Production under private enterprise [will] decide the outcome of future struggles toward something better for all.
--H.B. Maynard
Notes from Uncertain
12 Mar 2024Page XVIII: The best of thinkers, in contrast, are willing to question and so are agile. They do not, as Aristotle once warned, measure a fluted column with a straight edge. And this wisdom can begin only with a realization that the world is imperfect, and so are you. When...
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Notes from Chatter
12 Feb 2024Page 58: The asymmetry in King Solomon’s thinking is a chatter parable that embodies a fundamental feature of the human mind: We don’t see ourselves with the same distance and insight with which we see others. Data shows that this goes beyond biblical allegory: We are all vulnerable to it....
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Notes from Think Faster, Talk Smarter
10 Feb 2024Page 23: Professional golfers often do this, repeating a word like “calm” or “poise” to tamp down negative self-talk. we can also adopt mantras that remind us of our deeper purposes. In a spontaneous communication situation, you might tell yourself something like: “I have value to add.” “I’ve improvised my...
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Notes from Rebel Cell
20 May 2023Page 121: But how worried should we really be? Every one of us probably has a few strange lumps and bumps by the time we get to a certain age, as shown by autopsies carried out on people who have died in accidents. At least a third of women in...
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Notes from Team Genius
23 Apr 2023Page 28: Another way of looking at Dunbar numbers is that five is the number of your most intimate friends and partners (“clique”) and is a number that, not coincedentally, corresponds with the limits of our short-term memory. Fifteen is the number of people with whom we can have deep...
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Notes from The Art of Action
22 Apr 2023Page xi: Commanders today are not better than Julius Caesar or Napoleon. Things that have been mastered are forgotten. Each generation has to relearn old lessons and acquire old skills. They just apply the same principles to new situations. To learn the art of strategy and the art of creating...
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Notes from The Power Broker
11 Nov 2022Page 272: Once they had proven themselves to him, Moses took pains with their training. They were, most of them, engineers and architects, and he was constantly distressed with their weakness in the use of the English language. So he taught them to write. … “The first thing you’ve got...
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Notes from Zero to IPO
23 Jul 2022Page 22: Silicon Valley mythology would have you belive that great ideas magically occur to founders - particularly young college-age founders - who whip up pitch decks and then are suddenly off to the races. In reality, however, founders usually come up with ideas because they are intimately familiar with...
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Notes from Simply Said
12 Jul 2022Page 9: “I didn’t follow the cause. I followed the man - and he was my friend.” With these simple words, a lieutenant of Caesar summed up a secret of the great commanders’ success.
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Notes from Masters of Command
26 Jun 2022Page 9: “I didn’t follow the cause. I followed the man - and he was my friend.” With these simple words, a lieutenant of Caesar summed up a secret of the great commanders’ success. Page 82: According to the sources, Alexander’s senior general, Parmenio, responded positively, saying, “I would accept...
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Notes from The Fixer
01 Jun 2022Page 62: And then it hit me. I’d been looking at it all wrong. The right thought wasn’t, Holy shit, the governor is totally MIA. The right thought was, Holy shit, this guy is totally checked out. Someone’s gotta run the place. And if no one’s going to tell us...
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Notes from Good Strategy Bad Strategy
30 Mar 2022Page 6: A strategy that fails to define a variety of plausible and feasible immediate actions is missing a critical component. Executives who complain about “execution” problems have usually confused strategy with goal setting. When the “strategy” process is basically a game of setting performance goals - so much market...
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Notes from The Innovator's Prescription
04 Mar 2022Page xvii: It has taught us that the economist Jean Baptiste Say was right, at least for this industry: when caregivers make more money by providing more care, supply creates its own demand. By some estimates, a staggering 50 percent of health care consumed seems to be driven by physician...
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Notes from Deep Medicine
10 Feb 2022Page 26: Misdiagnosis in the United States is disconcertingly common. A review of three very large studies concluded that there are about 12 million significant misdiagnoses a year. These mistakes result from numerous factors, including failing to order the right test, misinterpreting a test that was performed, not establishing a...
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Notes from The Price We Pay
01 Feb 2022Page 14: Collectively, the two root issues driving health care’s cost crisis - the appropriateness of care and pricing failures - would become increasingly vivid. Page 30: Conversely, predatory billing practices are rare in the few health care sectors that have already adopted real price transparency, including cosmetic surgery, in...
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Notes from An American Sickness
20 Jan 2022Page 258: The doctors of the society, political neophytes all, took out an advertisement in the local newspaper to propose a list of bold cost-saving ideas. They should be music to many patient’s ears. Price transparency should be mandated: “The difficulty in obtaining the cost or price of medical care...
