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 respect for people, his personal tutoring of his followers through effective use of ambiguity and the Socratic approach, and his common sense — all pleasantly wreak of Toyota.

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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 follows, I show quantitatively how team size does have an impact on the effectiveness of communication and the eventual success of the service or product.

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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 of a thing, or where too much of a thing results in a decline of another equally important variable.  But, the 2×2 Matrix can also be useful and descriptive. 

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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 written.  I was quite busy with work and family but, all in all, it was a good year for shmula.com in terms of traffic.  Keep in mind, that shmula.com is a personal blog; in other words, I write about stuff that I’m interested in and passionate about.  I don’t claim to be an expert in anything nor do I claim that shmula.com is a blog about anything specific.  In sum, shmula.com will contain content on stuff that I care about. 

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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 the Super Delegate concept and how the notion of Super Delegates are, in fact, Anti-Majority Rule because it violates the principle of Voter Equality.

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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 our people and also burden on the earth. 

A company that I once did some work for was very concerned about the burden it was placing on its people and on the earth.  In what follows, I will show that a firm can still be enterprising, care about people, and care about the earth. 

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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 key take-away for me was the role of a good attitude and how that can make a big, big difference in life. 

Pyschology of Queueing - Psychology of Waiting Lines

Mr. Magorium puts a twist on the Psychology of Queueing.  Below are the the non-exhaustive, but general principles of the Psychology of Queueing:

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