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focus on another business
that we thought we were best at—
“Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.”
we apply some of the principles and the discipline of the most output-oriented of endeavors—manufacturing—to other forms of business enterprise, including most emphatically the work of managers.
The second idea is that the work of a business, of a government bureacracy, of most forms of human activity, is something pursued not by individuals but by teams.
The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.
concept of managerial leverage, which measures the impact of what managers do to increase the output of their teams.
choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage.
team will perform well only if peak performance is elicited from t...
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a responsive company should have fewer levels of managers.
By talking about specific problems and situations, the supervisor teaches the subordinate his skills and know-how, and suggests ways to approach things. At the same time, the subordinate provides the supervisor with detailed information about what he is doing and what he is concerned about.
you must continually dedicate yourself to retaining your individual competitive advantage.
Are you adding real value or merely passing information along?
every hour of your day should be spent increasing the output or the value of the output of the people whom you’re responsible for.
Are you plugged into what’s happening around you?
Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them?
The key to survival is to learn to add more value—
essential skill of entrepreneurship: how to manage.
A manager’s skills and knowledge are only valuable if she uses them to get more leverage from her people.
it’s about how that translates to the team’s performance and output.
“When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.”
to improve the output of an employee is motivate and train.
“I have seen far too many people who upon recognizing today’s gap try very hard to determine what decision has to be made to close it. But today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.”
“Is it better to be a hands-on or hands-off manager?”
The answer, as Andy explains, is that it depends. Specifically, it depends on the employee.
If the employee is immature in the task, then hands-on training is essential. If the employee is more mature, then a delegate approach is warranted.
it surprised me that so many of them had not seen this coming.
“CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.”
“Why?” I asked him. He answered in the style resonant of his entire book: “In order to build anything great, you have to be...
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you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.”
As optimists, most ceo's would miss their mark or overestimate a market because they fail to act on the leading indicators of bad news (i.e. Signals that predict a bad outcome). Optimists do not do well at preparing or predicting for poor outcomes by their very nature. They are blind to that possibility.
The task here encompasses the basic requirements of production. These are to build and deliver products in response to the demands of the customer at a scheduled delivery time, at an acceptable quality level, and at the lowest possible cost.
And we must make our breakfast at a cost that enables us to sell it at a competitive price and still make an acceptable profit.
We start by looking at our production flow.
pin down the step in the flow that will determine the overall shape of our operation, which w...
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total throughput time.
key idea is that we construct our production flow by starting with the longest (or most difficult, or most sensitive, or most expensive) step and work our way back.
we staggered each of the other steps according to individual throughput times;
offset them from each other.
fundamental types of production operations:
process manufacturing,
assembly,
test, which subjects the components or the total to an examination of its characteristics.
specialists
creates an immense amount of overhead, probably making it too expensive to consider.
when you have to depend on someone else, the results are likely to be less predictable.
capital equipment.
inventory
hot toast, throwing away what y...
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waste, which can also become too expensive fo...
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alternatives do exist: equipment capacity, manpower, and inventory can be traded off against each other and then...
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