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Notes from Grit
17 Mar 2021Page 22: There is a gap, James declared, between potential and its actualization. Without denying that our talents vary - one might be more musical than athletic or more entrepreneurial than artistic - James asserted that “the human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various...
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Notes from Extreme Ownership
04 Apr 2020Page 48: But it was a glaring, undeniable example of one of the most fundamental and important truths at the heart of Extreme Ownership: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. … leadership is the single greatest factor in any team’s performance. Whether a team succeeds or fails is...
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Notes from Radical Candor
12 Sep 2019Page 9: They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities as a manager: to create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism) to understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive; and to drive results collaboratively. Page...
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Notes from The Mask Of Command
16 Aug 2019Page 42: After the fall of Tyre, when Darius improved his bid, offering the whole of his empire up to the Euphrates, from which Alexander was still 500 miles distant, and also threw in the offer of a large cash sum and his daughter’s hand in marriage, Parmenio at once...
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Notes from Resilience - Why Things Bounce Back
12 Aug 2019Page 6: The strategies implied in each of these interventions - ensuring that there are sufficient reserves available to any given system; or diversifying its inputs; or collecting better, real-time data about its operations and performance; or enabling greater autonomy for its constituent parts; or designing firebreaks so that a...
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Notes from Measure What Matters
12 Jun 2019Page vii: Superpower #1: Focus and commit to priorities Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork Superpower #3: Track for Accountability Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing Page 26: He sought to “create an environment that values and emphasizes output” and to avoid what Drucker termed the “Activity trap”: “[S]tressing output...
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Notes from The One Best Way
01 Jun 2019Page 138: As a result, he would miss the one thing that was otherwise of greatest use to him in his experience with men; that is the knowledge of the character of the men with whom he is dealing. … They then begin to learn the greatest lesson of life,...
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Notes from Never Split The Difference
15 May 2019Page 44: How to confront - and get your way - without confrontation Use the late-night FM DJ voice. Start with “I’m sorry … “ Mirror. Silence. At least four seconds, to let the mirror works it magic on your counterpart. Repeat. Page 78: It comes down to the deep...
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Notes from Team of Teams
15 Apr 2019Page 31: Maybe more important than laying out a specific strategy, Nelson took care to emphasize the role of the individual captains. At the very core of his plan was what he later termed “the Nelson touch”: the idea that individual commanders should act on their own initiative once the...
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Notes from Accelerate
12 Mar 2019Page 14: In our search for measures of deliver performance that meet these criteria, we settled on four: delivery lead time, deployment frequency, time to restore service, and change fail rate. … Software delivery performance impacts organizational performance and noncommercial performance. 2017 High Performers Medium Performers Low Performers Deployment Frequency...
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Notes from Orbiting the Giant Hairball
28 Feb 2019Page 53: When you come into an organization, you bring with you an arcane potency, which stems, in part, from your uniqueness. That, in turn, is rooted in a complex mosaic of personal history that is original, unfathomable, inimitable. There has never been anyone quiet like you, and there never...
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Notes from Creativity, Inc.
21 Feb 2019Page 5: Decisions are made, usually for good reasons, which in turn prompt other decisions. So when problems arise - and they always do - disentangling them is not as simple as correcting the original error. Often, finding a solution is a multi-step endeavor. There is a problem you know...
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Notes from Man's Search For Meaning
21 Jan 2019Page 37: A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which...
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Notes from The Fifth Discipline
18 Nov 2018Page 10: The discipline of team learning starts with “dialogue”, the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine “thinking together.” To the Greeks dia-logos meant a free-flowing of ideas through a group, allowing the group to discover insights not attainable individually. Dialog differs...
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Notes about Modelling Customer Churn
13 Sep 2018I’m saving some links I followed when modelling customer churn. I came down pretty firmly in the camp of using survival analysis, and ended up with some interesting results by following this pattern: The Challenges of Building a Predictive Churn Model A Crash Course in Survival Analysis I II III...
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Notes from Toyota Production System
24 Jun 2018Page xiv: The starting concept of the Toyota production system was … a thorough elimination of waste. In fact, the closer we came to this goal, the clearer became the picture of individual human beings with distinct personalities. There is no real substance to that abstract mass we call “the...
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Notes from Turn the Ship Around
23 Dec 2017Page 46: Once the crewmen remembered what we were doing and why, they would do anything to support the mission. This was a stark contrast to earlier, when people were coming to work simply with the hope of not screwing up. Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Page 66: First,...
