JIT's inventor is sometimes subject to debate. For some, Taiichi Ohno; for others, Clarence Saunders, founder of Piggly Wiggly. It could even have been Adam Smith's division of labor or Henry Ford's combination of interchangeable parts and continuous flow. Oddly, few mention Dr. Deming. In my opinion, all of them did. Many people think Dr. Deming had nothing to do with it in an ironic twist. Here's an excerpt from his 1950 Hakone presentation.

Bitcoin is a software system that allows people to mine bitcoins in a lottery-based system. Today there are two ways to acquire a Bitcoin. You can purchase it from a cryptocurrency exchange in exchange for dollars. The second way you can obtain a Bitcoin is through cryptocurrency mining.

When Marc Onetto arrived at Amazon in 2007, the spirit of lean management was already present. You could say Onetto brought a capital "L" lean to Amazon. He previously worked in supply chain at General Electric (GE). GE was one of the earliest companies to adopt a process known as Six Sigma. A Motorola engineer named Bill Smith developed Six Sigma in 1986. Six Sigma emerged from the American Quality Movement forced upon by Japanese competition, and It was reasonably derived from Shewhart's and Deming's work on variation.

Jeff Wilke, Amazon's number two person, is less well known. Wilke joined Amazon in 1999, and when he retired in 2021, Amazon was doing around $1 billion every day. His background was in operation research. Wilke graduated from the School of Engineering and Management's Leaders for Manufacturing program at MIT (now called Leaders for Global Operations). He also served as vice president and general manager of pharmaceutical chemicals at AlliedSignal (now Honeywell). Wilke was well versed in Lean Manufacturing and Statistical Process Control when he joined Amazon. When Wilke joined Amazon's operations in 1999, he said MIT's Leaders for Global Operations playbook was what Amazon needed. 

The majority of the problems we try to solve are complex. A simple solution to a complex problem will not work. The phrase "correlation is not causation" is a fundamental principle in statistics. Statistics students are repeatedly taught this. Simply because two things correlate does not mean they cause each other. In 1897, Karl Pearson introduced the idea of spurious correlation. In this case, two or more events are associated but not causally connected.

She would not learn for another 15 years that someone had taken a picture of that kiss. Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt had taken a photo of the kissing couple that became one of the most famous WWII photographs two weeks after Life magazine published it. It served as a treasured reminder of what it was like when the war ended. The picture intrigued those who saw it. They wanted to know more about the nurse and sailor. There was no information available to Eisenstaedt, so the search for the couple's identity took on a life of its own.

In 25 years, it will probably be Amazon that will go down as the Toyota of the 21st century. However, for astute observers, Google will be the Toyota Production System of the 21st century.

The world would have been a mess if six-foot-nine-inch professional basketball player LeBron James (King James) had lived before the scientific revolution. Before the 16th century, it would have been nearly impossible for him to find shoes that fit him properly. King James does not order his shoes using metric measurements. Still, thanks to the invention of the meter, the scientific revolution led to more accurate measurements and ultimately better-fitting shoes for him.

The more I study Dr. Deming, the more I find these nuggets of insight into his mind. In a previous blog post (here), I explained why Dr. Deming changed PDCA to PDSA. I've also been wondering why Dr. Deming altered the wording of Dr. Shewhart's original names for the two types of variation. The creator of Statistical Process Control (SPC), Dr. Shewhart, originally called the two types of variation chance and assignable. Later, Dr. Deming referred to the two kinds of variation as common cause and special cause.

Buzzpsrout has been an excellent podcasting service for me for the past year. My original criteria for choosing a service were recommendations, a turnkey service, and price. I also like some of the bonuses they offer. For an additional fee, they offer Magic Mastering. This application cleans up your audio dynamically and helps set loudness and peak in line with Apple's requirements. Another feature I like is the soundbite feature, which allows me to create short audio clips. The app has many other valuable features. I especially like that they send me a link for Twitter and LinkedIn millstone stats like this post.

It's been a good year! I passed my second year at Red Hat. They say you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Working with Andrew Clay Shafer, Jabe Bloom, and Kevin Behr has raised my average in every category. I've made some new friends this year. Due to the pandemic, it was hard to stay in touch with many old friends.

Whenever the topic of the best burger came up, Five Guys was my first choice. However, at some point, I wanted to know what the fuss was all about with In-N-Out Burger.

On August 1, 2012, the company's employees made a system upgrade related to a new Retail Liquidity Program (RLP) called SMARS. This caused Knight's US platform to produce faulty code, which resulted in it placing errant trades on NYSE-listed stocks. Knight Capital was not able to prevent the malfunction from occurring. Over the course of 45 minutes, SMARS routed millions of orders into the market, which resulted in over 4 million executions in 154 stocks, representing over 397 million shares. By the time Knight stopped sending orders, they had a net long position in 80 stocks worth approximately $3.5 billion and a net short position in 74 stocks worth roughly $3.15 billion. Knight ultimately lost over $460 million due to these unwanted positions.

Bird strikes are the "hello world of aviation investigations." Bird strikes are the most studied aviation incidents dating back to the Wright Brothers. I try to fly out Monday morning and return Friday afternoon when I do business in San Francisco.

Bertalanffy is one of the principal authors of the school of thought known as general systems theory and systems science. His contribution to the intellectual history of the twentieth century is substantial. Bertalanffy's main interest as a biologist was curing cancer. Besides biology, his contributions span cybernetics, education, history, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology.

You'll have to shell out $1.7 million for it. Don't tell the current owners that Dr. Deming received phone calls from presidents, CEOs, and top scientists in that little basement area. The price might go up.

The total number of downloads is getting close to 6k, and we will probably surpass it by the end of the year. It has been just over eight months since the podcast began on April 26th this year.

During the early 1950s, a severe malaria disease broke out among the Dayaks on Borneo, an island in southeast Asia. The World Health Organization (WHO) was called in to assist. They came up with what they thought was a good idea for eliminating the disease. The idea was that if they could kill the mosquitoes carrying the disease, the problem would be solved. DDT was their weapon of choice.