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Photo by Miha Meglic on Unsplash The last thing I ask before a go-live is for the team taking over to walk one customer order through from start to finish, and I watch where they reach for a workaround. By that point the status report is usually green, and usually for good reasons, because the work the project committed to is done and spending is within tolerance. The walk-through answers a different question, which is whether the people who will run the business on Monday ca

When the Army started building replacement hospitals about twenty years ago, the people who had done it before had already retired. Shaun O'Leary, who worked on one of those projects, described what followed in a comment on my post this week. By his account, the new teams faced a steep learning curve, and poor coordination led to mistakes, delays and eventually lawsuits. The teams weren't kept together afterwards, so the next hospital faced much of the same learning again. On

Mark Zuckerberg once explained why he wore essentially the same grey T-shirt every day. He didn't want to spend mental energy deciding what to wear. Barack Obama took a similar approach to suits, usually sticking to blue or grey, and he was direct about why. "I'm trying to pare down decisions," he told Michael Lewis in 2012. "I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make." I've always found those examples inte

How does Elon Musk's Terafab relate to Henry Ford's production? In 1913 at Highland Park, Henry Ford and his engineers stopped building automobiles in place and started moving them past the worker instead. A chassis that had taken more than twelve hours to assemble eventually came down to roughly ninety minutes once the moving assembly line had been refined. Every business school tells that story. It is usually a story about flow and scale, and it is the Ford story people nat

Canada creates ideas, but needs the USA to fund them and China to scale them. Chinese Premier Li Qiang recently called for China to shore up external demand and deepen international trade, while also encouraging more private investment in infrastructure. At the same time, he acknowledged that weak domestic demand remains a serious problem. The latest numbers help explain the concern. Industrial output growth slowed to 4.5% in July, while retail sales grew just 0.6%. Fixed-ass