When I was in Bali, Mark from wooden-ships.com took me to see the company’s factory which was amazing. They had been running the business for over 10 years and now had nearly 300 employees.

The idea of a business creating that many jobs to me is amazing. His wife and partner Paola told me that Mark was really into “Lean.” I knew about the Lean startup but didn’t realize it was derived from others in the manufacturing world.

I right away started telling Mark about how all his operations should be online, less people and more technology. He laughed. I thought he was silly. Mark suggested I read the Toyota Way to understand things.

Let me summarize some of the “old” things that go on in Mark’s operation:

- Cards. They have a pull system where orders are pulled for new material every 15 minutes or so.

- All orders are custom made and minimal inventory is stocked up.

- They removed their computer system as it was slowing down the process

- They removed places people could hide errors and had a board detailing hourly performance of the plant.

I’m sure there are more but you’ll have to visit Mark to learn the rest.

I wanted to highlight the major things I found interesting in the Toyota Way which is one of Mark’s bibles and a key to adopting a lean system within your company.

- Continuously invest in people and promote a culture of continuous improvement.

- “Muda” (waste) is a term for anything that takes time that does not add value to your customer. Map out this process to help eliminate.

= Wastes include: overproduction, waiting, unnecessary transport, overprocessing, excess inventory, unnecessary movement, defects, unused employee creativity

- 4Ps of a successful company: Philosophy > Process > People & Partners > Problem Solving

- Accumulate facts and learn by doing.

- “Pull system” where things are only delivered when they are needed. Think about supermarkets replenishing rows when the stock goes down. Think just-in-time.

- Traditional process is improve process time and replace people with equipment (Noah’s former style).

- Things built in cells with close arrangement of people, machines or workstations in a processing sequence. One piece flow. Only build what is needed.

- The entire system stops when defects are found. Then go to the 5 why’s to really get to the root cause of issues. In other method of batches it can take way too long to realize problems in the process.

- Decisions are made through looking at many alternatives and including as many stakeholders as possible.

- Noah’s thought: Maybe consider using sound as well as visual cues for how things are going in your business. At the Gambit office we heard some other company always ring a bell and go crazy every time something happened. Definitely seemed like a fun thing to do.

- Need visuals for the business and technology supports what people do. This is mapping out flows and clearly displaying success metrics. They discussed how metrics don’t always show why things are happening. Bottom line: you can visually see almost instantly if something is off.

- Everything is documented. Knowledge is shared and encouraged among employees. All the while trying to see how to improve the processes already in place.

- Training a new employee can take up to 3 years. They are patient in their hiring / culture and training.

- Try to keep all key documents / decisions boiled down to 1 page.
= current situation, proposal, benefit / cost analysis, plan, implementation, controls, timeline

- Plan, Do, Check, Act. Repeat!

- Establishing metrics that are clear to all employees:
Metric / Unit of measure / Baseline / Target / % improved / Owner

- Noah’s Suggestion: Setup aweekly group session to improve one thing. 52 increases at end of year. You can also have this be anytime so you may have > 365 improvements. If they are even 1% per improvement or less that compounds to some big #s.

Additional resources on Lean: Mark’s blog, Lean Thinking & The Fifth Discipline

While traveling Europe I have way more time to read, do you want me to keep posting these reviews? Any suggestions on books?

Fast Forward, 5 years later and he is now a top selling author similar to a few other writing friends I’ve met/helped over the years, Ferriss & Ori.

Buy the book here, I highly recommend it. And if you want personal finance stuff more regularly, check out his blog.

If you buy the book and email me the receipt by Wednesday (3/25) to ramit@okdork.com. We will randomly choose 1 person to join us for burritos in San Francisco.

