BullsEye Number of words: 535 Consider the following scenario: You have had your car repaired at a new local garage. A week or two later, your neighbor, curious about whether she should also use this new garage, asks, “Did they fix the car?” “I think so,” you reply. “It seems to be running smoothly, so I … Read more
Number of words: 147 A major, and common, form of listening to clients is a more or less formal program of visits to key clients by senior partners of the firm (or, if the firm is not a partnership, then by office or practice managers of “executive committee members). Frequently these “visits” are conducted not … Read more
Number of words: 373 If a seminar is where the professional firm invites a group of clients together and talks to them, then a reverse seminar is where the firm invites the client executive to come and talk to the members of the firm. A typical request would go something like this Dear Client, We … Read more
Robert Bosch’s first product, circa 1887, was a low voltage magneto for petrol engines. It was only in 1927 that Bosch launched its bread and butter product – injection pumps for diesel engines. Contemporary engines use a technology called Common Rail Diesel Injection. In the older design of fuel pumps a mini engine of sorts … Read more
Beyond matters of form, the team focused on the function of the multi-touch. Most touch devices at the time used resistive touch screens, based on two thin sheets of conductive material separated by a thin gap of air. When the screen is pressed, the two layers make contact, registering the touch. Resistive screens were typically … Read more
“From early on we wanted something that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple you almost wouldn’t think of it as having been designed,” Jony explained. The shape wasn’t the issue—“it could have been shaped like a banana if we’d wanted.” Given the parts of the device (the screen, the chip, the … Read more
Then, as now, Jony’s aesthetic tended toward minimalism, in reaction perhaps to the mid-1980s tendencies for excess. That had been the height of the “designer decade,” when the splashy colors of Culture Club and Kajagoogoo represented good taste. According to Kunkel, Jony avoided styling his products to protect them from dating too quickly. “In an … Read more
In working out his design, Jony chose to focus on the pen’s “fiddle factor.” He observed that people fiddled with their pens all the time, and decided to give the pens’ owners something to play with when not writing. He cleverly added a ball-and-clip mechanism to the top of the pen that served no purpose … Read more
When Taiichi Ohno first came to tiny Showa Manufacturing in 1984, mighty Toyota was just at the end of a thirty-five-year process of diffusing lean thinking across the Toyota Group within Japan and was just beginning to spread it across the world, beginning at the NUAUNII plant in California. Two of the basic lean concepts … Read more
A key problem—one faced by many Japanese firms today—was that Showa’s market strategy was at odds with its new production methods. Showa had discovered how to build a complete boiler in four days (compared with sixteen to twenty weeks) and how to build all boilers to special order without paying a significant production cost premium, … Read more
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