Lean manufacturing, often referred to simply as “Lean”, has been described as a business model focused on efficiently delivering high-quality products or services to customers in a manner that ensures value by identifying waste within the value stream and eliminating it whenever possible. While practitioners...
Organizations must have a method for measuring the sustainability of its business practices. Companies are used to measuring financial results; however, it is only recently that focus has turned toward the development of tools for non-financial measurement of sustainability. Larger organizations with sufficient resources are...
The traditional “business plan”, which generally ran anywhere from 40 to 60 pages, has been criticized as a waste of time and effort when trying to raise capital from investors. Many have argued for an emphasis on describing the steps taken to identify and execute...
During the startup stage founders are primarily focused on what is immediately in front of them and have little time or patience for considering what might need to be done to build capacity among the members of the board of directors. While this is not...
Many startup pundits, including Steve Blank, the champion of the “customer development” and “lean startup” methods, have criticized reliance on the traditional practice of creating a business plan, and it’s true that many founders get hung up on trying to figure out what to do...
Wouldn’t it be nice if an entrepreneur could quickly execute a new idea by summoning an entire organization with just a click? The answer might be a “flash organization”, which two Stanford professors, Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein, described as ephemeral setups to execute a...
Arguably the most valuable resource for any business is the minds and commitment of its employees. This is especially true in the technology sector. Larger companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon are battling for “talent” to maintain their edge and are continuing to invest...
A recent article in The New York Times discussed Pearl Automation, which was founded in 2014 by three former senior managers from Apple’s iPod and iPhone groups. While Pearl has maintained what its founders believe to be the best parts of Apple culture, particularly the...
Writing about “the ugly unethical underside of Silicon Valley” in Fortune, Griffith suggested that “Silicon Valley has always seen itself as the virtuous outlier, a place where altruistic nerds tolerate capitalism in order to make the world a better place”. There is no doubt that...