Sublime

Inside the airline industry, however, everyone knew Southwest and only too well. It had never lost money, from the time it was fully established in business. And it had flourished while defying almost every success maxim of the post-deregulation world: it had no computer reservations system, offered no frequent-flier program, did not conduct yield

Shrunk from thirty teams to four after World War II, the UDTs’ narrow role of beach reconnaissance and demolition had devolved into a collage of extracurricular Navy assignments: collecting postblast radioactive water samples; exploding ship paths through Antarctic ice; even ignominiously standing duty as base lifeguards. Given this misuse—misuse t

It’s like, “How about we give you $30,000 and 30 days and you come back with a prototype.” Then the engineers say, “Do you know how much money it will cost me to set up to make a prototype? My yield will go down, my waste will go up, my metrics will go in the toilet and I’ll get screwed at my annual review.” It’s not that the incentives are set up

It’s not hard to appreciate the bureau’s plight. Everybody wanted standards—it’s not as if manufacturers took pride in making incompatible hoses. It’s just that each firm desperately wanted its way of doing things to be the standard way, and for good reason. Losing a standards war meant having to retool, which might require purchasing expensive new

Wilke’s secret to success? A culture of operational excellence—built on lean manufacturing, statistical process control, the theory of constraints, and purpose-built software.‡ Lean manufacturing, of course, came from the Toyota Way, the fusion of Deming’s and Japan’s “East meets West” ideas and practices. Statistical process control, too, comes st

This is the story of a rather unorthodox department known as M.D.1. (Ministry of Defence 1). Born at the War Office early in 1939 with a staff of one commissioned and one non-commissioned officer charged with the task of devising special weapons for irregular warfare, it rapidly grew up into an establishment equipped to design and develop new weapo

Procedure project, usually involves a well-recognized and…

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