Sublime

I learned everything I could about possible causes of failure, and I decided to spend most of my time on the factory floor to make sure every step was done properly. It soon became apparent that the instructions the engineering department gave the factory people were not adequate to ensure that every step would be done properly. I found the factory

Steve Jobs fastened onto the Brand approach in recounting his own life in his influential 2005 Stanford commencement address. He found inspiration in the closing page of Brand’s Whole Earth Epilog. It captured the sensibility that emerged on the western edge of the continent during the sixties. The back cover of the 1974 edition of the publication

Only a cynical dullard could come away from witnessing this feeling anything other than wonder at what man can accomplish.

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

At the end of the day, what matters is not what happens during the recurrent bubbles, but what comes next. The price to pay for widespread instability is that some investors regularly lose money because they didn’t pick the winner, whereas many employees eventually lose their jobs because they happened to work for the losers. In this context, the s

A new technology appeared on the horizon but at an infant state: extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). The U.S. government thought this was going to be the key technology for microchip production, and the Department of Energy sponsored development of it in a working group with Intel, AMD, and Motorola. In 1999, a small Dutch company joined the eff

But overall the profession does not excel at seeing trouble ahead and unlike engineering disciplines it doesn’t have a branch of forward-looking failure-mode analysis or of post-crash forensic analysis.

Babak Nivi writes the excellent blog Venture Hacks and was an early Lean Startup evangelist: http://venturehacks.com/. He’s since gone on to create Angel List, which matches startups and investors around the world: http://angel.co/

There were about 4,000 people at this facility, and we were the first Americans ever to visit. It was obvious to me that what they were building would be entirely useless in modern-day combat, but I didn’t say anything at the time, except to compliment them on their workmanship.