Archives: Book Reviews
Book Review
The Ten Faces Of Innovation
Title: The Ten Faces Of Innovation – Strategies For Heightening Creativity Author: Tom Kelley, Johathan Littman Genre: Creative ability in business Publisher: Profile Books(GB) Release Date: 2008 Format: Paperback Pages: 273 A brilliant guide to fostering creativity and business innovation, The Ten Faces of Innovation shows how any individual canRead More
The Six Sigma Way
When the stakes are really high and the future of your department or organization rests in the balance, the Define stage of a DMAIC process takes on extra importance. Writing down a few customer requirement statements simply won’t cut it. You have to be much more rigorous in your investigation of customers and their needs, and in defining specific requirements. If your team is in this situation, you will want to investigate Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a method that moves from highly specific customer requirements to what needs to happen in the process to make sure those needs are met.
The Goal: A Process Of Ongoing Improvement
Title: The Goal Author: Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox Genre: Lean Thinking, Continuous Improvement, Lean Manufacturing Publisher: Routledge Release Date: 2004 Format: Paperback Pages: 374 Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal is the gripping novel which is transforming management thinking throughout the Western world. The author has beenRead More
The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
Title: The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company Author: Steven Blank and Bob Dorf Genre: Business, Innovation, Customer Development Publisher: K & S Ranch Release Date: 2012 Format: Hardback Pages: 608 It s been called the bible for startups and the best $40 investment aRead More
Six Sigma for Small Business
You’ve probably been thinking about potential projects for a while. I would be willing to bet that you’ve already identified a few chronic problems you would like to investigate and improve. But there are some important criteria you should consider for choosing Six Sigma projects – selecting the most obvious is not always advisable, and every business scenario is not a potential “project”.
The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses
Failure is a prerequisite to learning. The problem with the notion of shipping a product and then seeing what happens is that you are guaranteed to succeed—at seeing what happens. But then what? As soon as you have a handful of customers, you’re likely to have five opinions about what to do next. Which should you listen to?
The Frugal Innovator: Creating Change on a Shoestring Budget
“The frugal wave is not, however, a purely local, grass-roots, or even a national phenomenon: it is decidedly cosmopolitan. In India and China, for example, many of the most powerful innovations have come from innovators who have a foot in both the developed and the developing world – they bridge both, bringing ideas from the West and applying them in new ways in their home markets. China excels at absorbing ideas from the West and reinterpreting them in a Chinese context.”
Frugal Innovation
Novartis, a global pharmaceutical company, is also investing heavily in next-generation manufacturing techniques. It has co-funded an $85
million centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that focuses on research into continuous manufacturing, led by Bernhardt Trout. The continuous manufacturing process represents a major technology leap for the pharmaceutical industry, enabling drugs to be produced in smaller volumes in a continuous flow in one small, fully integrated facility, rather than mass manufactured in large batches using a multi-step process distributed across many large factories.
The Innovative Leader
“We tend to think that the best way to innovate is to add new features to our products or services. What can we add that increases the appeal of our offering? This route can easily lead to extra cost, feature overload and customer fatigue. Sometimes a better answer lies in subtraction.
Michael O’Leary, the founder of Ryanair, looked at the business process of passenger flights and built a new model by subtracting all the frills that meant extra cost.”
The Art Of The Start
“There really is only one question you should ask yourself before starting any new venture … Do I want to make meaning?. Meaning is not about money, power, or prestige. It’s not even about creating a fun place to work. Among the meanings of ‘meaning’ are to, Make the world a better place, Increase the quality of life, right a terrible wrong, Prevent the end of something good.
Goals such as these are a tremendous advantage as you travel down the difficult path ahead.
Having that desire doesn’t guarantee that you’ll succeed, but it does mean that if you fail, at least you failed doing something worthwhile.”