Majority Rule in Social Networks

by Pete Abilla on 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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Kaizen: They Must Increase, I Must Decrease

by Pete Abilla on August 26, 2010

The true spirit of Kaizen isn’t just about improving the organization, but it is also in teaching, guiding, and in effectively stretching people beyond their current capabilities. Indeed, it is in developing people and in increasing their capability to contribute and add value. Staying true to the spirit of Kaizen has a few implications on [...]

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The Lean Startup: Customer and Market Risks

by Pete Abilla September 2, 2010

Products often don’t fail because of technology. Products and Organizations fail because of failure to find a market for their product. Put another way, we can’t just build products hoping that customers will come – that leads to one of the Toyota Seven Wastes – Overproduction, or, building something nobody wants. Steve Blank explains this [...]

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Visual Management, Color Psychology, and Decision Making

by Pete Abilla September 1, 2010

There’s a lot of research into what factors affect our decision making. Most of the research is in the social sciences, such as sociology and economics, and more applied approaches toward user behavior and shopping behavior. Recent research into color and color psychology and how color affects our buying decisions is interesting and relevant. This [...]

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Rethinking Product Development: A Customer Development Approach

by Pete Abilla September 1, 2010

Steve Blank, author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, explains the state of product development and how it needs to be augmented with Customer Development. Doing so would reduce market risk and increase the chances for startup success.

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Check Sheets

by Pete Abilla August 31, 2010

A Check Sheet is one of the Seven (7) Basic Quality Tools. A Check Sheet is a simple tool for data collection. In this post, I’ll show how to create and use a Check Sheet and provide some basic heuristics and common pitfalls of Check Sheet and data collection overall. A Check Sheet allows us [...]

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Your Baby is Ugly

by Pete Abilla August 30, 2010

No, we’re not talking about children or infants here. We’re talking about people who are so invested in their idea, business, and process, which results in hyper tunnel vision and they begin to believe the fantasy that their [enter "whatever" here] is the best and cannot get better. Calling that [thing] imperfect is analogous to [...]

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Red Bead Experiment: Part 6

by Pete Abilla August 30, 2010

This is Part 6 of 6 of the Deming Red Bead Video Tutorial. The Red Bead Experiment by Dr. W. Edwards Deming Pete Abilla www.shmula.com Product Review Aug 30, 2010 Rating: 5/5 An amazing and incredibly simple game that illustrates so many important management principles and also principles of process improvement. I promise you – [...]

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Book Review: Whaddaya Mean I Gotta Be Lean

by Pete Abilla August 29, 2010

Jeff Hajek, the author of “Whaddaya Mean I Gotta Be Lean”, was kind enough to send me a book to review. Overall, I thought the book was good for an audience of on-the-ground practitioners of Lean. My first impression was not to take the book too seriously, given the cute and irreverent title of the [...]

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Red Bead Experiment: Part 5

by Pete Abilla August 28, 2010

This is Part 5 of 6 of the Deming Red Bead Video Tutorial. The Red Bead Experiment by Dr. W. Edwards Deming Pete Abilla www.shmula.com Product Review Aug 28, 2010 Rating: 5/5 An amazing and incredibly simple game that illustrates so many important management principles and also principles of process improvement. I promise you – [...]

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Lean for Service Operations: Improving Healthcare

by Pete Abilla August 27, 2010

A good article in Businessweek illustrates the impact of Lean Thinking or, more specific, Lean Consumption or Lean for Service Operations can have on Healthcare. Here are a few items from that article worth noting: [Look for] integration opportunities: connecting adjacent but unconnected pieces of the patient experience to create small, incremental improvements. The integration [...]

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