For the past few weeks I’ve been reading the Lean Product and Process Development (2nd Edition) book by Allen C. Ward and Durward K. Sobek II. It’s very idea heavy, with practically every chapter introducing new concepts. Second edition has several great case studies which really help with understanding how some of the concepts can be used in practice. All in all, this is a book I’ll be re-reading for years to come. ∞
During the Second World War, U.S. government initiated an improvement programme “Training Within Industry” with aims of providing education regarding the importance of continuous improvement (CI). After the war, CI was taught to post-war Japan through works of Deming and Juran (Shingo and Robinson, 1990). Based on those lectures, Japanese developed their own way of CI thinking, nowadays known as kaizen (Imai, 1986).
A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
Marcus Aurelius
Besides previously discussed Quality Management Systems (QMS), there are also Quality Management Frameworks (QMF) which aim to provide guidance. Companies can use these frameworks to benchmark the performance of their QMS, and can use the guidance of QMF to strive for excellence.
This post provides concise overview of six Quality Management Systems, based on the work of Professor Andrea Chiarini.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
Sometime around January or February 2016 Miro Hegedić introduced me to Tore Rasmussen, one of the guys behind Playing Lean. Given my background and interests, Lean Start-up wasn’t really on my map, but all that changed after meeting with Tore. Since then, it just kept on rolling, and today we are working together on several projects.
For the uninitiated, Playing Lean is an educational board game which facilitates learning of the Lean Start-up principles through gamified experience. Playing Lean is aligned with Ash Maurya’s Running Lean, and he is involved with the development of the game. He endorses it as an educational tool for the Lean Start-up. Tore has written more about how Playing Lean conveys Lean Start-up.
In May 2016 I became a Certified Playing Lean Facilitator, and in agreement with Tore and Simen, I started to plan a promotional Australian road-trip. The idea was to cover all major cities over the course of one month.
Previously presented definitions of quality could be considered new, but philosophy of quality is far from new. Well known Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle considered qualities as hylomorphically formal attributes, and described four types of qualitative opposites: correlatives, contraries, privatives and positives (Whitaker, 1996).
Quality thinking developed with manufacturing systems, and could be considered both order qualifier and order winner.
