-
2025 has inconsistent writing, despite great plot ideas – a Year Review!
We structure our opinions on a lot of artifacts: books, movies, papers, and other expressions of authorial intent. Why not reviewing a year? This is also a way of putting some distance between myself and the great deal of angst and suffering in the world. Yet distance allows to make sense of the individual struggles →
-
How to design the products our customers want
Nintendo is but one company with mixed product launches: runaway hits or expensive knickknacks. If only there was a more structured approach to product development! This post summarizes my notes on the matter. The tools available to reduce waste (Lean) and to analyze the process based on data (Six Sigma) connect to existing products. How →
-
Grains, Gluten, and Gobbledygook
This is definitely not a kitchen blog. These are structured notes on flour so that we can separate the wheat from the chaff. In the mid-2000s, mom took some baking lessons. The result was a flavorful and beautifully decorated bread – often enjoyed with a lard, garlic, and thyme spread. Mom has never been too →
-
Are we post-classical? and why it matters
What we learn and how we approach knowledge matters: it shapes the rules in which we operate and how we try to understand the world. Two trends are moving the West into post-classical thinking: elites education; and technology. A general quotes Horace In 1944 the island of Crete was still occupied by the German army. →
-
The end-to-end perspective and its (likely) impact on procurement
Supply Chain Management (SCM) connects to almost every business operation: from financial streams to packaging, to the sequence of tasks, to where and when to execute them. SCM is core and center to the big overarching trends in the industry, from near-shoring, to digitalization, Industry 4.0, and the quest for resilience. In recent years, practitioners →
-
Lean as a method: get more bangs for your bucks!
Lean as a method works wonders to improve performance and serve customers. While limited as a philosophy, it gives a new pair of lenses to investigate operations. The core idea is to become more lean: how? by being fast and wasting little. Reducing cycle time and reducing waste Cycle time is the time to complete →
-
Process improvement theory: the Gospel of Six Sigma
The pursuit of process efficiency Let there be no misunderstandings: six sigma is a process improvement tool. It is a management tool to improve the efficiency of operations by reducing waste and cycle time. This post will focus on the philosophy and not the methodology of quality management. The philosophy of process improvement Six sigma →
-
Blog against the machine
With AI taking over the commercialized webspace, is a content blog the right medium? →
