Here’s this week’s 200 word idea thanks to Fastcompany.com.
How can a loom maker located in the Kansas of Japan decide to go into the car business after everyone else and become better than GM and Mercedes in the core business of making cars? Why is it that when Nissan sells a hybrid, it’s got Toyota parts in it?
Even as a student, Intuit founder Scott Cook was fascinated by Toyota. Along with his professors at Harvard, he went to the Toyota factories and observed Toyota’s approach to manufacturing. And, one of his professors pointed out that Toyota ran itself as a massive series of experiments from the production line worker to the CEO. They had the line supervisor teach 70 or 80 people how to run experiments with their team – little scientific single variable experiments to try out their ideas on how to improve production. He later saw the same dynamic repeat itself at Google.
Scott Cook concluded that the reason big companies with insanely smart people made bad decisions was because they relied on the 3 P’s of politics, persuasion and PowerPoint instead of experimentation. He was so inspired by Toyota that “leadership by experimentation” became at the center of his leadership style at Intuit
Source and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com
‘We got beat because Google runs itself as a series of experiments run by its engineers. They are constantly trying new things at a ferocious rate. A Google chief scientist says they run 3,000 to 5,000 experiments a year. If you use Google in a week, you’re likely to be in three experiments. You don’t know you are, because they are experiments.’ | A Yahoo engineer on Google
A Learning a Day 