From the category archives:

business

Majority Rule in Social Networks

by Pete Abilla August 11, 2010

In popular culture, there is much talk of social networks. Indeed, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Linkedin are ubiquitous – how did we ever live without them? One interesting property of these social networks or social graphs that isn’t talked about much is the concept of Majority Rule. While I haven’t seen much written about Majority Rule [...]

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Unhappy Employees Result in Unhappy Customers

by Pete Abilla July 24, 2010

Of the two major pillars in Lean Thinking, one is Respect for People. From Toyota’s perspective, it’s almost a moral imperative to develop humans and treat them well and fairly. But, there’s also a very pragmatic reason: the way a company treats its employees will be the way those employees will treat the customer. the [...]

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iPhone 4, iOS 4.0: Scare Away The Customer

by Pete Abilla June 24, 2010

Apple makes beautiful devices.  But, the message for the iPhone 4 update is so scary that it erased any giddyness I might have had for the device: Updating to iOS 4.0 will delete all media, including iTunes Store purchases. To preserve your media, apply this update on the computer where you sync music, videos, and [...]

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Oil Spill, My Home

by Pete Abilla June 12, 2010

A new site gives perspective on the British Petroleum (BP) Oil Spill Disaster 1  in the Gulf of Mexico. This site overlays the BP Oil Spill over your home state. If it were in Utah, the BP Oil Spill would look like this: I want to be really clear here, I’m not against British Petroleum (BP) [...]

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The Seven Wastes of Medical Billing

by Pete Abilla June 2, 2010
This entry is part 3 of 10 in the series Seven (7) Wastes

Pete’s Note: I’m very proud to feature a guest post from friend, advocate for and practitioner of Lean Thinking in Health Care, and an all-around good person, Devin Cabanilla1.  Learn more about Devin immediately after his post on The Seven Wastes of Medical Billing Administration. The bill processing and revenue stream in health care is [...]

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Flowchart Fun: McDonald’s Nutrition Facts

by Pete Abilla April 14, 2010

There must be something going on with Food, Kitchens, and Lean.  I’ve talked about how to manage bottlenecks in a fast food business, I recently posted on the Iron Chef and SMED, my buddy Kevin just wrote a post on the Lean Kitchen, and today I’m posting a McDonald’s Calorie and Fat Flowchart. Similar to [...]

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The Law of

by Pete Abilla April 9, 2010

I’m very selective about what I read and what I do with my time.  So, when I get forwarded email from most people – including family – I’ll either archive it or just delete it. But, this time my father-in-law sent me something interesting and funny (thanks, dad).  I thought you might find it funny [...]

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Visualizing Decision Making Complexity

by Pete Abilla April 2, 2010

I’ve written before that there are, at times, too many cooks in the kitchen.  In that article, I quantitatively show how the number of communication links grows exponentially as the number of team members grow.  This state of affairs adds tremendous burden to a system, as well as confusion, diffusion of responsibility and, most troubling [...]

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A Bracket is a Queue

by Pete Abilla March 31, 2010
This entry is part 4 of 28 in the series queueing theory

We’re accustomed to viewing queues as serial lines, or people waiting to be served.  But, not much thought is given to the shapes of queues. Well, a Bracket is a type of Queue. In general, a queue is a line of people or things waiting to be handled, sometimes in sequential order starting at the [...]

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