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Notes from Lean Customer Development
09 Oct 2017Page XV: Customer development is critical to success, but grossly underutizlized. Here are the top four reasons I believe this is so: We’re biased toward our own gread ideas. We feel that our industry knowledge entitles us to skip vaidating those ideas and jump to creating products. We don’t know...
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Notes from Mindset - The New Psychology of Success
08 Sep 2017Page 5: A few modern philosophers … assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism … With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgement, and...
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Notes from Lean Analytics
08 Sep 2017Page 28: Page 38: Humans do inspiration; machines do validation … change favors local maxima; innovation favors global distruption. Ten common pitfalls: Asssuming the data is clean Not normalizing Excluding outliers Including outliers Ignoring seasonality Ignoring size when reporting growth Data vomit Metrics that cry wolf The “Not Collected Here”...
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How to Create Products That Customers Love with Marty Cagan
22 Aug 2017I took this workshop, and jotted down some notes from Marty. All in all, I’d definitely recommend this workshop; it was a great overview, and helped me start seeing the difference between product management in Silicon Valley vs. elsewhere. SAFe is designed for IT. IT projects we give to the...
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Notes from User Story Mapping
10 Aug 2017Page XXXV: Page XL: Page XLIII: Page 28: Page 32: Page 44: Page 56: Page 76: Page 82: Page 90: Page 107: Page 122: Page 133: Page 142: Page 150: Page 157: A small, cross-functional team led by a product owner orchestrates product discovery work. Page 162: Page 170: Page...
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Notes from Lean UX
10 Aug 2017Page 34: We’ve talked a lot in this chapter about outcomes as the measure of success for your product. One challenge we’ve observed with the teams we’ve worked with is finding the right level of granularity in determining the right outcomes to measure. To help with that, let’s look at...
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Notes from Inspired - How to Create Products Customers Love
06 Aug 2017Page 8: Futher, this model is based on a flawed view of software that holds you can define high-level requirements independent of detailed requirements and especially the user experience. In companies with the model, product managers become little more than a spec-generation service. It is a frustrating job that tends...
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More Reliable Delivery with Monte Carlo & Story Mapping
26 Jun 2017More Reliable Delivery with Monte Carlo & Story Mapping from Conal Scanlon Click here to download the Monte Carlo Workbook
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Notes from Managing to Learn
23 Apr 2017Page 2: In stark contract, effective use of the A3 Process can facilitate the shift from a debate about who owns what (an authority-focused debate) to a dialog around what is the right thing to do (a responsibility-focused-conversation). Page 53: We want to not only show respect to our people,...
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Notes from Toyota Kata - Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness, and Superior Results
04 Dec 2016The Improvement Kata:### Page 6: The competitive advantage of an organization lies not so much in the solutions themselves - whether lean techniques, today’s profitable product, or any other - but in the ability of the organization to understand conditions and create fitting, smart solutions. The key point was not...
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Notes from Lean Software Development - An Agile Toolkit
09 Sep 2016General Principles: Eliminate Waste Amplify Learning Decide as Late as Possible Deliver as Fast as Possible Empower the Team Build Integrity In See the Whole Tools: Seeing Waste Value Stream Mapping Feedback Iterations Synchronization Set-based Development Options Thinking The Last Responsible Moment Making Decisions Pull Systems Queuing Theory Cost of...
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The Seven Zeros of JIT Applied to Product Development
16 Aug 2016J.N. Edwards was one of the first people to introduce Just in Time (JIT) to the West when he presented it at an APICS conference in 1983. As with most Westerners, he wrote in terms of absolute ideals (Hopp, in Factory Physics, speculates that this could either be the result...
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Commentary on "The Role of Scientific Management in World Recovery"
14 Aug 2016H.B Maynard
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The Role of Scientific Management in World Recovery
14 Aug 2016The following is presented without comment, [sic] from the original speech. My thoughts are provided elsewhere. *Towne Lecture presented at a luncheon meeting of the Management Division in conjunction with the Annual Meeting, New York, N. Y., December 1, 1948, of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The world today...
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Notes from The Lean Startup
04 Jul 2016Page 20:### In contrast, if I was interrupted with questions, process, or - heaven forbid - meetings, I felt bad. What did I really accomplish that day? Code and product features were tangible to me; I could see them, understand them, and show them off. Learning, by contrast, is frustratingly...
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A brief timeline of Management Philosophies
25 Jun 2016For a new implementation, I’m worried about things being interpreted as management by fad. Based on our improvement model, I worked backwards to key events that helped shaped what we know today. The roots of good software development and operations - respect for people, eliminating waste, creating value that flows...
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