Take aways:

- Problems with schools. Change revolution, the degree of change is happening very rapidly and when we figure something out it becomes irrelevant. Secondly, burgeoning bureaucracy, are naturally highly resistant to change. An essential mindlessness about them which accelerates entropy rather than impede it.
- Why do people look at education like a vaccine. You take a subject, you had it and then once you’ve had it you are immune and need not take it again.
- It’s great that the highest form of intellectual achievement is the recall of random facts. This is shown by the popularity of quiz shoes. As a student who gets one in right that is how we are preparing the youth.
- Have you ever heard of a student taking notes on the remarks of another student? Probably not. Because the organization of the classroom makes it clear that what students say is not the “content” of the instruction. Therefore, it will not be included on tests. Therefore, they can ignore it.
- Have you ever heard of a student saying, “Whose facts are those?” Where does “knowledge” come from. It isn’t just there in a book, waiting for someone to come along and ‘learn’ it.
- The point is, once you have learned how to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.
- How teachers can be: telling the students what he thinks they ought to know. Why not teach relevant information that students request? (One counterpoint I wonder is how are the students to know what they will need/want to know in the future. I think this is the role of a teacher). Teachers should encourage student-student interactions, he doesn’t accept a single statement as an answer to a question, he encourages exploration and the inquiry method of asking questions to learn. (This makes 1000% sense to me, I learned for tests while now I learn for curiosity to relevant things and what I really want to know and absorb.) The teacher recognizes that summarizing the learnings is the act of closure whereas learning should not be a terminal event. Measures the success of students not on tests but by the success in terms of behavioral changes in students (frequency of questions, relevance of their questions).
- Subjects should be interchanged cause you deal with English in Math and history in science and so forth.
- Here are some students reacting to re-taking a test after teachers found out the answers were shared before the test.
Raymond Rodriguez, “It’s not fair. I didn’t know anything about cheating but I passed. Why should I have put myself on the line again?” and Domingo Maldonado said “as far as I’m concerned. They can’t ask you anything you haven’t covered in class. I’ll probably do better the second time.” Think about this. If you really learned information should any of this really matter. You know it, absorbed it, questioned it, etc…
- Why is the “new English” focused on grammar. Why with all the language problems we focus on that. The teachers fear normal human activity as teaching grammar makes it easy for them and a respectable “out.”
- Standards are dumb, not too high or low but “Is it appropriate to your goals?”
- How are schools to decide which “subjects” to include. The learnings should be explored through questions which leads to relationships among subjects instead of so separated. Why so ABCED-minded way of doing things? We do not “get” meanings from our environment, we assign meanings. We take things so easily top down, why? We are taught through the perception of the teacher not from the learner who is really supposed to be “learning.”
- The real thing to think about is “What’s Worth-Knowing Questions Curriculum.” (I think you need to learn from the past to not repeat the same mistakes but you need to think of what you want in the future to ask the right questions or explore in the past).
- Why are we going to books that some subjective person wrote to gain this knowledge. Why aren’t more schooling created through newspapers, internet now, interviews, personal discovery, etc…There is no learning without a learner.
- Perception vs. reality of how we perceive the information we intake. Looking at education it seems we are very transactional and not discrete events. We do NOT get our perceptions from ‘things’ around us, but our perceptions come from us.
- Whatever we say something is, it is not but because of having said it, we will perceive it as such. This becomes our reality and how if affects the language in which we learn. For example, the British government changed the calendar and made Sept 2 to now be Sept 14, some people asked what happened to the 11 days. It’s the projection and/or perception of how we asses our reality. A good way to look at this is that we are imprisoned so to speak, in a house of language.
- History and how we learn it is subjective. It’s oral. The question then becomes how best to inquire about the history of the past.
- They suggest not looking at everything to think of things as closed but explore the problems out there. This prepares children with the ever-changing environment we live in. Not learning the specific facts but preparing them to inquire and figure out new relevant things.
-”All scientists examine their instruments to test for experimental error – but traditional philosophers never did examine their instrument, Language” – W. Labarre, The Human Animal
- “Every language is a special way of looking at the world and interpreting experience… One sees and hears what the grammatical system of one’s language has made on sensitive to, has trained one to look for in experience. This bias is insidious because everyone is so unconscious of his native language as a system.” – C. Kluckhorn, Mirror for Man.
- In order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one’s actions or change one’s purpose.
- Changes for new teachers:

