Thoughts on Lean, communication, and social media
Webrooming is the new hype and hope of brick-and-mortar stores. The reverse of showrooming (going to a physical store and then buying the product online), webrooming stands for researching the product online and then going to a physical store to make the purchase.
In this post, I will examine how innovative retailers are taking advantage of webrooming, and what possibilities may still lie untouched.
Continue reading “Webrooming and lessons from Verkkokauppa.com, Target and Gap”
What does this Lean Startup thing have to do with Lean? What can a startup learn from an established giant like Toyota, or vice versa? Where is my value-stream map, I need a value-stream map, right? The ground between established Lean practice and the Lean Startup movement is full of confusion, but things are far from hopeless – it is possible to form a relatively clear picture of this whole, and that is what this post is all about.
What do you want to own? That is a fundamental question that has been challenged more and more in the recent years. Is being able to access the things you want when you want enough, or do you actually need to own something?
Continue reading “Spotify, Netflix, and the collaborative economy”
Eric Ries has argued for an entrepreneurial career path to be created within large corporations in order to better promote innovation in his book, The Lean Startup. In this post, I will examine how this idea plays together with the game theory concept of the shadow of the future, which refers to the way our knowledge of future interactions affects our current decisions.
Continue reading “Lean Startup in large corporations and the shadow of the future”
In his book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries argues for ways to expand Lean thinking into the realm of startups, into the realm of huge uncertainty.
At the core of his model lies the Build-Measure-Learn loop, which is the key to genuine experimentation and validated learning through working with customers. But what is the relationship between the Build-Measure-Learn loop and the old Lean stalwart, the Plan-Do-Study-Adjust cycle?
Continue reading “Lean Startup’s Build-Measure-Learn loop and the PDSA cycle”
Yves Morieux’s and Peter Tollman’s Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated is one of the most interesting books on designing and leading organizations published this year. Morieux has been refining the concept for the past few years, as the rules made their first appearance in his Harward Business Review article in 2011, and featured prominently in his TED talk in October 2013.
Morieux’s basic argument is that complexity is best managed by creating practices that promote autonomy and cooperation, and he advocates six rules, adherence to which results in fostering the correct behaviors for improved performance throughout the company.
In this post, I will examine Morieux’s six rules and compare them to Lean, because, even though Morieux does not mention Lean at all, and sometimes writes about processes in a negative manner, it seems obvious to me that there would be many similarities in companies guided by either set of principles. As a matter of fact, at least the Lego Group has utilized both Morieux’s guidance and Lean in practice.
I will also compare Morieux’s rules to social business, as that comparison will highlight some interesting potential development in the way work is organized.
Continue reading “Morieux’s six simple rules to managing complexity, Lean, and social business”
The manufacturing industry has a big problem. The youth of today see manufacturing as a dirty and uncomfortable work environment and would rather work somewhere else. The result is that too few young people choose to pursue careers in engineering, machining, or welding, and of the young people who have skills that are applicable to multiple industries, such as software designers, too few consider manufacturing industry as a primary career choice.
In his presentation at Manufacturing Performance Days in June this year, Professor Marco Taisch argued that the issue begins already from the way science is taught and appreciated in elementary school. If that is the case, then the needed changes are quite fundamental. However, problem-solving often consists of both short-term and long-term solutions, and in this post I am more concerned in more short-term solutions, namely, how to reach teenagers and college students and change their view of manufacturing. Can eSports offer a venue to changing their opinions?
Reviews have been one of Amazon’s strengths and one of its problems for a long time. The issues around fake reviews are rather well known and covered extensively in traditional media as well (here is a New York Times piece on those issues and Amazon’s attempts to solve them).
However, there is also another, less thoroughly covered story of Amazon review manipulation: the helpful or non-helpful review vote. Anyone can vote for or against a review with the simple click of a button, and this affects how reviews are displayed on the page. This feature is nowadays extensively used for manipulation of review rankings on product pages.
This post stems from two sources. On one hand, Daniel Pink’s Drive has brought variations of self-determination theory of motivation into the mainstream. On the other hand, everyone in the gamification scene is building varieties of Bartle player types to explain motivation. Can these two be brought together?
Actually, Andrzej Marczewski has already done something like that with his user types, but in this post I want to dig a bit deeper into the theoretical basis of doing so. We’ll get back to the user types later, but first we need to venture into Nick Yee’s well-known paper, Motivations of Play in MMORPGs: Results from a Factor Analytic Approach.
As social business matures, it is moving to new areas. People share ideas, and they also increasingly share products and services in what Jeremiah Owyang calls the collaborative economy. This sharing has mostly been consumer-centric (accommodation, cars, loans) with fairly few corporate sharing models (coworking is one). However, there is no reason why this model could not work in manufacturing as well, and as a matter of fact there are already some precursors from which a full-fledged collaborative manufacturing model can grow.