Quotes from Gene Kim

human error is not our cause of troubles; instead, human error is a consequence of the design of the tools that we gave them.

but as they say, you always have to watch out for the quiet ones. I take a quick shower. I run into the kitchen and grab a couple of sticks of the string cheese our son loves to eat. I take these

Something seems wrong in a world where half the e-mail messages sent are urgent.

CONTINUALLY IDENTIFY AND ELEVATE OUR CONSTRAINTS To reduce lead times and increase throughput, we need to continually identify our system's constraints and improve its work capacity. In Beyond the Goal, Dr. Goldratt states, "In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only one constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion.

we are starting to master the First Way: We're curbing the handoffs of defects to downstream work centers, managing the flow of work, setting the tempo by our constraints, and, based on our results from audit and from Dick, we're understanding better than we ever have what is important versus what is not.

Tuckman phases of teams, going through form, storm, norm, and perform. She's ready to start norming and performing!

Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it. Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it. Like Phoenix.

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.

Remember, it goes beyond reducing WIP. Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.