Toyota’s sudden acceleration woes, which led its CEO Akio Toyoda to appear before Congress to explain why the company’s famed quality system broke down and spawned a massive $16M government fine for hiding safety problems, puts a shadow across their once acclaimed management practices. But its worth remembering what once worked about the innovative Japanese management practices brought to our shores by Toyota.
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Going Paperless: Target the Waste
It seems that everyone everywhere is tightening their belt these days – so when budgets become a sensitive subject, I often recall one of my favorite charts that I liked to trot out when I worked in the bureaucracy at the Department of Energy and was trying to get traction on ideas to change the way they did consumer information.
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Crowd Source Your Requirements Gathering
In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki observed leaders run the risk of being all tactics and no strategy unless they make sure that your day-to-day activity adds up to something bigger. “Successful campaigns,” he writes, “may depend as much on the fast aggregation of information from the field as on preexisting top-down strategy.”
This presentation shows how several creative concepts and frameworks –starting with “the wisdom of crowds” — are mashed up to create something new. The result is my fix for a web development requirements-gathering process which is too often broken.
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