From the monthly archives:

February 2008

Abraham Lincoln on Genchi Genbutsu

by Pete Abilla February 25, 2008

I just finished reading the book Lincoln on Leadership. I found it to be an excellent book, highlighting the leadership lessons that made Lincoln one of the most revered and respected people in the world. I highly recommend this book. Abraham Lincoln’s life, in my view, was a personification of the Toyota Way — his [...]

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Lost-in-Translation in Large Teams

by Pete Abilla February 24, 2008

Team size can make a big difference in the success of your service or product.  What is counterintuitive for most people is that the larger the team size, the lower the likelihood of success for your service or product.  Why?  Entropy can set in and large teams are inherently bad vehicles for communication.  In what [...]

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Fun With The 2×2, Happiness Edition

by Pete Abilla February 21, 2008

Following Kevin’s Fun With Statistics series, I’ll be doing a Fun With The 2×2 Matrix series.  In this part of the series, we’ll be looking at the dynamic between Success and Happiness. Most variables in life can probably be better modeled as a function, showing th inflection point at which there might be too much [...]

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2007 Year-in-Review

by Pete Abilla February 18, 2008

I meant to post about site metrics for shmula.com in 2007, but am obviously very late.  In what follows, I’ll summarize the shmula.com blog traffic, reader demographics including gender, household income, and geolocation, feed subscribers, and also other site metric items. 2007 was a good year, though a much slower year in terms of posts [...]

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Barack Obama, Super Delegates, and Set Theory

by Pete Abilla February 14, 2008

About 10 years ago, I wrote a paper axiomatizing Majority Rule, using the Truth-Functional Logic and Set Theory; I explain the concepts of Social Choice Function, Majority Rule, Voter Equality, Sensitivity, and Option Equality.  Today, I republish it here, and explain its application to the Democratic ticket between Barack Obama and HIlary Clinton and explain [...]

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Burden on People; Burden on Earth

by Pete Abilla February 7, 2008

On average, most business processes are inefficient  and create an unhealthy amount of waste: once you learn to see the process waste all around — with Lean Thinking as your worldview — you will notice overprocessing, transportation, overproduction, waiting, inventory, motion, and defects.  Aside from our processes producing waste, our processes also create burden on [...]

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Attitude and the Pyschology of Queueing

by Pete Abilla February 2, 2008
This entry is part 20 of 28 in the series queueing theory

I took the kids to see a movie at a nearby dollar theater many weeks ago.  We saw Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and some parts of that movie has stayed with me.  I thought that the movie was actually very good: it was an overall very good feel-good movie, with a very good message.  One [...]

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