 129 Notice More 15, 16, 17, 18–22, 35, 81, 96–7, 119 Presents (game) 33–8, 62, 63, 111, 129 Use Everything 15–16, 17, 18, 26–9, 96, 119 presentations 39, 44–58 Presents (game) 33–8, 62, 63, 111, 129 Robinson, Sir Ken 85, 86 Rodriguez, Robert 28 Roshi, Suzuki 27 Rosling, Hans 53 SCRUM 119 Semco 121 senses 18–21, 76, 96 shadow story 24–5, 42, 56 Sloan, Alfred 103 software engineers 119–20 Southwest Airlines 85 status 49, 104–6, 107 storyteller improv games 27–8, 99, 108–11 Swedish Story (game) 108–11 taking things to pieces, enthusiasm for 8, 18, 29, 30, 113, 115–16 TED talks 53, 76 3M 121 Toyota Production System 91 Twain, Mark 54 Use Everything 15–16, 17, 18, 26–9, 35, 96, 119 Wake Wood (film) 42–3 weak signals 99–100 ‘whites of the eyes’ 46 ‘Yes, and’ (game) 59–64, 78 ‘yes, and...’, seeing things as 11, 42, 98, 114, 120 Published by The Do Book Company 2013 Works in Progress Publishing Ltd www.thedobook.co Text copyright © Robert Poynton 2013 Illustrations copyright © Andy Smith 2012 The right of Robert Poynton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced to a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

If anybody on the production line is having a problem or observes an error, that person pulls a cord that halts production across the plant. Senior executives rush over to see what has gone wrong and, if an employee is having difficulty performing her job, she is helped as needed by executives. The error is then assessed, lessons learned, and the system adapted. It is called the Toyota Production System, or TPS, and is one of the most successful techniques in industrial history. “The system was about cars, which are very different from people,” Kaplan says when we meet for an interview. “But the underlying principle is transferable. If a culture is open and honest about mistakes, the entire system can learn from them.

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Cutting-edge organizations are always seeking to close this gap, but in order to do so they have to have a system geared up to take advantage of these learning opportunities. This system may itself change over time: most experts are already trialing methods that they hope will surpass the Toyota Production System. But each system has a basic structure at its heart: mechanisms that guide learning and self-correction. Yet an enlightened system on its own is sometimes not enough. Even the most beautifully constructed system will not work if professionals do not share the information that enables it to flourish.

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They don’t just want players to improve, but to do so as fast and as profoundly as possible. In a similar way, in health care, there are debates about whether the Virginia Mason System creates the most effective method of reducing medical errors, just as there are discussions about whether the Toyota Production System is the best way of improving efficiency on a production line. But both models will eventually be superseded. We will learn to create more effective evolutionary systems, not just in health care and manufacturing, but in aviation, too.* How, then, to select between competing evolutionary systems?

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Department of War created a methodology called Training Within Industry to help overburdened defense contractors. Just like Taylor with his pig iron lifters, the idea of Training Within Industry was to get factory workers to crank out more stuff in less time. After the war, Japanese companies refined Training Within Industry into what came to be known as the Toyota Production System, which then evolved into Lean Manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing. In the 1980s, two engineers at Motorola, the American consumer electronics giant, dreamed up a manufacturing system called Six Sigma, which big companies around the world spent the next two decades adopting. And so it goes.

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For the past hundred years, since the days of Frederick Taylor, companies have been latching on to new management fads, and each new fad runs its course, and then everyone leaps onto the next one, believing—like Charlie Brown running for the football in Lucy’s hands—that this time things will be different. Management Science Meets the Information Age Twentieth-century Taylorite methodologies like Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, and the Toyota Production System were developed for manufacturing physical things—cars, airplanes, lawn furniture, whatever. But now we’re in the Information Age, and most of us work with our brains, not our hands. Of course, with the rise of the Internet, clever management consultants started wondering if you could create a system that would optimize the productivity of knowledge workers and impose rigor and discipline on tasks like writing software code.

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In 2004, he and four others split off and built a new virtual world, a place where people create avatars to socialize and play games. They called the company IMVU. Ries was the chief technology officer. Ries stayed at IMVU for four years, and during his time there he became fascinated with the Toyota Production System and Lean Manufacturing. He theorized that you could take the principles that Toyota uses to assemble a Corolla and apply them to developing new software products, or even to the process of building a company. IMVU, his start-up, provided a real-life laboratory for testing his theories. In 2008, after leaving IMVU, Ries started writing a blog and giving speeches, laying out his theories.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

In addition to Dorsey’s user narratives, tools like customer development,11 usability studies, and empathy maps12 are examples of methods for learning about potential users. One method is to try asking the question “Why?” as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Usually, this will happen by the fifth why. This is a technique adapted from the Toyota Production System, described by Taiichi Ohno as the “5 Whys Method.” Ohno wrote that it was “the basis of Toyota’s scientific approach . . . by repeating ‘why?’ five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.”13 When it comes to figuring out why people use habit-forming products, internal triggers are the root cause, and “Why?”

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,” Startup Lessons Learned (accessed Nov. 12, 2013), http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/what-is-customer-development.html. 12. Rich Crandall, “Empathy Map,” the K12 Lab Wiki (accessed Nov. 12, 2013), https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/3d994/Empathy_Map.html. 13. Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-scale Production (Portland, OR: Productivity Press, 1988). 14. For more on the need for social belonging, see: Susan T. Fiske, Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology (Hoboken: Wiley, 2010). Chapter 3: Action 1. “What Causes Behavior Change?,” B.

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

—BRUCE BARTON, ADVERTISING EXECUTIVE BEST KNOWN FOR CREATING THE BETTY CROCKER BRAND At this very moment, a Toyota engineer somewhere in the world is making a very small change to the Toyota Production System, one of the most efficient manufacturing Systems in the world. Alone, the change may not look like much—a small tweak, a slight restructure, a bit of material or effort saved. Taken together, however, the effects are huge—Toyota employees implement over 1 million improvements to the Toyota Production System every year. 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.

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You can think of the Value Stream as a combination of your Value Creation and Value Delivery processes. Very often, your offer moves directly from the first into the second. Even though the purposes of these core processes are very different, treating them as one big process can help you improve your ability to deliver the value you create. The Toyota Production System (TPS) was the first large-scale manufacturing operation to systematically examine its entire Value Stream on a regular basis. Analyzing the production system in great detail paved the way for an ongoing series of small, incremental improvements: Toyota engineers make over 1 million improvements to the TPS each year.

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See Systems improvement recommended reading second-order effects selection test slack stock uncertainty Systems analysis analytical honesty confidence interval context correlation and causation deconstruction garbage in, garbage out humanization key performance indicator mean, median, mode, midrange measurement norms proxy ratios recommended reading sampling segmentation Systems improvement automation cessation checklist critical few diminishing returns experimental mind-set fail-safe friction middle path optimization recommended reading refactoring resilience scenario planning standard operating procedure (SOP) stress testing Take the puppy home strategy Target monthly revenue (TMR) Taylor, Frederick W. Teamwork. See Working with others Tesco Testimonials Testing Tharp, Roland Third parties, as buffers Threat lockdown, mental Throughput Time, as universal currency Time value of money Tools, as force multipliers Toyota Production System (TPS) Trade-offs creating, example of incremental degradation as relative importance testing understanding, importance of between universal currencies in value creation Transactions, completing. See Sales Travel Web sites Trust background checks increasing, with damaging admission and sales transaction See also Reputation Tversky, Amos Ultradian rhythm Unbundling.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

In some hospitals, nurses now mix or collect their medications wearing vests that say “Don’t Interrupt Me,” or stand inside a “Do Not Interrupt” zone marked off with red tape. But there was probably something else—more subtle and more cultural—at play. Today, many healthcare organizations study the Toyota Production System, which is widely admired as a model for safe and defect-free manufacturing. One element of the TPS is known as “Stop the Line.” On Toyota’s busy assembly line, it is every frontline worker’s right—responsibility, really—to stop the line if he thinks something may be amiss. The assembly line worker does this by pulling a red rope that runs alongside the entire line.

