Explore Your Curiosity

★ "Construction has an enormous number of setups. Every time a worker puts down a hammer and picks up a saw, every time a crew moves to a different part of the building, there’s a setup. Every time the superintendent has to look at a set of plans, every time the crane unhooks from one piece and hooks on to another, there’s a setup. ... Setup time can dramatically exceed the actual process time. A nail leaves a nailgun in a fraction of a second, but it can take minutes to get the material to be nailed into position. If you can reduce your setup time, not only do you increase your throughput and decrease inventory, you make your production process more flexible, by making it less costly to change what you’re making. This is one of the key insights behind the Toyota Production System, which let Toyota efficiently produce a smaller number of cars with greater product variety. ... Something interesting about this sort of production model is the fractal nature of it. As you drill down, each individual step consists of several sub-steps, each with their own setup time, variation, failure rate, etc."

— Construction, Efficiency, and Production Systems

★ “The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. This theory starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase. From this simple insight follows all kinds of interesting conclusions about how markets and products change over time. Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads – their primary customers.”

— The next big thing will start out looking like a toy

Tiny Thought

Asking for feedback creates a critic. Asking for advice creates a partner.