1. Five-year moratorium on use of all textbooks, since they are boring and based on the assumption of knowledge and outside of the learner.
2. English teachers teach math, put the teacher as a learner with the students.
3. Transfer elementary teachers to high school.
4. Require a teacher who knows their subject to write a book on it
5. Remove tests/grades as this is the weapons of coercion and eliminates a major obstacle for students to learn.
6. Classify teachers publicly
7. Require teachers to take a test prepared by the students on what the students know.
8. Teacher’s pay should be based on how many kids want to go to next month’s class
9. All teachers need to take 1 year off to work in some other “field.”

- Successful in terms of conventional school terms is no good. These are now the intellectual paraplegics. All during these 16 years of schooling, they learned not to think, not to ask questions, not to figure things out for themselves. They learned to become totally dependent on teacher authority, and they learned it with dedication. This needs to change. So that people can make viable meanings in order to make, in turn, viable choices and decisions of their own, on their own.
- How did the structure of knowledge or learning come to be. No evidence to prove one hour classes, 15 weeks a semester, books are the best way, etc.. There is mass evidence to confute them.
- They suggest removing all administrators. democracy of letting the students make a lot of the changes is inefficient but still better than the totalitarian system schools are now. be accountable to the constituents of the school
- Print, changed the very form of civilization. The book, isolates the reader and his responses, tended to separate him from the powerful oral influences of the past.
- So what now? Ask What am I going to have my students do today? What’s it good for? How do I know?
- Try looking at your students as smart. If you can let go of the assumption that what you constitutes the only ingredients of “smartness.”
- Games are a good way or let the students determine the information they want to know. This can be productive in getting students engaged in the learning process. And interaction with the students on a real response not just grading papers. Also the teacher asked people to answer questions and those answers were actually a poem. Make it fun.

Bottom Line:

If you are interested in changing education then you must buy this book. Teaching as a Subversive Activity, highlights the problems, talks about the history and provides actionable ways to make it better. I love this book.

I heard about The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist from a great guy and was hoping to get a better grip on how we can make this a long-term marriage.

Take Aways:

- Not enough. We live with this mentality way too much, not enough profits/exercise/time/etc…
- Myth: That’s just the way it is. That’s not true. If you don’t like the trap, get out of it.
- Success. What does that really mean to you? It’s just a word that limits us. Figure out what your own success level really is.
- Receiving aid. When a society continually receives aid they feel debilitated and helpless. Need to think about their root problem and work with them on solving that.
- Sufficiency. There is always enough. Let go of that chase to acquire more. Enjoy what you have. Think about investing in what you have.
- Staleness. Just like your food in the pantry, money does no good sitting around. Try to make more with it, for yourself, society and others.

Bottom-Line:

Don’t read this book. This book reads like a memoir where most of the book covers her adventures with The Hunger Project. I am not saying Lynne is not an amazing person but a lot of this is fluff, high level things without action items to go do.

Take-Aways:

- Finishers. Americans love finishing things, that’s why it’s hard to leave that last bite untouched on your plate. This is the clue that we are done when our plates are clean. Try always leaving a piece of food on your plate.
- Perception. In a study when people thought they were drinking “cheap” wine, ate less and stayed at dinner shorter BUT the group with the “good” wine (they were the same wines) stayed longer, ate more and said the meal was better.
- Eat. Don’t torture yourself from the food you love. Here are great ways to reduce the amount of food you eat: The first bite is always the best so just reduce the portions. Take 1/2 home before the plate comes to the table, have the waiter remove the bread from the table, put food in the back of the cupboards (make it harder to get), take Costco size things and put them in smaller containers (then hide the large bins) and in general keep the food out of sight.
- Numbers. When a sign says limit 12 per person over no limit a person is likely to buy more of them, 30 to 100 percent more.
- Awareness. Eat when you are really hungry. How used to the noon lunch routine are you? Are you really hungry? When you eat say out loud – “I’m not hungry but I’m going to eat this anyway.”
- 20 percent. Try 20 percent more veggies/fruits on your plate and 20% less of the entree.
- 1/2 plate. When cooking think about 1/2 the plate meat/potatoes/etc… and then the other should be veggies.
- Forgotten. A great study where 1 group saw the bones after they ate chicken wings and the other groups wings were cleared away after eaten. Who ate less? Exactly, the group who saw their progress. You can do the same with wine glasses, always serve new ones after each glass and leave the old ones out (bottles too).
- Volume. We focus on the volume of a substance rather than the calories when we eat. Solution: Add more volume, water, froth, whip, air, etc…
- Cut it. The mindless margin is when you are “I’m full but I can eat more,” be satisfied. Just say done.
- See all you eat. Serve yourself from the kitchen and eat in the dining room and try to serve snacks out on fixed portions otherwise the hand always reaches into the bag.
- Servings. What’s the right serving size? We generally eat 92% of what we serve ourselves. Use smaller dishes, taller glasses (we will pour less than a wide one) and serve in smaller packages.
- Chop-sticks. It takes 20 minutes to digest and realize the affects of the food you ate. Hence, you can keep eating when you are really satisfied. Solution: Make it harder to eat means you will likely eat less. Use chop-sticks, try eating with your other hand, try pacing yourself with the slowest eater at the table, put your fork down after every bite and try starting last and finishing last. Yay, finally it’s best to be worst.
- Groups. When you are with 1 other person you’ll eat 35% more, with a group of 4 it’s 75% and with 7 or more its 96% more. Solution: Always eat alone or be aware of this (sorry keith).
- Nice restaurants. You are likely to eat more with low lights, soft music, muted colors and an attentive wait staff.
- Distractions. If you eat while you work, read, watch tv, etc… you are more likely to eat more.
- Brands. We experience this food as better because we expect them to be better. Set your expectations to low and all food tastes great.
- Perceptions. Add two words to any dish and people will think the food is better. Calling peas “power peas” encouraged kids to eat nearly double the normal amount. Spend the last 15 minutes of prep on your food in the kitchen during a dinner party and people will think you are working hard and the food will be better.
- Habits. Start them young, get used to them and it will stay with you for awhile.
- Health Halo. Watch out at Subway. Most people because they think they are eating healthy will get the soda (plus refill), cookie, chips and the most unhealthy sandwiches. Calories add up and make it almost as unhealthy as McDonald’s. Watch out.
- Business parties. Only 2 items on your plate at anytime, chow down on health stuff first, set the food down during a conversation so you don’t mindlessly munch and when you enter the room remind yourself the purpose of your visit: business or food (generally food for me:)
at business parties.

Bottom-Line:

Buy this book now. It is awesome! Don’t stop eating the great food you love, just eat less. We ALL eat an extra 200 calories in our day that we have no idea. Just reducing 50-200 calories a year cuts out 10+ pounds a year. It is much easier to eat less than to work out.

Background: Do you have a problem confronting your boss? Not sure how to break up with your boyfriend? Unsure of how to talk about something tough. This book talks about difficult conversations (surprise!) and how to handle them (yay!).

• Sharing is caring: “I feel hurt when…” is a good way to describe to others how you feel about what they did. This is generic advice but useful in separating the problem from yourself and to improve understanding in a conversation.
• Inquire: Don’t assume crap. Try to make sure you understand the situation before you decide things.
• Own it! This is best advice I got from the book. You are responsible for your own actions, think of how you contributed to the problem. Don’t just go guns blazing and blame the other.
• Switch it: Think about what the other person thinks about what you’ve done.
• Role play: Not the kinky kind. Talk about how you are going to deal with the situation before you start.