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Coiera, “A Systematic Review of the Psychological Literature on Interruption and Its Patient Safety Implications,” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 19:6–12 (2012); and J. Craig, F. Clanton, and M. Demeter, “Reducing Interruptions During Medication Administration: The White Vest Study,” Journal of Research in Nursing 19: 248–261 (2014). 161 One element of the TPS is known as “Stop the Line” See C. Furman and R. Caplan, “Applying the Toyota Production System: Using a Patient Safety Alert System to Reduce Error,” Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety 33:376–386 (2007). 162 In a seminal 1983 article, Lisanne Bainbridge L. Bainbridge, “Ironies of Automation,” Automatica 19:775–779 (1983). 162 In a famous 1995 case, the cruise ship Royal Majesty National Transportation Safety Board, Grounding of the Panamanian Passenger Ship Royal Majesty on Rose and Crown Shoal Near Nantucket, Massachusetts, June 10, 1995 (Washington DC: National Transportation Safety Board, 1997). 162 In a dramatic study illustrating the hazards K.

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See regional health information exchanges (RHIOs) Rock Health, 237–240 Röntgen, Wilhelm, 50 Rothman, David, 30 Royal Majesty, 162 satisficing, 161 Schiff, Gordon, 87–88 Schmidt, Eric, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 250–251 Schwab, Robert, 65–66 scribes, 75, 82 The Second Machine Age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 94, 244 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 23 Septra, 128, 136–137 See also Pablo Garcia medical error case Shenkin, Budd, 174 Shorter, Edward, 30 Shortliffe, Ted, 102 shovel ready, 14–15 Siegler, Eugenia, 39 simple transforms, 5, 113 Sinsky, Christine, 75, 78–79, 83–86, 87, 210 Sixth International Conference on AIDS, 195 Slack, Warner, 93, 276 Slack’s Law, 276 Smart Patients, 179–180, 196–200 Smarter than You Think (Thompson), 276 Smith, Mark, 108, 113, 122–123, 183–185, 188 SOAP note, 46 social media, 177–178 Stack, Steve, 73 stacking, 53 standardization, 41–42, 244 hospital standardization, 36 standards, 13 See also Meaningful Use Sterile Cockpit, 83 stethoscopes, 32, 33 Stoller, James, 77 Stop the Line, 161 Strangers at the Bedside (Rothman), 30 Sullenberger, Chesley “Sully”, 147, 270 supervised learning, 112 Swiss cheese model, 131–132 Sydenham, Thomas, 31 Szolovits, Peter, 100–101, 110, 112 Tecco, Halle, 238–239 teleradiology, 60–61 See also radiology televisits, 261 tethered personal health records, 185 See also PHRs third-party payers, and medical records, 37–39 Thompson, Clive, 276 Tillack, Allison, 55, 56–57, 58 Top 100 lists, 40 Toyota Production System, 161 trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. See Septra Tsoukas, Hari, 56 UCSF Medical Center Benioff Children’s Hospital, 127–130 computer systems, 132–134 Epic Systems, 224–225 MyChart portal, 133 universal patient identifiers, 190 upcoding of diagnoses, 81–83 See also kwashiorkor usability, 74, 214–215, 249 user-centered design, 269 lack of, 76–77 vendor lock, 217 vendors, and Meaningful Use, 212–213 Verghese, Abraham, 27–28, 45, 77, 93, 113, 273 Vioxx, 183 Wah, Robert, 17, 246 Walker, Jan, 175, 176 Warner, David, 174 Watson supercomputer, 94, 108–109 in healthcare, 103–104, 105–106, 118 on Jeopardy, 95, 102 therapies, 111–113 Weed, Larry, 45–46 Weiner, Michael, 105 WellPoint, 17 work flow, 243–244 See also productivity paradox x-rays, 32 See also radiology Zeiger, Roni, 76, 179–181, 186, 196, 199–200 About the Author Robert Wachter is professor and associate chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where he directs the 60-physician Division of Hospital Medicine.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

Most ideas will be small, but they can empower people to embrace changes that redirect the business and make people at all levels feel that their contributions mean something, a seemingly minute action that can embolden people to present even more radical ideas. Students of the “Lean” approach to change management will rightly see our encouragement for Lean-supported modes of thinking in these recommendations. Continuous improvement, one of the central tenets of the Toyota Production System from which Lean is derived, instills an organizational belief that processes and approaches can always get better, and that the people employed to do the work are in the best position to see opportunities in their zone of influence and act on them. In the realm of Empathetic Imagination, continuous improvement creates an environment in which small ideas have the potential to snowball into big ones, with the added benefit that it helps reveal the emergent Producers in your midst and gives them the opportunity to implement ideas.

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., 71, 72, 120, 216 Student, 100 Summers, Larry, 213 SunAmerica, 200 Sun Life Insurance, 200 Sun Life Stadium, 213 Sun Microsystems, 183, 214 Suzuki, 64, 210 Sviokla, John, 10 Swensen, David, 102, 103 Sydney Opera House, 140 Sze Man Bok, 45–46, 204 Taiwan, 204 talent, 14 reshifting balance of, 21–24 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 34 Target, 55 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 77 Taylor, Glen, 37, 48–51, 52, 75, 216–17 Taylor Corporation, 48, 217 technology, 11–12 TechShop, 179 TED, 178 Telecom Italia, 210 Teleflora, 21, 152, 212 Tesla, 211 Tesla, Nikola, 178 Teva Pharmaceuticals, 203 Texas, University of, at Austin, 202 Thailand, 7 Thaler, Richard, 117 Third Wave, The (Toffler & Toffler), 68 time: duality of, 60–62 imagination and, 73–77 time management, individual, 80–81 Time Warner Center, 107, 123, 127, 213 timing, 25, 82–83 fast and slow, 62–63 lessons in, 63–71 Toffler, Alvin and Heidi, 68 Toyota, 53 Toyota Production System, 54 Trader Joe’s, 196 Trans International Airlines, 207 Treasury Department, U.S., 213 Tufts University, 211 Tversky, Amos, 115 Twain, Mark, 1 20th Century Fox, 211 Twitter, 63 Undercover Boss, 53, 225n Unilever, 209–10 Union Pacific Railroad, 196 Uniqlo, 65–66, 219 Unique Clothing Warehouse, 219 United Nations, 199 United States, 8, 65, 66 USAID, 174, 175 Vancouver, Canada, 38, 39, 217 Vatera Healthcare Partners, 85, 206 Vidal Sassoon, 144 Villette, Michel, 121–22 Virgin Group, Ltd., 114, 130, 199 Vuillermot, Catherine, 121–22 Vulcan Ventures, 196 Wagner, Todd, 154, 201 Wall Street, 103, 107–8, 124, 126, 198 Wall Street Journal, 34, 211 Walmart, 55 Warhol, Andy, 59 Warner Bros.

