Focus on the Inputs

by Pete Abilla August 17, 2010

In the April 2010 Letter to Shareholders, Jeff Bezos tells Amazon.com shareholders about their focus on inputs, the customer, and their purposeful lack of discussion around financial metrics: Senior leaders that are new to Amazon are often surprised by how little time we spend discussing actual financial results or debating projected financial outputs. To be [...]

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The Lean Startup, Video Interview, Eric Ries, Part 2

by Pete Abilla August 17, 2010
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series The Lean Startup

This is Eric Ries, explaining The Lean Startup – this is part 2. You can see Eric Ries Lean Startup Video Interview Part 1 here. In other words, how to apply Lean Thinking to entrepreneurship and to building products and launching companies that customers love.

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The Lean Startup and Customer Development

by Pete Abilla August 16, 2010
This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Book Review

Steve Blank, the author of “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”, explains how to effectively bring a product to market. In doing so, he applies many principles of Lean Thinking, sparking a very popular movement in the entrepreneurship and the startup world: The Lean Startup. Steve Blank argues that there are many methodologies for software [...]

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The Lean Startup, Video Interview, Eric Ries, Part 1

by Pete Abilla August 15, 2010
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series The Lean Startup

Here’s a great interview with Eric Ries, the standard bearer for The Lean Startup Movement (leanstartup). It’s an entrepreneurial approach that applies principles of Lean Thinking to building products and launching companies that customers love.

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Book Review: Clinical 5S for Healthcare

by Pete Abilla August 14, 2010

Akio Takahara is the leading lean practitioner and expert on the 5S support system in Healthcare. In his book, he claims that 5S in Healthcare will do the following: Reduce human errors Prevent patient accidents Eliminate the waste of searching Better utilize available work space Increase patient and colleague satisfaction It’s very refreshing to see [...]

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reCAPTCHA: A Problem, A Solution, an Innovation

by Pete Abilla August 13, 2010

reCAPTCHA is one of the most innovative ideas that I’ve ever come across. What is fascinating is that reCAPTCHA solves a real human problem in such a simple an innovative way. To some degree, Luis Von Ahn, the inventor of reCAPTCHA, followed the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) framework in Lean – without even knowing it. What if [...]

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Do Not Do 5S – Yet

by Pete Abilla August 12, 2010

I’ve never understood why most organizations start their Lean journey with 5S. Most consultants advocate this approach also. I take a different view. In an earlier post, Jamie Flinchbaugh argues that organizations shouldn’t begin their Lean journey with 5S for the following reasons: If your first step in Lean is one that involves mandates, it [...]

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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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Lean Six Sigma: Elements of DEFINE

by Pete Abilla August 10, 2010
This entry is part 5 of 28 in the series Lean and Six Sigma

The first phase in the Six Sigma Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) Methodology is Define. During the Define phase, a team and its sponsors reach agreement on what the project is and what it should accomplish. The main work in the Define phase is for the project team to complete an analysis of what the project should accomplish [...]

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