"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Thursday, October 04, 2007

Making Great Decisions

From the Lean Development yahoo group...

Ford has spent the last thirty years moving all its factories out of the US, claiming they can't make money paying American wages. Toyota has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the US .

The last quarter's results: Toyota makes 4 billion in profits while Ford racked up 9 billion in losses. Ford folks are still scratching their heads

I viewed a Google Tech Talk recent on "Making Great Decisions". The presenters have a book by the same name. The talk and the book a very similar. The book has more content, of course, but the format is better as a book for me. It's the kind of book that I can pick up here and there and read a few of their stories. Nothing truly astounding has jumped out to grab me, which may be good: the stories are just common sense reminders for the most part, with a few fundamentals of analysis thrown in, e.g. considering your biased viewpoint when analyzing a trend.

By and large we tend to stop thinking even when we appear to be "doing".

2 comments:

jarober said...

Ford has been motivated by the need to get out of union contracts; note that Toyota has been very careful about putting plants into "right to work" states.

There's a lesson there, too.

Patrick Logan said...

Yeah, there's a trail of bad decisions made by management *and* labor.

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.