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

While doing this work, Deming gave a series of lectures on statistical process control and quality management that made him a legend and guru to Japanese companies attempting to become internationally consequential. Deming created a managerial approach for organizing production so as to drive out waste and achieve both quality and efficiency, which famously influenced Toyota and what became known as the Toyota Production System. Thanks in part to Deming’s contributions, which are revered to this day in Japan, the laggard Japanese auto manufacturers became the bane of Detroit carmakers, so much so that American manufacturers, auto and otherwise, came to embrace Deming’s methods in the 1980s and helped drive an American manufacturing revolution.

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See educators teaching See also educators certainty, 170–173, 181, 185 integrative approach to, 174 reductionism, 173–178 technology, 65, 66, 88–89 tenure-based voting rights, 157–159 theorizing, 178–179 Third Congressional District of Maryland, 202, 203 third-party candidates, 201–202 3G Capital, 123–124, 126, 187 tightly coupled systems, 106–107 Tilly, Charles, 192, 194 time-and-motion studies, 42 time horizons, 155–159 Tobin, James, 92 Tobin tax, 92, 103 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 198–199 Ton, Zeynep, 124–126 total quality management, 43 Toyota Production System, 43 Toys “R” Us, 97–98, 99, 101 trade free, 41–42, 56, 63, 66, 150–152 productive friction in, 150–152 trade barriers, 150 trade policy, 56, 150, 151 Trader Joe’s, 125 trade wars, 41 trading technology, 88–91 training, 125 transaction costs, 106 trickle-down economics, 161 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 138, 144 two-sided markets, 152–153 Uber, 192 unemployment, 24 United States, metaphor for, 26 University of Chicago, 24 US Census Bureau, 4 US Constitution, 40 US economy achieving balance in, 97–114 efficiency in, 63 as efficient machine, 21–44, 94, 100, 210 gaming the system and, 84–94 growth of, 33–38 imbalances in, 1–17 models of, 22–25 as natural system, 77–94 of 1970s, 5–12, 24 proxies in, 45–57 sectors, 22 user-experience (UX) design, 180 value creation, 130 Verizon, 53–54 voter registration, 205–206, 207 voters, 201–206 Voters Not Politicians, 204 wage growth, 9, 10, 68 wages, 67–70, 125, 150 Wagner School, 180 Wallace, George, 201 Wallenstein Feed & Supply (WFS), 133–134 Washington Mutual, 137 Waste Management Inc.

Why We Work by Barry Schwartz

Atul Gawande, call centre, deskilling, do well by doing good, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Higgs boson, if you build it, they will come, invisible hand, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, scientific management, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System

All they changed was the production system. The result was a dramatic improvement in both productivity and quality. When you create an environment in which workers are respected, they want to be there and they want to work. The labor costs associated with the production of vehicles dropped almost 50 percent under the Toyota production system. There is little reason to believe that we as a society have learned Toyota’s lesson. Indeed, we seem to have moved in the opposite direction, turning jobs that demand judgment, flexibility, challenge, and engagement into the white-collar equivalent of factory work. Consider education.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Subsequently, the bright-spot approach has been used successfully in developing nations, and even in the United States where certain hand-washing practices in a small number of hospitals are being replicated in order to help reduce bacterial infections—the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths—throughout the medical system.28 The bright-spot approach is also similar to what political scientist Charles Sabel calls bootstrapping, a philosophy that has begun to gain popularity in the world of economic development. Bootstrapping is modeled on the famous Toyota Production System, which has been embraced not only across the Japanese automotive firms but also more broadly across industries and cultures. The basic idea is that production systems should be engineered along “just in time” principles, which assure that if one part of the system fails, the whole system must stop until the problem is fixed.

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See Watts (2003, Chapter 9) for an account of Toyota’s near catastrophe with “just in time” manufacturing, and also their remarkable recovery. See Nishiguchi and Beaudet (2000) for the original account. See Helper, MacDuffie, and Sabel (2000) for a discussion of how the principles of the Toyota production system have been adopted by American firms. 30. See Sabel (2007) for more details on what makes for successful industrial clusters, and Giuliani, Rabellotti, and van Dijk (2005) for a range of case studies. See Lerner (2009) for cautionary lessons in government attempts to stimulate innovation. 31.

Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

The result was a move from Henry Ford’s never-ending production line as a linear production ledger to the Toyota model in which production contained a reflexivity much closer how we might understand the blockchain; that is, how people become part of these systems and could develop practices within them. In 1970, Toyota launched the Toyota Production System (TPS), a method that managed car manufacture and employees more effectively than the failing Fordist model, which had struggled in 1950s and 1960s in Japan. ‘Just-In-Time’ was the title of the manufacturing and conveyance model that informed the demand of car parts in terms of which part was needed, when it was needed, and how many were required.

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Oxford: Blackwell. Maurer, B. (2006) ‘The anthropology of money’, Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 15–36. Maurer, B., Nelms, T.C. and Swartz, L. (2013) ‘“When perhaps the real problem is money itself!”: the practical materiality of Bitcoin’, Social Semiotics 23(2): 261–277. Ohno, T. (1995) Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Portland, OR: Productivity Press. Parkes, D. and Thrift, N. (1980) Times, Spaces and Places, A Chronogeographic Perspective. Bath: Pitman Press. Pialoux, M. (1999) ‘The old worker and the new plant’, in P. Bourdieu et al. (eds), The Weight of the World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 267–281.

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Instead of having to make constant resort to orders and threats, companies can rely on workers to find new, more efficient ways of getting things done. That reduces the need for supervision, cuts transaction costs, and allows managers to concentrate on other things. The supreme example of this kind of approach is the Toyota Production System, Toyota’s legendarily efficient system for making cars. At the core of TPS is the idea that frontline workers should be trained to have a wide range of skills and that they have to understand how the production process works from the bottom up if they are to take best advantage of it. At the same time, Toyota has eliminated the classic assembly line, in which each worker was isolated from those around him and, often, worked on a single piece of a vehicle, and substituted for it teams of workers who are effectively put in charge of their own production process.

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For a defense of the bottom-up model see Joseph Blasi and Eric Kruse, In the Company of Owners (New York: Basic Books, 2003); and for a critique of it see James Hoopes, False Prophets (Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2003). See also William Joyce, Nitin Nohria, and Bruce Roberson, What Really Works: The 4 + 2 Formula for Sustained Business Success (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). Alfred P. Sloan, My Years with General Motors (New York: Doubleday, 1964). The definitive Western account of the Toyota Production System can be found in James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). Keller, Rude Awakening: 101. Frederick Winslow Taylor is cited in Stephan H. Haeckel, Adaptive Enterprise (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999): 30.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts

AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business process, corporate governance, Drosophila, Erdős number, experimental subject, fixed income, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, independent contractor, industrial cluster, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Milgram experiment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, power law, public intellectual, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social distancing, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Y2K

It might come as a surprise then that the industrial behemoth that produces Toyota cars and trucks is much more than a single company. In actuality, it is a group of roughly two hundred companies integrated by their common interest in supplying the Toyota company itself with everything from electronic components to seat covers, and also by what is known as the Toyota Production System. TPS is a collection of the same kinds of manufacturing and design protocols that have been adopted by most Japanese (and these days American) industrial firms, so in a way it’s nothing special. What makes it unique is the almost religious zeal with which it is implemented inside the Toyota group.

