Sublime

Timothy Prestero’s “Better by Design.”

Efficiency is what excites Jay. Looking at something and finding a better way to do it is his forte. And that’s something I not only valued but embraced. I’m not the kind of guy who says, “Look, kid, I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and I’m not interested in changing.” I never have a problem if someone tells me something is broken. I have alw

if you or a colleague describes a Job to Be Done in adjectives and adverbs, it is not a valid job.

institutional knowledge

Toyota’s leaders painted a big red square on the assembly line floor. New employees had to stand in it at the end of their first week, and they were not allowed to leave until they had criticized at least three things on the line. The continual improvement this practice spawned was part of Toyota’s success. I asked my team what they thought: did we

In more mature organizations, feedback is ad hoc, real-time, and multidirectional, an open dialogue between people anywhere in the organization.

The best way to solve a management problem, he believed, was through “creative confrontation”—by facing people “bluntly, directly, and unapologetically.”fn7

Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them. It was one of the things that the PARC group admired most about Bob Taylor. Interestingly, Tom West fought hard for his Eagle group at Data General but chose not to tell them, reasoning that it would only distract them from the project. As a result, some of his t

The Japanese companies looked for every point of friction in the manufacturing process and eliminated it.