Business Insight Zone

Recently my Hoover’s pal Zack Gonzales and I were exchanging e-mails about the universal underlying principles of excellence in business. (This is the kind of stuff we chat about here at Hoover’s Galactic HQ.)

Our conversation focused particularly on the continuous process improvements embodied in the Toyota Production System (for large companies), in the iterative working methods of 37signals (for small companies), and in the concept of “deliberate practice” articulated by psychologist Anders Ericsson (for individuals).

The key lesson: you align the short term to the long term — continuously, moment by moment — by improving processes at the “atomic” level, at the point of contact.

As Zack put it, “Everything you touch, you either (a) improve if it’s worth improving, (b) maintain if it’s where it should be, or (c) abandon if it’s not worth pursuing.”

You do this by tiny-to-small completed increments — every single day.

That’s it.

Your thoughts?

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Related reading:

• Dan Markovitz of TimeBack Management — Kaizen vs. Kaikaku
  I had already written this when Dan posted his little gem about how constant small improvements can, in time, amount to a revolution.

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(Picture by MiguelVieira. Why a sequoia? Because success isn’t like scoring a bullseye, or hitting the jackpot, or finding a pot of gold, or hitting a home run, or any of the other crutch images I was tempted to use. It’s much more like the ongoing growth of sequoias; mature sequoias are not only the largest trees in the world, but also the fastest-growing.)

Category: Management, The working life