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Even after installing thousands of additional phone lines, so much information was flowing in and out in the form of queries, suggestions, solutions, and new problems, that the company was often unreachable, leaving the cavalry largely to its own devices. This, however, is where all the training kicked in. After years of experience with the Toyota Production System, all the companies involved possessed a common understanding of how problems should be approached and solved. To them, simultaneous design and engineering was an everyday activity, and because Aisin knew this, they were able to specify their requirements to a minimum level of detail, allowing potential suppliers the greatest possible latitude in deciding how to proceed.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

The US basically had a twenty-year head start on everybody else after World War II because so many countries got so wrecked. Maybe the early ’70s are just when the rest of the world had recovered enough for things to get back to normal. The early ’70s are definitely when Japan had rebuilt enough to become a force to reckon with. That’s about when the Toyota Production System started eating American manufacturers’ lunch—something I know from looking up all the Japanese terms like kaizen and muda that still show up without explanation in signage all over SDF8. And Nixon went to China in ’72, though Mao didn’t die until… what, ’76? There might have been more people in the private workforce after the end of the Vietnam War and the draft—maybe the women who’d taken the places of men who were sent off to fight in Korea and Vietnam didn’t necessarily want to leave when those soldiers rejoined the private sector, and that’s about the time double-income households started becoming the norm.

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” * I’ve been getting scheduled for between thirty and forty hours a week since I started, though never the full forty. * A Gaiman-helmed miniseries adaptation starring David Tennant as Crowley will premiere in 2019 on—where else?—Amazon Prime. * Meaning lean production—the business philosophy of creating more and more value for customers using fewer and fewer resources. It’s an evolution of the Toyota Production System—the reason Japan started eating American manufacturing’s lunch in the 1970s. Lean retains a bunch of Japanese words like kaizen and muda, which you may recall were plastered all over SDF8. Because Jeff Bezos, along with a huge number of tech entrepreneurs, is super into lean. * If something at Walmart comes “from Arkansas,” it means it’s straight from the company’s Bentonville headquarters

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

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. Kata encourages organizations to look at the end-to-end flow of work and methodically experiment until the desired outcome is reached.

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indirect impact of downtime, Indirect impact LinkedIn case study, Project Operating Expense and Abandonment Expense negotiating SLAs with vendors, Negotiating SLAs with vendors running the black box like a service, Running the Black Box Like a Service SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, Service-Level Indicators, Service-Level Objectives, and SLAs-Negotiating SLAs with vendors SLOs, SLOs working with, Working with Third Parties Shouldn’t Suck-Closing Thoughts third-party integrationsautomation, Automation communication, Communication contract termination, Decommissioning decommissioning, Decommissioning disaster planning, Disaster planning LinkedIn case study, Testing and staging logging, Logging monitoring, Monitoring-Uses for RUM playbook for, Playbook: From Staging to Production-Closing Thoughts reporting APIs, Logging synthetic monitoring, Uses for synthetic monitoring testing and staging, Testing and staging tooling, Tooling Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, Critical Decisions Made Under Uncertainty and Time Pressure Cannot Be Scripted, Every Incident Could Have Been Worse throttling, Getting Clever with State ticket-driven request queues, Silos Get in the Way-Silos Get in the Way time quanta, Time Quanta time to detect (TTD), The Virtuous Cycle to the Rescue: If You Don’t Measure It…, Surrogate Metrics time to engage (TTE), The Virtuous Cycle to the Rescue: If You Don’t Measure It…, Surrogate Metrics time to fix (TTF), The Virtuous Cycle to the Rescue: If You Don’t Measure It… Todd, Chad, Replies toilas enemy of SRE, Toil, the Enemy of SRE-Toil, the Enemy of SRE defined, Toil, the Enemy of SRE engineering work vs., Toil, the Enemy of SRE-Toil, the Enemy of SRE enterprise operations model–SRE transition, Toil Limits privacy engineering and, Reducing Toil-Frameworks self-service capabilities and, Self-Service Helps SREs in Multiple Ways tooling, third-party integrations and, Tooling Toyota Production System, Start by Leaning on Lean trainingfor persons with mental disorders, Training on-call, Training transactions, as availability metric, Transactions transgender inclusivity, Benefits Treat, Robert, Replies Treynor Sloss, Benjamin, Leverage Existing Enthusiasm for DevOps, SRE Patterns Loved by DevOps People Everywhere triage, First, Do No Harm trust, forgiveness as corollary to, The corollary to trust is forgiveness 2001: A Space Odyssey (movie), The Awakening of Applied AI U unknown-unknowns, software failure and, Underlying Assumptions Driving On-Call for Engineers, On-Call Is Emergency Medicine Instead of Ward Medicine US Digital Service, Elegy for Complex Systems user error, data loss and, User error V vacation time, Benefits van Zijll, Robin, Replies velocity of change, Provisioning, Change Management, and Velocity vendor lock-in, Project Operating Expense and Abandonment Expense verificationcoverage, Verification Coverage-Storage Watcher data durability engineering and, Verification-Watching the Watchers testing the verification system, Watching the Watchers zero-errors system, The Power of Zero virtual repair debt, Virtual Repair Debt: Exorcising the Ghost in the Machine virtuous cycle, The Virtuous Cycle to the Rescue: If You Don’t Measure It…-The Virtuous Cycle to the Rescue: If You Don’t Measure It… visual analysis, Start by Leaning on Lean W wages (see compensation) Watson, Coburn, Context Versus Control in SRE, Context Versus Control in SRE-Context Versus Control in SRE Wheel of Misfortune (game), Active Learning Example: Wheel of Misfortune Willis, John, SRE Patterns Loved by DevOps, SRE Patterns Loved by DevOps People Everywhere-Conclusion window of vulnerability, Window of Vulnerability Woods' Theorem, Mental Models work-life balance, Developers’ Productivity and Health Versus the Pager-Developers’ Productivity and Health Versus the Pager(see also psychological safety) Y you build it, you run itat Soundcloud, You Build It, You Run It-Introducing Production Engineering deployment platform, The Deployment Platform Production Engineering team and, Introducing Production Engineering-Introducing Production Engineering SysOps and code deploys, Closing the Loop: Take Your Own Pager Yust, Amber, The Intersection of Reliability and Privacy, The Intersection of Reliability and Privacy-Conclusion Z zero-errors systems, The Power of Zero Zhang, Yichun agentzh, Scriptable Load Balancers: The New Kid on the Block Zwieback, Dave, Approaching Operations as an Engineering Problem About the Editor David N.

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

I read a case study in business school on Toyota that included a discussion of the “Five Whys.” To get to the root of a problem, the manager on a production line asked questions starting with the word “why” five times. Taiichi Ohno, the former Executive Vice President of Toyota Motor and pioneer of the Toyota Production System in the 1950s, offers this example.14 1. Why did the robot stop? The circuit was overloaded, causing the fuse to blow. 2. Why was the circuit overloaded? There was insufficient lubrication on the bearings, so they locked up. 3. Why was there insufficient lubrication on the bearings?