Bottom Line: Skim in Barns & Nobles. This book is a good read to figure out your own framework for resolving hard conversations, just sometimes easier read than done.

I really wish this book would have been around when I graduated from college in 1993 with a mountain of student loan debt and no clue how to network, interview or write a resume. What I like best is Trunk’s no nonsense advice that propels you through the book. She gives you the bad news for your own good. Recruiters are not going to tell you that your resume sucks, but Penelope will. Your friends are certainly not going to tell you to move home with your parents to save money, but Penelope will.

Some of the key take-aways are:

• Your resume is a sales tool
• Cold calling will empower you
• Corporate life is risky—start your own biz instead
• Being Likeable is more important than being competent
• A lawsuit will hurt you more than the harassment
• You only need 40k to be happy
• Typecast yourself

As you can tell from this list, Ms. Trunk isn’t afraid of a little controversy. I can just see the backlash she’s going to get from her chapter on harassment. I have to agree with her though and she puts it all into perspective when she says on page 119, “After you’ve filed a report, human resources will protect the company, not you.” This will probably be pretty sobering for anyone just entering the workforce. Anyone older who has actually gone to human resources for help, will recognize this as a true and unfortunate fact of corporate life.

Penelope puts the responsibility for career success squarely on your shoulders. There are plenty of people who are not going to like this. They’d rather blame the economy or their boss or a string of ‘bad luck.’ And as a career coach myself, I’m very empathetic to the epic struggle it can be to find a job or change careers.

In fact, after 9/11, living in NYC, I co-founded a business and made almost enough money to buy take-out burritos on a regular basis. It took three years before I found a full-time job. And I worked that full-time job for exactly one week before I decided that I’d chew my own arm off to get out of those corporate shackles.

The most surprising (and to me satisfying) chapter in the book is Chapter 5, “Corporate Life is Risky—Start Your Own Business Instead.” This chapter is an example of what really sets this book apart from all of the other career books out there. She gives it to you straight about the pros and cons of both corporate life AND entrepreneurial life. This will resonate with people (like me!) who work in corporate
America when they need to, but hope to live entirely off their own business in the near future.

If you’re serious about finding some good answers to the question, “What should I do with my life?”check out Brazen Careerist. It won’t be pretty and plenty of readers will want to chuck this book before they even reach Chapter 5, however, for the brave Brazen Careerists among us, (and I am one!) Career Victory is close at hand.

So Are You a Brazen Careerist? Ok then, here is your chance to prove it. Did you quit law school to pursue a job at a non-profit? Did you move home to your parent’s basement to start a granola company? Did you tell your boss to shove that job that you hated ever since day one even though you didn’t have another one lined up and you were three months behind in rent?

Share the bravest career move you’ve ever made and win a copy of Penelope’s new book, Brazen Careerist; The New Rules for Success.

I met with “Big Ben” last week over a dueling ping-pong match. Sad to say Ben was not the winner. My unbeaten streaks stands and I will challenge anybody to a burrito over a game of pong. Anyways, the point of this article is that Ben gave me his book on Friday; I have been in Pittsburgh for my brother’s graduation and finished his book on the flight there.

Highlights from the book:

• Instead of asking how much someone would pay for a product ask them how much the current problems are costing them.
• Meetings for Ben have always been more efficient while standing.
• Preparing for meetings was the most important thing. Spend a few hours at Kinko’s for strong leave-behinds, manually set up each demo for a customized look and feel, research the customer, and visualize himself giving a powerful demo.
• Instead of calling anything pricing to a customer position it as an “investment.”

Free Autographed Book: For the person who can say something interesting about entrepreneurship.

Marcella: Well we all have to go sometime, sir, but we can choose when.

Martin Blank: (Standing up to disconnect the call) Nobody chooses when.

