In Toyota thinking, there are at least two indicators that a problem is occurring that needs to be resolved.
– The first is a sign that the process is not in control and that the process is understood imperfectly.
– The second, the ‘True North Ideal,’ as we called it in “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota [...]

Friends,
Ten years ago, I watched on television as a plane– stolen from the city in which I live–slammed into buildings in the city that is my hometown.  I later learned that among the thousands killed were former colleagues, a neighbor, and a high school classmate.
Today, 9/11/11, we should mourn–we have to mourn–those who perished.
But we [...]

How do we ensure complex systems remain resistant to failure: either from deliberate attack or as an unintended consequence of being unable to resist the stresses under which they are placed?
Conversation with a colleague about the specific risks to IT-system security identified two general alternatives, each with its own advantages and difficulties.

Threat analysis
Vulnerability [...]

Managing work to see problems when and where they occur is a necessary precondition–one too often overlooked–if an organization is going to achieve bona fide continuous improvement in pursuit of operational excellence.
Here’s why.
Absent an ability to design perfect systems for design, production, and delivery on the first try, operational excellence depends on continuous improvement and [...]

There is a conventional wisdom that ‘lean’ and other efforts towards process excellence and ‘innovation’ conflict, the former about standardization and rigidity, the latter about free-flowing creativity.
There are reasons for those wisdoms, but they miss the significant compliment between rigor in design and speed in improvement.  The stability of one is the necessary precondition for [...]