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims

Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E

That this was written near the outset of the fields is a testament to how rigorously and deeply Drucker wrestled with these questions. Liker, Jeffrey. The Toyota Way. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. University of Michigan Professor Jeffrey Liker is a long-time student of Toyota’s processes and culture. This book provides an excellent overview of the Toyota Production System, otherwise known as lean production. Elements include: problem solving and continuous learning (genchi and genbutsu), respect for people and partners (kaizen), flow processes and pull systems to eliminate waste (kaizen), and long-term thinking. This book presents interesting case studies, such as the creation of the Prius, to illustrate fourteen Toyota operating principles.

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

It has forced organizational sociologists and management scientists across the country to rethink the long-standing assumption that the practices of Toyota and the other major Japanese automobile manufacturers were some quirky extension of unique Japanese culture, born out of traits so uniquely Japanese they couldn’t be replicated. After all, these were American autoworkers responding to changes negotiated with an American union. The only thing that wasn’t American was the management. How can we account for such an incredible and rapid turnaround? The answer is basically that Toyota Production System incorporates the very elements of a successful cooperative system that we have been examining in the past five chapters. As a result, it has been able to harness precisely the kinds of intrinsic motivations and dynamics that make workers not only more innovative and more productive, but also happier with their work and workplace.

Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

Roosevelt) 148 New Keynesianism 159, 163 New Neoclassical Synthesis 111 Nicholas I, Tsar 52 NINJA (No Income, No Job, No Assets) homebuyers 61–2 Nixon, Richard 109, 146 Nobel laureates Kenneth Arrow (1972) 191, 213 Gary Becker (1992) 194, 195–6 Ronald Coase (1991) 73 Peter Diamond (2010) 179 Eugene Fama (2013) 160, 187 Milton Friedman (1976) 146, 147–8, 154, 161 Lars Peter Hansen (2013) 160 Friedrich Hayek (1974) 137 Daniel Kahneman (2002) 218, 220 Paul Krugman (2008) 180, 191 Simon Kuznets (1971) 148 Robert Lucas (1995) 202 Robert Merton (1997) 187 Edmund Phelps (2006) 213 Paul Samuelson (1970) 168 Myron Scholes (1997) 187 Vernon Smith (2002) 218 non-accelerating inflation of unemployment (NAIRU) 153–5 Nordhaus, William 171, 178 North American Free Trade Agreement 41, 187 North, Lord 23 Obama, Barack 162, 190 offshoring of jobs 41 OPEC 22 opportunity cost concept 201, 205 optimism bias and overconfidence 226–7 outsourcing 21 overlapping generations (OLG) model 178–80 Pareto, Vilfredo 182 Pareto efficiency 182 pensions and pension funds 178 permanent income hypothesis (Friedman) 148–50 Perot, Ross 41 Phelps, Edmund 154, 213 Philip, Prince 158 Pigou, A.C. 95 Pinochet, Augusto 161 political economy 28, 74, 93 population growth theories Malthus 31 Ricardo 31, 32–3 Posner, Richard 215 Predictably Irrational (Ariely, 2009) 234 prejudice economic perspective of Becker 196–7, 198–9 views of Friedman 157 price, as interaction of supply and demand (Marshall) 75–9 prices and knowledge (Hayek) 131–3 Prices and Production (Hayek, 1931) 126, 130 Principles of Economics (Marshall, 1890) 72, 76, 77–8, 87–8, 188 private savings, influence of taxation policy 43–4 private sector windfalls, impact of stimulus measures 43–4 privatisation of state-owned monopolies 21 246Index productivity, and division of labour 11–14 Prospect Theory (Kahneman) 228–32, 234 protectionism 22–3, 33–5, 41–2, 185 public goods economics 175–8 purchasing price parity (PPP) measures 186 quantitative easing 162, 163 quantity theory of money, criticism by Keynes 97 Rae, John 23 rational choice model (Becker) 197, 212–15, 216 challenge from Kahneman 221–33 rational expectations hypothesis 111, 137 Reagan, Ronald 19, 20, 139, 146, 158, 160 recession drivers of (Keynes) 101 see also Great Recession (2009) reflection effect 229 revealed preference theory 180–1 reverse elasticity 84 Ricardo, Abraham 28–9 Ricardo, David (1772–1823) 27–46, 183 attack on the Corn Laws 33–5 early life and influences 28–30 from finance to economics 30–1 global free trade 40–2 government debt 38–9 influence of Adam Smith 30 international trade and comparative advantage 35–8 key ideas 46 long-term legacy 40–4 on the general workings of the economy 31–3 on wealth creation and distribution 31–3 political career 30 population growth theories 31, 32–3 The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) 28, 31–3, 188 Ricardian equivalence 38–9 Ricardo effect 33 verdict 45–6 wine and cloth example 35, 37, 40–1 Ricardian equivalence 38–9 Ricardo effect 33 Robbins, Lionel 122, 129 Rogeberg, Ole 211 Rogoff, Kenneth 189–90 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 148 Samuelson, Paul (1915–2009) 37, 106, 137, 159, 167–92 autarky concept 184 early life and influences 169–70 economics in action 190–1 Economics: An Introductory Analysis (1948) 168, 171–3, 188–9 efficient markets 187 ethical judgements in economics 182–3 explaining trade imbalances 184–5 factor price equalisation theorem 186–7 financial economics 187 Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) 168, 169–70 global public goods 177–8 influence of Keynes 171–2 influence on economic theory 189–90 intergenerational economics 178–80 international economics and trade 183–7 key economic theories and writings 171–87 long-term legacy 188–91 mathematical approach to economic issues 169–70 microeconomic market system 172–3, 174 multiplier effect 174–5 Index247 neoclassical synthesis 174 neo-Keynesianism 168–9, 173–5 Nobel Prize in economic sciences (1970) 168 oscillator model of business cycles 174–5 overlapping generations (OLG) model 178–80 public goods and public finance 175–8 public goods economics 175–8 revealed preference theory 180–1 understanding consumer behaviour 180–1 verdict 191–2 warrant pricing 187 welfare economics 181–3 Scholes, Myron 187 Schwartz, Anna 150–1, 162 Scottish Enlightenment 3 Second World War 95, 96 self-interest theory of Adam Smith 2–3, 6, 8–9, 20 Skidelsky, Robert 114, 128 slavery 10–11 Smith, Adam (1723–90) 1–25, 97, 230–1 A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) 2, 5–6 division of labour and productivity 11–14 drivers of rates of pay 12–13 early life and character 3–5 free-market mechanism of supply and demand 8–9 free international trade 13–14 from philosophy to economics 6–7 functions funded by general taxation 16 functions of the state 16–18 functions that users should pay for 16–17 idea of ‘natural liberty’ 8 idea of ‘sympathy’ of people for each other 6 key ideas 25 long-term legacy 19–23 market price of a commodity 15–16 on slavery 10–11 personal legacy 23 pin factory example 11–13 role of the state in the economy 9, 10 self-interest theory 2–3, 6, 8–9, 20 taxation principles 17–18 the evil of cartels and monopolies 10–11 the invisible hand 7–9 the market mechanism 15–16 The Wealth of Nations (1776) 2–3, 6, 7–25, 188 verdict 23–4 Smith, Vernon 218 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (US) 42 social security systems 179 social welfare function 182–3 socialism 134–6 sovereign debt crisis in Greece 113–14 Soviet Union, collapse of 140, 158 Sraffa, Piero 130–1 stagflation in the 1970s 154, 173–4 Standard Oil Company of New Jersey 21 state-owned monopolies, privatisation programmes 21 Statecraft (Thatcher, 2002) 19 status quo bias 227–8 stimulus measures, debate over effects of 43–4 stimulus versus austerity debate 43–4, 140–1 Stockholm School of Economics 168 Stolper, Wolfgang 184–5 Stolper–Samuelson theorem 184–5 Strachey, Lytton 94 structural unemployment 155 substitution effect, response to price change 82, 83 Summers, Anita 190 Summers, Lawrence 190 Summers, Robert 190 Sunstein, Cass 234 248Index supply and demand market mechanism 8–9, 15–16, 75–84 supply side economics 127, 201 surplus value of labour (Marx) 54–6 taxation policy influence on private savings 43–4 views of Adam Smith 16–18 taxpayers, view of government debt (Ricardo) 38–9 Thaler, Richard 232, 234, 235 Thatcher, Margaret 19, 138–9, 155, 160–1 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes, 1936) 99–106 The Principles of Political Economy (Mill, 1848) 188 The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Ricardo, 1817) 28, 31–3, 188 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek, 1944) 135, 138, 140 The Wealth of Nations (Smith, 1776) 2–3, 6, 7–25, 188 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman, 2012) 226–7, 234 time factor and the value of capital (Hayek) 124–6 in the supply and demand model 77–9 Townshend, Charles 5, 6–7 Toyota, production systems 21 trade barriers 22–3, 41–2, 185 Corn Laws 33–5 trade imbalances, Samuelson’s explanation 184–5 trade unions 19 transient income concept 149 Treatise on Human Nature (Hume) 4 Treaty of Versailles 95–6 Tversky, Amos 218, 220, 221–5, 228–33, 235 Ulam, Stanislaw 37 uncertainty and investment volatility 104–5 unemployment causes of (Keynes) 101 frictional 155 ‘natural’ rate of (Friedman) 153–5 relationship with inflation 153–5 structural 155 United States housing market crisis (2008) 61–2, 112 import tariffs after the Wall Street Crash 42 savings and investment imbalance with China 113 trade imbalance with China 45 US Federal Reserve 111–12 action to control inflation 161 and the 2008 financial crisis 235 influence of monetary policy 159 money supply and the Great Depression (1930s) 150–2 quantitative easing (2009 onward) 162 role in the Great Depression (1930s) 159 utilitarianism 31, 182 value and costs of production 75–7 distribution of economic value (Marx) 54–6 surplus value of labour (Marx) 54–6 Voltaire 7 wages drivers of wage rates (Smith) 12–13 effects of reducing (Keynes) 101–2 relationship to rents and profits 32–3 surplus value of labour (Marx) 54–6 Wall Street Crash (1929) 23, 42 Wallich, Henry 190–1 warrant pricing (Samuelson) 187 wealth creation and distribution, view of Ricardo 31–3 Index249 welfare economics 181–3 White, Harry Dexter 108 Wilberforce, William 10 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 121 women in the workforce 202 Wood, Kingsley 106 Woolf, Leonard 94 World Bank Group 109 World Trade Organization (WTO) 22, 40–1, 185

