A VP of Marketing from Wiley Publishers wrote me a few weeks ago and offered me a book to review.  I asked why and her comment was that she noticed that I have a lot a post about customer obsession and that my subscribership was healthy.  I said, "sure, send me the book."  I’ve started to read it and I think it’s interesting, but I won’t finish it.  But, I did find this gem about Toyota and how it has created word-of-mouth buzz through its presence in Second Life and Whyville.

The book she gave me was this:

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There is much literature on the Toyota Production System, otherwise knows as Lean Manufacturing.  There is much less literature, however, on how Toyota develops products.  We know, for example, that the Agile Software Methodology and movement is mostly influenced by Toyota’s Product Development System (TPDS), but there is less information on TPDS, than there is for TPS.  The article below shows well what The Toyota Product Development System is about.

For more on the Toyota Product Development System, you can check out this great book by Morgan and Liker: 

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Genchi Genbutsu is a key concept at Toyota and the Toyota Production System; it means "go and see for yourself."

While doing some research on user-centered design for a class I teach at BYU, I came across a fascinating article on Toyota with an excellent example that shows how Genchi Genbutsu is way of doing business at Toyota.   Below is a excellent example of how Toyota applies this principle in their everyday work (Chicago Sun-Time, Feb. 24, 2003):

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Mary and Tom Poppendieck, the author of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers (Paperback), which won the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004 and, the sequel Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (Paperback) were recently interviewed on the history of Lean, or the Toyota Production System, and how the software world is now using Lean to develop software.  Below is the transcript of that interview.

Mary & Tom, can you please introduce yourselves and tell us what your currently working on.

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For the Operations and Supply Chain Management class that I teach at BYU, I’ve been doing some research on Supplier Code of Conduct, or the tenets by which a supplier can be accepted into a network; this is often called "Order Qualifier" — that is, the basic items that a supplier must meet in order to be even considered as a supplier in the company’s network.  In the course of my research, I have studied the Supplier Code of Conduct for Apple, Intel, Boeing, Starbucks, The Gap, and Toyota.  But, I also recently discovered an interesting article — the Toyota Code of Conduct — not for suppliers, but for employees.

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User Interfaces and — any product Interface — is very difficult to build.  How do you design eating utensils for people with arthritic hands?  Answering that question is not easy — the physiology of arthritic hands is complex; designing objects that hands with arthritis can grasp, hold, and use is a difficult problem.  That’s just an example, but the point is this: The face of any product is the product. 

Here’s a revealing experience from Erasmus Smums:

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I believe in creating bridges between groups and, in general, cooperation and teamwork.  I subscribe to the Toyota Production System axiom of "respect for people".  While I believe in building bridges, there are some bridges I don’t mind burning at all.

It’s been over a year since my infamous Google Job Interview.  Since that time, Google has written me several emails, to see if I’m interested in working for them.  One of the Googlers (an ex-Amazonian-turned-Googler and very famous blogger) has written me private emails stating "Just let me know, and I’ll make it happen."   I appreciate the  emails and the solicitation. 

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Launching a new website, front-end store, or product requires several trade-off’s.  Here are two principles I learned at Amazon that still ring true to me.

Living with the Suboptimal

The result of external competitive pressures and a resource-constrained development environment is that we almost always have to live with the suboptimal: we have to launch with fewer features than we would like, with less complex features than we would like, in less time than we would like.

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