– John Cusack, Grosse Pointe Blank

Imagine: You’re a 53-year-old CEO of a well-respected international consultancy that spans the industrialized world. As a matter of profession, you socialize with and advise chieftains of multi-billion-dollar firms, and your life is scheduled out eighteen months in advance, optimized to the nth degree from dawn to midnight, juggling the obligations of a family and the demands of a job where your thoughts and insights are constantly sought by colleagues, subordinates, clients and compatriots. Retirement to a golf resort is still over a decade away – until then, every moment brings new challenges, new opportunities and you are primed to handle them with the same energy and focused attention that got you where you are.

Life is good.

Now imagine: a doctor’s visit. You’ve been in excellent health your whole life and expect your recent headaches to be a minor annoyance to be chased away by time or the right handful of pills.

“I have bad news. You have inoperable brain cancer. You have three to six months. I’m sorry.”

Like a rain of lit kerosene on a well-manicured garden, Gene O’Kelly’s meticulously-planned, ordered life was torched in an instant, and he now has to compress the balance of his life into 100 days.

What would you do?

What would you do?

On Ben Casnocha’s strong recommendation, I picked up a copy of Gene O’Kelly’s haunting memoir, Chasing Daylight, which chronicled his final journey into oblivion, beginning with his diagnosis, and ending with his wife writing the last chapter of a book he was unable to finish.

In one measure, he was fortunate – the cancer that afflicted O’Kelly would not compromise his mental facilities; he would have the presence of mind to be himself right up until the end – and in this, he considered himself blessed, as he wrote in the opening lines of his book.

In his final 100 days, O’Kelly brought the methodical, organized ethos that made him an effective executive into the realm of settling his interpersonal affairs: drafting a plan of how he wanted to say goodbye to friends, colleagues, family – in the right order, and in a manner that preserves the best parts of their memories without maudlin moments of regret or anguish.

Every decision was weighed with an eye toward making the best of each of his remaining days (refusing chemotherapy, for instance, since the putative benefits of extending his life by weeks came at the expense of wracking him in distracting pain), chasing the remnants of daylight left in the accelerated sunset of his life in pursuit of “Perfect Moments” where he and the person he was saying goodbye to had full presence of mind in the now, with no room for useless ‘what-if’ dwelling in the past or idle speculation of a future that he can no longer be a part of.

Everybody draws different things from such a powerfully personal story – what took my breath away about the entire account was its supporting character who made sporadic appearances, Corinne O’Kelly … Gene’s wife, upon whom the burden of his decline and demise must fall the heaviest. Right at his side the whole time, faithfully transcribing his notes for the book chronicling his final days to share his journey with others, all the while channeling her own grief, her sadness and her love into this, their final project together.

If I am allowed a criticism of the book, it is this: O’Kelly did not give his wife nearly the space she deserved, her quiet devotion and running interference on the background that gave him license to fully explore what it meant to die well and on his own terms. But perhaps this, too, was intentional and as it should have been, a long-winded tribute to a beloved wife is something more fitting for private reading – and the book, like Gene O’Kelly’s business life, is the public man than he chose to share.

Thank you, Gene – for a thoughtful and soul-stirring read. I hope to raise a toast to you one day in Valhalla, but if it’s all the same to you, I hope that day is far off. And thank you, Ben, for the recommendation.

Off to work.

Related Reading: Twilight of my Years (musings on mortality)

Motivation and Gratitude (essay on the invisible miracles we take for granted that keep our bodies working)

This is post from Kai Chang as a part of User Generated Tuesdays, er Wednesday;)

Bottomline: Skim this book in the library or at Borders. After randomly grabbing Focus by Al Ries from the library and loving it I wanted to get other books by him. This book has some high level ideas/concepts but they are a tad outdated. I guess being immutable laws they should last forever…

Book take aways:

• The law of leadership: Who was the first president? Who was the 23rd president? Notice the difference?
• The law of perception: Realize that “marketing is a manipulation of perceptions.” What is the perception of Japanese cars? It matters!
• The law of focus: Own one word. Period. What is the word for FedEx? What about Xerox? What about Coca-Cola?

Whoever can answer the questions will get my copy of the book