Quotes About Improvement

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

You have it in you already. You just sort of need to be exposed to these things and provide yourself an education. The library assumes the best out of people. The services it provides are founded upon the assumption that if given the chance, people will improve themselves.

I think football would become an even better game if someone could invent a ball that kicks back.

Failure is a prerequisite to learning.

This is an important rule: a good design is one that changes customer behavior for the better.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste. In

This is one of the most important discoveries of the lean manufacturing movement: you cannot trade quality for time. If you are causing (or missing) quality problems now, the resulting defects will slow you down later.

The one envelope at a time approach is called "single-piece flow

Learning to see waste and then systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries.

Stop production so that production never has to stop.

Even if the amount of time that each process took was exactly the same, the small batch production approach still would be superior, and for even more counterintuitive reasons. For example, imagine that the letters didn't fit in the envelopes. With the large-batch approach, we wouldn't find that out until nearly the end. With small batches, we'd know almost immediately.

At any time, the company could invest its energy in finding new customers, servicing existing customers better, improving overall quality, or driving down costs. In

Vanity metrics wreak havoc because they prey on a weakness of the human mind. In my experience, when the numbers go up, people think the improvement was caused by their actions, by whatever they were working on at the time.

good design is one that changes customer behavior for the better.

Compare two startups. The first company sets out with a clear baseline metric, a hypothesis about what will improve that metric, and a set of experiments designed to test that hypothesis. The second team sits around debating what would improve the product, implements several of those changes at once, and celebrates if there is any positive increase in any of the numbers. Which startup is more likely to be doing effective work and achieving lasting results?

This is one of the most important discoveries of the lean manufacturing movement: you cannot trade quality for time.

work-in-progress (WIP) inventory]

When I work with product managers and designers in companies that use large batches, I often discover that they have to redo their work five or six times for every release.

a good design is one that changes customer behavior for the better.

of work. Over that period, we were making constant improvements to the

its focus needs to be on improving customer retention. This goes against the standard intuition in that if a company lacks growth, it should invest more in sales and marketing.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

paradoxical Toyota proverb, "Stop production so that production never has to stop." The

book Lean Thinking, James Womack and Daniel Jones recount