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram

Alvin Toffler, desegregation, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joseph Schumpeter, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman

Richards was the mathematical whiz who came to the Pentagon in 1973, the man whom Christie assigned the job of finding a place for happy hour. Richards had reviewed all of Boyd’s briefings. He later went to work for Lockheed and began studying the fabled Toyota production system, which he found “frighteningly familiar” from his study of maneuver conflict. But the Toyota production system began in the 1950s, about two decades before Boyd began work on “Patterns of Conflict.” The underlying ideas of mutual trust, mission orders, and individual responsibility, and the concepts of “harmony” and “flow” and—most of all—the manipulation of time as a production tool were central ideas in both the Toyota system and the strategy of maneuver conflict.

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Or take the example of Toyota, until recently (when some drivers started to find its accelerator technology a little too sticky) the auto industry’s most profitable firm. Toyota does not produce the most innovative or exciting cars (compare the Tercel to the Mustang). But it does have the Toyota Production System, which reorganized factory floors and pioneered just-in-time parts delivery, among other things.18 There is strong evidence to support Romer’s contention that process technologies are more important to per capita income growth than “traditional” invented technologies. Not least, there is no relationship between a country’s research and development expenditures in “traditional” or invented technologies, on the one hand, and growth rates, on the other.

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2 by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan

active measures, Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, continuous integration, correlation coefficient, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, delayed gratification, DevOps, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, Google Glasses, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intermodal, Internet of things, job automation, job satisfaction, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, level 1 cache, load shedding, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine readable, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, place-making, platform as a service, premature optimization, recommendation engine, revision control, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sorting algorithm, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The future is already here, Toyota Production System, vertical integration, web application, Yogi Berra

The result of the DevOps approach is higher uptime and lower operational costs. 8.2 The Three Ways of DevOps “The Three Ways of DevOps” is a strategy for improving operations. It describes the values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps. The Three Ways strategy was popularized by Kim et al.’s (2013) book The Phoenix Project. It borrows from “Lean Manufacturing” (Spear & Bowen 1999) and the Toyota Production System’s Kaizen improvement model. 8.2.1 The First Way: Workflow Workflow looks at getting the process correct from beginning to end and improving the speed at which the process can be done. The process is a value stream—it provides value to the business. The speed is referred to as flow rate or just simply flow.

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http://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale Siegler, M. (2011). The next 6 months worth of features are in Facebook’s code right now (but we can’t see). http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/30/facebook-source-code Spear, S., & Bowen, H. K. (1999). Decoding the DNA of the Toyota production system, Harvard Business Review. Spolsky, J. (2004). Things you should never do, Part I, Joel on Software, Apress. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Stevens, W. (1998). UNIX Network Programming: Interprocess Communications, UNIX Networking Reference Series, Vol. 2, Prentice Hall.

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

I myself only fully grasped the importance of this union role when I visited the joint GM-Toyota assembly plant in Fremont, California, in November 1997. Named New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., (NUMMI), the Fremont plant is a former GM plant that has become a manufacturing showcase in which GM executives and workers can THE ECONOMICS OF UNFAIRNESS learn firsthand how the Toyota production system works. At first glance, the assembly line at Fremont did not look very different from what I had seen at Nissan. Workers performed their repetitive tasks as car bodies moved slowly down the line. At rest areas, there were the familiar plastic-covered worksheets specifying tac for each worker on the line, down to the nearest fraction of a second.

Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business by Bob Lutz

An Inconvenient Truth, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, flex fuel, Ford Model T, medical malpractice, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, scientific management, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, Toyota Production System, transfer pricing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, value engineering

(We’ve all heard tales of Coke bottles being deliberately left in doors to produce a severe rattle later on.) I suppose some of this existed in the bad old days many decades ago, but today’s reality is the exact opposite: gleaming buildings, well-landscaped grounds, brilliantly lit inside, with a level of cleanliness that would rival many hospitals.All of the fabled “Toyota Production System” methods were learned and incorporated over the years. Modern equipment, a positive change in union-management working relationships, a union-shared focus on quality, a massive investment in ongoing training, and a relentless drive for greater efficiency had made GM manufacturing in the United States as good as, and often better than, the best of the Japanese automotive manufacturing facilities.

