On Linkedin today, my friend Laksh Raghavan discussed the concept of Black Swans. Several years ago, I wrote some old blog posts about this topic. Please accept my apology for the following old blog posts scientific voracity. I was just trying to have me some fun.

I was researching post-World War II Sarashon and CCS contributions to Japan this morning based on this paper (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27919728). In addition, I listened to Katie Anderson's excellent book Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn this morning while working out. Then it hit me, Toyota's supply chain success can be traced back to a very recognizable thread.

Denso may be unfamiliar to you, but I suggest you are familiar with their products. Your car is likely heated or cooled by Denso. Founded in 1949, the company is the world's second-largest supplier to automotive OEMs by revenue (as of 2018). A lesser-known fact is that a Denso employee invented QR codes in 1994. Known initially as Nippon Electrical Equipments Co. Ltd. Denso was founded as a stand-alone company separate from Toyota Motor Company. Later, they changed their name to Nippon Denso, and today they are known as Denso.

Hearing the different perspectives and opinions about what I call the Miracle at Toyota is interesting. Many people credit Taiichi Ohno with the success of the Toyota Production System. Toyota, however, was also influenced by Shigeo Shingo. Ohno implemented Just In Time (JIT), the Andon Chord, and his infamous seven wastes. Shingo was responsible for several innovations, the least of which was the Single-Minute Exchange of Die (SMED).

Dr. Deming played an essential role in Toyota's success as well. Several people have disputed Deming's influence, which is odd because Toyota was obsessed with Total Quality Control (TQC) as far back as the late 1950s.

There seems to be a school of "Lean" that denies that Dr. Deming had any influence on Toyota. Aside from the fact that Dr. Deming has had a documented role in Japan's economic recovery starting in 1950. Not to mention the Deming Prize Toyota won in 1965. As well as Shoichiro Toyoda's quote, "There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about what Dr. Deming means to our management."

My journey began in October 2021. The trip took ten years to complete. I thought I was done in January 2022. After four drafts, I think the book is complete.

In the 1980s, you could say that the notorious Charles Koch was obsessed with Edwards Deming. Charles Koch joined his father's business, Rock Island Oil & Refining Company (now Koch Industries), in 1961. Koch became president of the company in 1967. In a legal battle with his brothers, Frederick and Bill sold their stakes for $1.1 billion, and Charles and David gained majority ownership. In his 2007 book, "The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World's Largest Private Company," Charles Koch cites Dr. Deming as an important influence. Charles Koch started applying Deming's methods to Koch Industries in the early 1980s. Koch said that Deming was more than a business consultant; he was a Guru.

According to Peter Drucker, you can't manage what you can't measure. Dr. Deming is also often credited with this quote. Deming clarified his point in his last book, written in 1993 at 93. According to him, it is a costly myth to assume that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. He said, "It is wrong to suppose that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

What would Dr. Deming do if he walked into a bank in 2022 and was asked to assess the handling of incidents? He might have recalled what Dr. Shewart did in 1924 when he conceived of Statistical Process Control (SPC). He would assert that quality problems should be solved using mathematics. Defects were inspected manually and categorized into go/nogo groups before Shewhart's SPC. Based on the specifics of the part and the acceptable tolerance levels, there could be over two categories.

Amazon's cloud services have been the subject of many articles. The book Working Backwards explains how Amazon Web Services came to be. Only two of the initial half-dozen services were successful, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2). EC2 is at the core of what we consider Amazon's cloud computing service. Without EC2, Amazon's "cloud" would not be a cloud. Previously, developers had to request a physical or virtual server if they needed a computer. Virtual servers were much easier to obtain than physical servers; however, getting a virtual computer still required installing and maintaining a physical set of servers. The virtual server is a physical server that appears as one or more virtual servers.

I had a software developer named Joe who worked for me at one of my software startups. Joe was one of the best developers I have ever worked with. However, Joe had one annoying habit; he arrived late to work every day and missed the first 10 to 15 minutes of our daily 30-minute call. And to make matters worse, he explained why he was always late. 'You wouldn't believe what happened to me today,' he would say. With Joe's lateness and his regaling of the experience, we would lose, on average, 20 minutes out of every 30-minute morning meeting. For him, every morning was a special event that he couldn't control. Lecturing Joe didn't help. Joe's firing was out of the question; he was too valuable to the team.

It was impossible to find cream cheese at the grocery store near the end of 2021. What appeared to be a mild inconvenience could be a symptom of a much larger problem. Not having cream cheese schmear on your bagel is one of the thousands of unseen combinatorial secondary effects of the pandemic. Abraham Maslow published a paper titled "A Theory of Human Motivation" in 1943. Maslow expanded the concept to include observations on human needs, referred to as Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Physiological needs such as water, warmth, and food are at the bottom of the pyramid. There have been recent cyberattacks on water treatment facilities, US power grids, and the food supply. In May 2021, the world's largest meat processing company, JBS, paid the equivalent of $11m for a ransomware attack.

Assumptions based on averages are incorrect on average. In a famous cartoon by Jeff Danziger, titled the Flaw of Averages, an incident is portrayed regarding a statistician who drowned while crossing a river that was, on average, only three feet deep. Although the average depth of the water was three feet, the man who drowned was seven feet underwater.