Jul 6 2018
A Rose By Any Other Name,… Don’t Even Try!
Whether you name a company, a product, a machine, a person, a role,… or serialize units in production, you create a key to which information about an entity can be attached and through which it can be retrieved. When you do it, you should think through the different ways the name will be used and, once you have made your choice, stick with it.
These are obvious principles, but not always respected in manufacturing organizations. It hadn’t occurred to me to post about this until I saw, in yesterday’s New York Times, an unintelligible tennis women champions’ board from Wimbledon, from photographer Duncan Grove, with annotations to decrypt it:
The simple, straightforward choice would have been to designate these winners by the full names under which they were referenced in the media and list multiple winners under the same name for all wins. The board maintainers at Wimbledon could also have asked the honorees what they wanted to be called. Their marital status is irrelevant and, if married, so are their obscure husbands’ last names and initials, particularly for the women who won both before and after marriage, or had several spouses. The key takeaway: when naming, forget obsolete traditions.
Jul 23 2018
What is the science in Lean? | Jeffrey Liker | The Leadership Network
“Scientific thinking can be defined as the intentional coordination of theory and evidence, whereby we encounter new information, interpret it and, if warranted, revise our understanding accordingly. In fact, we learn the most when we explicitly state what we expect and compare it to what actually happens. […] This is where practicing PDCA comes in, and Toyota’s view on being scientific.[…] Just explaining the concept of PDCA is not enough to change behavior and mindset, and there are not many master teachers like Ohno to go around — who have an intuitive feel for what to ask next to push the right buttons to help the student learn through practice. This is the reason for the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata — to have a structured approach to learning and teaching scientific thinking so it can be deliberately practiced by anyone..”
Source: The Leadership Network
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Is there science to Lean, TPS, or, more generally, manufacturing? There is definitely technology and there is management. Technology is about getting inanimate objects to do what we want them to; management, about working with people. Science is not about getting anything done but about understanding how nature works.
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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 2 • Tags: Lean, PDCA, Scientific Method