Essay on How to think

Submitted By Nara-Un
Words: 653
Pages: 3

Can You Go Too Fast? So far this book has emphasized the importance of speed. Startups are in a life-or-death struggle to learn how to build a sustainable business before they run out of resources and die. However, focusing on speed alone would be destructive. To work, startups require built-in speed regulators that help teams find their optimal pace of work. We saw an example of speed regulation in Chapter 9 with the use of the andon cord in systems such as continuous deployment. It is epitomized in the paradoxical Toyota proverb, “Stop production so that production never has to stop.” The key to the andon cord is that it brings work to a stop as soon as an uncorrectable quality problem surfaces—which forces it to be investigated. 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. Defects cause a lot of rework, low morale, and customer complaints, all of which slow progress and eat away at valuable resources. So far I have used the language of physical products to describe these problems, but that is simply a matter of convenience. Service businesses have the same challenges. Just ask any manager of a training, staffing, or hospitality firm to show you the playbook that specifies how employees are supposed to deliver the service under various conditions. What might have started out as a simple guide tends to grow inexorably over time. Pretty soon, orientation is incredibly complex and employees have invested a lot of time and energy in learning the rules. Now consider an entrepreneurial manager in that kind of company trying to experiment with new rules or procedures. The higher-quality the existing playbook is, the easier it will be for it to evolve over time. By contrast, a low-quality playbook will be filled with contradictory or ambiguous rules that cause confusion when anything is changed. When I teach the Lean Startup approach to entrepreneurs with an engineering background, this is one of the hardest concepts to grasp. On the one hand, the logic of validated learning and the minimum viable product says that we should get a product into customers’ hands as soon as possible and that any extra work we do beyond what is required to learn from customers is waste. On the other hand, the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is a continuous process. We don’t stop after one minimum viable product but use what we have learned to get to work immediately on the next iteration.