Novayama LLC

The Value of a Little Bit of Information

Shortly after 9am last Friday my home Internet went down. After doing my own troubleshooting, I was pretty certain it wasn’t anything in my control, so I called the technical support line of my provider. The person on the other end (who I later in this saga learned was in the Philippines) was obviously reading …

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Is Your Problem Technical or Adaptive?

Back in the early 1990s I was an avid skier, putting in 40+ days on the slopes every season. I was part of a group that did days in local (to Seattle) ski areas; annual trips to Whistler, BC (my favorite place); Mount Hood and Mount Bachelor in Oregon; and a semi-fateful trip to Red …

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Boeing: The Turning Point(s)

In early spring of 1999 I was sitting in a classroom at Boeing with a couple of dozen other employees. Everyone with a “management” job code was being sent to this session over a few weeks’ time. The topic was a major new direction for the company. From this point forward, management was to use …

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Introduction to Toyota Kata

I recently did an “Introduction to Toyota Kata” session for Kata School Cascadia. The intent is to give an overview of my interpretation of the background, and how Toyota Kata fits into, and augments, your Continuous Improvement effort. Here is a direct URL in case you can’t see the embed on your phone or pad: …

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What Conversations Does Your VSM Drive?

Continuing on the theme of value stream mapping (and process mapping in general) – in the last post, Where is your value stream map? I outlined the typical scenario – the map is built by the Continuous Improvement Team, and they are the ones primarily engaged in the conversations about how to close the gap …

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