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

Their classic, and now outdated, rigid Fordian variety was based on a moving conveyor introduced in 1913. 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.

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Olsson, F. 2007. Järnhanteringens dynamic: Produktion, lokalisering och agglomerationer i Bergslagen och Mellansverige 1368–1910. Umeå: Umeå Studies in Economic History. Olsson, M., and P. Svensson, eds. 2011. Growth and Stagnation in European Historical Agriculture. Turnhout: Brepols. Ohno, T. 1988. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press. OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). 2015. Who gets what from imported oil? http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/publications/341.htm. Orme, B. 1977. The advantages of agriculture. In Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers beyond Europe, ed.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

So, starting with the Human Relations School that emerged in the 1930s, which highlighted the need for good communications with, and among, workers, many managerial approaches have emerged that emphasize the complexity of human motivation and suggest ways to bring the best out of workers. The pinnacle of such an approach is the so-called ‘Japanese production system’ (sometimes known as the ‘Toyota production system’), which exploits the goodwill and creativity of the workers by giving them responsibilities and trusting them as moral agents. In the Japanese system, workers are given a considerable degree of control over the production line. They are also encouraged to make suggestions for improving the production process.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The process was divided into eighty-four discrete steps, and none other than Frederick Taylor himself helped to optimize each of them. The build time of a Model T went from twelve hours to just two hours and thirty minutes. Nearly half a century later, Taiichi Ohno and the Toyoda family developed the Toyota Production System, a just-in-time approach to manufacturing that sought to eliminate muri (overburden), mura (inconsistency), and muda (waste). Once again, automotive workflow was forever changed for the better, and not just in the factory but throughout the entire organization. Improving workflow, the way value is created, is a continual source of advantage for the firms that do it.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

In an attempt to bring discipline and predictability to software development, early practitioners of Agile looked to the world of manufacturing, asking: “How can we bring assembly line predictability to software development?” Thus was born the Kanban workflow methodology, which was literally taken from the Toyota Production System. In Kanban, the Product Owner breaks the week’s work down into small tasks, which get written on sticky notes and hung on a Kanban board. Engineers pull tasks from the board, do the work, move the notes to the “finished” pile, and repeat. When the week ends, they report the number of tasks they’ve finished.

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

From what I could gather, General Motors had built this factory years ago and was losing its shirt keeping it open, shipping thousanddollar bills out with every car it made. It tried to close down but couldn’t. Smelled like the United Auto Workers union had a veto, but somehow our guide skipped the reason. In 1984, Toyota, looking for a U.S. presence, cut a deal with GM to co-own the factory, but only if it was operated under the rules of the Toyota Production System and their culture of a “teamwork-based working environment.” Phil leaned over and whispered, “Are we going to have to do calisthenics before the tour?” Our guide had been promoted off the floor and was singing the benefits of TPS. “It used to be thought that the biggest problem for an assembly line was when the line came to a stop.

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works By Ricardo Semler, Portfolio Hardcover, 2004. Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory By Neil Johnson, Oneworld, 2009. Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson, Simon and Schuster, 2011. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition By Ronald S. Burt, Harvard University Press, 1995. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production By Taiichi Ohno and Norman Bodek, Productivity Press, 1988. The Ultimate Question: How Net-Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World By Fred Reichheld, Harvard Business School Press, 2006. A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America’s War on Terror By Daniel Ford, CreateSpace, 2010.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

From my interview with Bottino. 26 Why can’t India have 911 emergency service? . . . From my interview with Jacqueline Novogratz of the Acumen Fund; plus, Shaffi Mather’s November 2009 TED Talk, “A New Way to Fight Corruption.” http://www.ted.com/talks/shaffi_mather_a_new_way_to_fight_corruption.html 27 The five whys methodology originated . . . Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (Portland, OR: Productivity Press, 1988). Also, Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (New York: Crown Business, 2011). 28 IDEO example of five whys . . . From the company’s “Method Cards,” published by William Stout, November 2003. 29 character actor and author Stephen Tobolowsky . . .

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

Post facto framing is an incredibly powerful tool for late bloomers, as well as everyone else. Smart framing is good for you and your organization. Cognitive psychologists have shown that effectively reframing challenges is a key to organizational success, in settings ranging from automotive manufacturing on the Toyota Production System (TPS), to pet adoption in shelters in Los Angeles, to hospital operating rooms across the country. People who learn to reframe are better able to solve problems, face challenges, and effect significant change, making them better team members. Even more, skilled reframers make better leaders.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

The term “just-in-time” comes from the twentieth-century capitalist business world, in which companies used information technologies to fine-tune how inventory is shipped “just-in-time” for manufacturing. This strategy reduces overhead—such as warehouse space and extraneous shipping costs. Though it originated with Japanese car makers, the term increasingly is used to reference e-commerce companies, such as Amazon.com. See Yosuhiro Monden, Toyota Production System: An Integrated Approach to Just-in-Time, 4th ed. (Boca Raton, FL: Productivity, 2011); and John Walsh and Sue Godfrey, “The Internet: A New Era in Customer Service,” European Management Journal 18, no. 1 (2000): 85–92. 94. Tung-Hui Hu, “Real Time / Zero Time,” Discourse, 34, nos. 2–3 (2012): 164. 95.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

They moved to a system under which the Augusta plant was run entirely by “technicians” organized into teams, each of whom was expected to develop a wide range of skills and to actively contribute to the continual improvement of the plant. The plant had no job classifications and no production quotas. Its employees spent four hours a week in training and an additional two hours meeting together to solve problems. In short, the plant invented something remarkably close to the Toyota production system years before Toyota would first make waves in the United States. Augusta was so successful that by 1967 every new P&G plant was required to use the system. The first plant designed from the ground up to use the new techniques was built in Lima, Ohio. Under the leadership of Charlie Krone—an unconventional plant manager who had studied not only Trist but also Tibetan and Sufi mysticism and the work of the spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff—the Lima plant was designed to “embody learning” and to integrate emotional and psychological factors directly into the design of the work.

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar, Bill Carr

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business logic, business process, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, microservices, Minecraft, performance metric, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, web application, why are manhole covers round?

That’s an aggressive goal, and it cannot be achieved immediately. It serves as a powerful advocate for the customer, and it has led to the development of many systems and processes to prevent and eliminate defects. As we’ve described, one of the best-known of these processes is the Andon Cord, which was adapted from the Toyota Production System: factory workers can pull a physical cord to halt the assembly line when they spot a defect. At Amazon, the customer service people have a virtual cord—actually a button—that they can push when a defect is noticed. It instantly prevents Amazon from selling any more of the affected product until the customer issue is resolved.

