2026-08-31 17:03:00
Frederick Taylor taught Henry Ford how to do mass production. Deming brought quality, systems understanding and respect for the worker. And operations research brought insight.
If you have a repeated production process, the method for improving it is almost always the same, regardless of what you and your team produce:
1. Measure before you change. You can’t improve what you haven’t observed. Go to the floor, watch the actual work, time it, and document what’s really happening—not what you assume is happening. Taylor called this time study. Operations research calls it data collection. Either way, you start by looking.
2. Map the flow. Trace the path of materials and information from start to finish. Where does work queue up? Where does it sit idle? Where does it move backward? A simple process flow diagram reveals bottlenecks you’d never see otherwise.
3. Identify the constraint. Your system can only move as fast as its slowest step. Find it. Everything else is secondary until you address that bottleneck. (At a buffet, when you double the number of stations of the slowest item, the entire line runs faster.)
4. Separate value from waste. For every step, ask: does this transform the product in a way the customer would pay for? Anything else—waiting, moving, inspecting, reworking—is waste. You don’t need to eliminate all of it, but you need to see it.
5. Standardize the best-known method. This is Taylor’s core insight: once you find a better way, write it down, teach it, and make it the default. Not to control workers, but to create a floor that everyone can build on. Deming’s insight is that variation is the enemy of quality.
6. Reduce variation before you optimize speed. This is Deming’s most important and surprising lesson. A consistent process running at moderate speed beats an erratic one running fast. Get the process under statistical control first.
7. Build in feedback loops, not inspection gates. Smart managers don’t like end-of-line inspection because it’s too late. Instead, give the people doing the work the information and authority to catch problems as they happen. The goal is to make quality intrinsic to the process, not bolt it on after.
8. Optimize the system, not the parts. This is where operations research and Deming converge. Making one station 30% faster can actually make the whole system worse if it just piles up inventory before the next step. Ask: what does this change do to the entire flow?
9. Involve the people doing the work. Taylor got this wrong—he treated workers as interchangeable parts. Deming fixed this: the people on the floor know things management never will. Create structured ways to capture that knowledge. Invest in reducing fear so people will share what they know.
10. Iterate in small cycles. Plan-Do-Study-Act is Deming’s learning wheel. Don’t redesign everything at once. Make a small change, measure the result, learn from it, adjust. Then do it again. The factory you want isn’t built in a single leap—it emerges from dozens of small, informed improvements compounding over time.
The meta-principle underneath all ten: respect the system and the people in it. Change the system before you blame the people.
And don’t get efficient at doing something you’d rather not be doing at all.
2026-08-30 17:03:00
The first day of classes, some students slouch in the back row, unprepared and uninterested. Some are up front, eager and ready. But it’s only the morning of the first day–these attitudes aren’t related to the teacher. It’s a pattern, one that is the result of culture, systems and personality.
Many of these students have been let down before, and it’s easier to be skeptical than to make a commitment, only to be disappointed later.
If it happens over time, it becomes part of how we see ourselves. And that person might end up in a job where they seek to do as little as possible and care less.
For good reasons, then, there are two sorts of attitudes people bring to work:
For a great job or a committed teacher, it’s a shame if someone brings a failure attitude to work. They’re wasting a slot that someone else could have thrived in.
And for a lousy job, one that offers little dignity or possibility, we’re wasting all the potential of someone who seeks to contribute.
Getting the match right helps the organization and the worker as well.
Resumes give few clues about the attitude people bring to work. But finding the right match could save a lot of time and heartbreak.
2026-08-29 17:03:00
Snap, crackle and pop.
A set of German-made socket wrenches can turn a bolt in a similar way to a cheaper alternative, but it feels far more rewarding.
More than forty years ago, I started using a Mac. The first thing one noticed was hard to put words on–everything about it simply clicked better. The mouse was an extension of your mind.
Today, a 128k Mac is an ancient relic, and the current models have raised the standard. The other day, I needed to use a cheap PC laptop, and the difference was startling. I felt like I was wearing gloves.
This fit-and-finish design and production ethic can be extended from typography to the way we answer the phone. It’s largely invisible, but it takes consistent and quiet effort.
The investments we make in fit and finish will always need to be defended from the short-term penny counters that seek to take away the budget in a quest to save a few dollars today instead of investing in tomorrow.
It’s not cheap, but it’s a bargain.
2026-08-28 17:03:00
For fifteen or twenty years, this question is relentlessly answered, whether or not we ask it.
After we learn fractions, the teacher moves on to decimals. After we read O’Connor, we’re handed Faulkner. In music history, Debussy follows Brahms. Chemistry after biology.
It persists in some places after school… the museum hangs Picasso in the next room after Braque.
And in the old days, the newspaper editors spent a lot of time organizing their stories and their pages.
But now… nothing.
Random access. No attention paid to what we need to know now, what follows from where we are, what’s about to be important.
Not at work and not as citizens.
Instead, it’s a random-access blizzard of emails, meetings and alerts. A mob screaming about the emergency of the moment without lining up the context first. Part of our dislocation and ennui come from the lack of a shared curriculum.
Choosing what’s next might be the most important decision we make today.
2026-08-27 16:28:00
It’s not up to us to fix the world all by ourselves. But we vote with our attention and our dollars. If we’re attracted to the wrong stuff like moths to a flame, don’t be surprised when folks spend time building new fires.
Each of us knows that we’re motivated by positive feedback. We’re drawn to behaviors and activities that earn us a smile or a prize. And yet, we often forget to reward the businesses, behaviors and systems we want more of.
Many of us are drawn to invented controversies, hustles, one-click bargains, come-ons, convenience that comes at a high price, division, brawls, tired tropes, social networks that trap us and, while we’re at it, a big bag of fried chips.
Actually, you’re a philanthropist, doling out attention and cash to the behaviors you care about. Invest wisely.
If people stop going to the circus, the clowns go home.
2026-08-26 17:03:00
It might be at school, at work or at home.
Hunkering down, hoping we won’t get noticed. A safe spot, worth concealing.
The problem with hiding out from responsibility or change is that we’re also hiding from time. But time always finds us.