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

This book (really an excerpt from his forthcoming book) is so very, very good that it just blows me away. Issenberg tells the tale of everything I’ve been trying to say to everyone in politics, but he does it in a real-life three-act morality play that’s so good it could be a model on how to tell a story. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries Ries presents a translation of the Toyota Production System to start-ups—and it’s so clearly the right way to run a start-up that it’s hard to imagine how we got along before it. Unfortunately, the book has become so trendy that I find many people claiming to swear allegiance to it who clearly missed the point entirely. Read it with an open mind and let it challenge you, so you can start to understand how transformative it really is.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, game design, haute couture, impulse control, index card, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, patient HM, pattern recognition, power law, randomized controlled trial, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, Tenerife airport disaster, the strength of weak ties, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Walter Mischel

We emphasized, however, that when that happens, the actual routine that emerges, as opposed to the nominal one that was deliberately designed, is influenced, again, by a lot of choices at the individual level, as well as other considerations (see book [Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change] p. 108).” 6.17 These organizational habits—or “routines” For more on the fascinating topic of how organizational routines emerge and work, see Paul S. Adler, Barbara Goldoftas, and David I. Levine, “Flexibility Versus Efficiency? A Case Study of Model Changeovers in the Toyota Production System,” Organization Science 10 (1999): 43–67; B. E. Ashforth and Y. Fried, “The Mindlessness of Organisational Behaviors,” Human Relations 41 (1988): 305–29; Donde P. Ashmos, Dennis Duchon, and Reuben R. McDaniel, “Participation in Strategic Decision Making: The Role of Organisational Predisposition and Issue Interpretation,” Decision Sciences 29 (1998): 25–51; M.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

air freight, anti-work, antiwork, Apollo 13, business intelligence, business process, centre right, cloud computing, continuous integration, dark matter, database schema, DevOps, fail fast, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, index card, information security, inventory management, Kanban, Lean Startup, shareholder value, systems thinking, Toyota Production System

It’s amazing that this business didn’t go under as a result.” He gestures broadly with both arms outstretched, “In the 1980s, this plant was the beneficiary of three incredible scientifically-grounded management movements. You’ve probably heard of them: the Theory of Constraints, Lean production or the Toyota Production System, and Total Quality Management. Although each movement started in different places, they all agree on one thing: WIP is the silent killer. Therefore, one of the most critical mechanisms in the management of any plant is job and materials release. Without it, you can’t control WIP.” He points at a desk near the loading docks closest to us.

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

In 1950, it was a small family-run business: Eiji Toyoda, Toyota: Fifty Years in Motion (New York: Kodansha USA, 1987); Jeffery Liker, The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004). Taiichi Ohno, went to the United States . . . had a vision: Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production (Boca: Productivity Press, 1988). it made Toyota the most profitable automaker: Graham Rapier, “These are the 15 most valuable car brands in the world,” Business Insider, September 25, 2017. its net margins grew to be over eight times higher: Alexander Styhre, The Innovative Bureaucracy: Bureaucracy in an Age of Fluidity (New York: Routledge, 2007).

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

Lincoln, James, Hanada, Mitsuyo, and McBride, Kerry, "Organizational Structures in Japanese and U.S. Manufacturing." Administrative Science Quarterly, voL 31, 1986, pp. 338-364; Kenney, Martin, and Florida, Richard, Beyond Mass Production: The Japanese System and Its Transfer to the US. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 42, 105, 107. 22. Ohno, Taiichi, Toyota Production System (Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 1988), pp. 25-26. 23. Womack et aL, pp. 71-103. 24. Cited in Davidow and Malone, p. 126. 25. Kenney and Florida, p. 54. 26. Womack et aL, p. 12; also cited in Technology and Organizational Innovations, Production and Employment (Geneva, Switzerland: International Labor Office, July 1992), p. 33. 27.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

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Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

See economic change Technology Trap, The (Frey), 128, 130 tech platforms, 117–18 Terkel, Studs, 223, 237 Tesler, Michael, 292 Thaler, Richard, 3 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 224, 225, 228 Thirteenth Amendment, 67, 260–61 three pillars of economic dignity, xviii, 29–32, 296 care for family, xviii, 30, 33–43 economic respect, xviii, 30, 63–85 pursuit of potential and purpose, xviii, 30, 44–62 thrift savings plans (TSPs), 204 Tiananmen Square protests, 248 Title IX, 31 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 49–50 Tough, Paul, 289 Toyota Production System, 238–39 Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), 142–43, 165–66, 329n trade policies, 122–26, 135, 144–46 Trebesch, Christoph, 295 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 69–70 Triumph of Injustice, The (Saez and Zucman), 123, 124 Triumph Services, 214 Truman, Harry S., 29 Trumka, Richard, 250, 251 Trump, Donald, (Trump Administration) divisive dignity and, 170, 291–92, 293 farming industry, 118 for-profit colleges, 114 poultry processors, 81 regulations, 107 science and technology public investments, 99 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, 124–25, 168 work requirements, 91 trust gaps, 282–84 Tubman, Harriet, 149 U-6 (unemployment) rate, 8 Uber drivers, 9–10, 192, 230, 252 UBI.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, continuous integration, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, database schema, defense in depth, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, George Santayana, Google Chrome, Google Earth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, Kubernetes, linear programming, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, meta-analysis, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, no silver bullet, OSI model, performance metric, platform as a service, proprietary trading, reproducible builds, revision control, risk tolerance, side project, six sigma, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, web application, zero day

Nelson, “The Data on Diversity”, in Communications of the ACM, vol. 57, 2014. [Nic12] K. Nichols and V. Jacobson, “Controlling Queue Delay”, in ACM Queue, vol. 10, no. 5, 2012. [Oco12] P. O’Connor and A. Kleyner, Practical Reliability Engineering, 5th edition: Wiley, 2012. [Ohn88] T. Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production: Productivity Press, 1988. [Ong14] D. Ongaro and J. Ousterhout, “In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Extended Version)”. [Pen10] D. Peng and F. Dabek, “Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications”, in Proc. of the 9th USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, November 2010.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Japanese management techniques improved plant efficiency and output quality enough to restore it to competitive shape; the workers seemed to like it better, too. NUMMI amicably negotiated a contract with the UAW, but production workers also seemed to appreciate the tenets of the cohesive Toyota Production System. The factory grouped workers into teams, reduced the number of job descriptions, and rewarded suggestions from the line. A stated “no-layoffs” policy put everyone at ease, and a doctrine of “continual improvement” invited workers to contribute to increasing efficiency. Compared to the stultifying atmosphere at GM, NUMMI valued workers as thinking people, which turned out to work just fine.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

“Trade, Money, and the Grievances of the Commonwealth: Economic Debates in the English Public Sphere during the Commercial Crisis of the Early 1620’s.” Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/cdptexdis/td427.htm. Surowiecki, James. 2008. “The Open Secret of Success: Toyota Production System.” New Yorker, May 12. Sutch, Richard. 1991. “All Things Reconsidered: The Life-Cycle Perspective and the Third Task of Economic History.” Journal of Economic History 51 (June): 1–18. Swedberg, Richard. 2009. Tocqueville’s Political Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sylla, Richard, and Gianni Toniolo, eds. 1992.

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Hampered by a lack of capital and technical capacity and by a strike-prone, radicalized work force, Toyota would probably have gone bankrupt were it not for the Korean War and large orders to supply the American military with vehicles. It then began to put together what became known as the Toyota Production System. The starting point was a solution to labor unrest by a unique deal which promised employees lifetime employment in return for loyalty and commitment. Together they would work to establish a system which would reduce waste. Ideas for improving productivity could be raised and explored in “quality circles.”