Implications of Technology:"

16 “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. 17Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

How can it be that industry after industry is overrun with disruptive innovation and incumbent companies are unable to respond?

The problem, it seems, is too much focus on today’s operations—maybe even too much focus on the lean principle of Eliminate Waste—and not enough focus on the bigger picture, on Optimize the Whole. Too much focus on adding features for today’s customers and not enough focus on potential customers who need lower prices and fewer features. Too much focus on predictability and not enough focus on experimentation. Too much focus on productivity and not enough focus on impact. Too much focus on the efficiency of centralization and not enough appreciation for the resiliency of decentralization.
Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (pp. 8-10). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Lean Product Development in Intel

PDE chose to use the Lean Product Development techniques recommended by Targeted Convergence Corporation. These techniques consider the entire product—hardware and software—and offer strategies for designing products that take months or years to develop. They focus on continuous improvement of the knowledge used to make decisions, elimination of wishful thinking, and coordination of work across multiple teams. The techniques include LAMDA learning cycles (Look-Ask-Model-Discuss-Act), Knowledge Briefs (a one-page summary of knowledge), Set-Based Design (investigating multiple options to learn as much as possible and decide as late as possible), and Integrating Events (synchronization points where work-to-date is assessed in detail by everyone involved in developing the system and critical decisions are made).10
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (pp. 50-51). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

As an engineer, how do you face the fact that your company possessed:the most efficient way to get things done is to decompose work into its component parts and assign each component to a specialist.

A third reason for separate delivery organizations stems from the strong influence of Adam Smith’s division of labor theory on Western cultures. We are conditioned to believe that the most efficient way to get things done is to decompose work into its component parts and assign each component to a specialist. Of course, efficiency also demands that each specialist be kept busy, so as not to waste valuable time. When work can be broken down into clear segments of predictable effort, assigning work to specialists and keeping them fully occupied is one path to efficiency. But development—the discovery and validation of effective solutions to important problems—is not supposed to be predictable; it is supposed to be exploratory, creative, and responsive to feedback. Product development excellence is the result of constant, bidirectional communication among specialties. In such an environment, the path to efficiency is not resource efficiency—keeping specialists busy. For developing new ideas, the path to genuine efficiency is flow efficiency—moving ideas from concept to cash (or trash) with as little delay as possible.---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 161). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

focusing on efficiency is probably the wrong approach; understanding the essential problem and finding an innovative solution to it will likely yield better results. When a company comes to believe that innovation is essential to its survival, the time has come to switch its focus from efficiency to decentralization. There are several reasons why decentralization fosters innovation. First of all, it takes a team to field a new product or service, and if a company is structured around independent business teams at multiple locations, innovation has a lot of incubation zones. Second, there is wide agreement that if innovation teams are subject to the same processes and metrics as core business units, they are likely to fail; processes and metrics more suited to a startup business should be used.17 Third, tightly coupled systems are fragile. A decentralized system is a decoupled system, which can more easily tolerate the failures that go hand in hand with innovation.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 150). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

The idea is to keep the tiny signals of budding opportunities from being lost in the unavoidable noise of running a successful business.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 155). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Disrupt yourself is to focus on customers' value.

If you are in a high-tech field, you can count on disruptive technologies to threaten your core business every five to ten years. It would be better if you were the inventor of those disruptive businesses, but the only way to do so is to find simpler, cheaper ways to solve customer problems.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 156). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

What software could do:

The system grew steadily over the next few years, one experiment at a time. By the end of 2012 the team had conducted over 20 major experiments and Fasal had 1.2 million registered farmers, 90% of them active users. It was growing at the rate of 20,000 farmers a week. Why? Farmers found that Fasal increased their income by an average of 20%. “Every farmer, at minimum, is bringing us at least two additional farmers,” Bachu says. “So you can start to see the network in place.”15
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 149). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Who limit the Code farmer to become outstanding.

A small team can be a big advantage. When the entire product team is responsible for the product’s success, everybody develops a deep understanding of the customers, their lives, their problems, their constraints. The whole team gets involved in each experiment, so people with diverse perspectives imagine, implement, and measure the results of an experiment. Creating small, complete teams inside of the company is a great way to bring a startup mindset to big companies.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 149). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Pixar University: a climate that fosters respect and trust and unleashes creative energy, they know they are a part of something amazing.

But that was only the beginning. In most studios, there is a development department chartered to come up with movie concepts. At Pixar, the main job of the development department is, instead, to assemble teams of people who work well together, who address problems effectively and make steady progress, and who bring out the best in each other. The job of executives is to create a climate that fosters respect and trust and unleashes creative energy, because, Catmull believes, this is the kind of atmosphere where passion and dedication flourish, and people are eager to go to work every day because they know they are a part of something amazing. Pixar University is a key element of developing mutual respect. Here everyone is encouraged to develop skills in other disciplines. In any given class there will be experts honing their skills alongside novices from other areas of the company. In this way people work together in friendly environments, learn to appreciate the work of their colleagues from other disciplines, and bring a broader set of alternatives to bear on mutual problems.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 140). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Meet you in the humble.

People at innovative companies know that the best way to understand a complex system is to stimulate it in a way that they expect will move it in a particular direction and then observe whether or not they were right. They know that the more small experiments they do, the more they learn. They understand that if their experiments never fail, they aren’t learning anything new. They realize that the biggest advances in knowledge start out as surprises. And yet, most companies are not structured to accept surprises; they tend to focus on predictability, not on surprises. Their systems and metrics are aimed at flawless execution, not on running experiments that might fail. In companies where every investment is measured against a hurdle and everyone’s career depends on never being associated with failure, no one is going to take any risks.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (pp. 145-146). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Disruptive Innovation(pretend (to prepare) to advance along one path while secretly going along another; do one thing under cover of another)

The concept of disruptive technologies was introduced in a 1995 Harvard Business Review article, “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave” by Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen.2 The authors showed how the success of established companies and their most popular products attracts competitors. These competitors often develop products that are less expensive, or smaller, or require less power, or are easier to use than the established products. At first the new products don’t meet the needs of existing customers, so the incumbent companies are not concerned. Once disruptive technologies gain a customer base—usually outside the existing customer base—they grow stronger and more competent while maintaining the cost or size or power or ease-of-use advantage that got them into the market in the first place. Often it’s just a matter of time before these disruptive products take over the market from the established leaders. The remarkable thing is that while the upstarts are growing strong, incumbents usually ignore them. It’s as if the established companies have blinders on and simply cannot see what is happening.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (pp. 133-134). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

If we need fail to filter out success, let us run a cheap and safe way to fail:

As illustrated in the risk-versus-cost curve, the Think It stage lets us drive down product risk in a very cost-effective way—we are just prototyping and experimenting. This gives us a cheap and safe way to fail, so we can keep trying until we find out what the right product is to build.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 124). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

We have spent a lot of time over the past decade working to make life better for those who develop software. thriving in the new landscape, a land without islands, a land that is a bit short of specialists, a land that’s full of endless possibilities.

We have spent a lot of time over the past decade working to make life better for those who develop software. We promote lean principles such as small batches and steady flow and quality at the source. Over the past few years we have watched the waters recede and marveled as islands of software development became part of the mainland. We have observed that the best and brightest software specialists have learned to talk directly with customers, work as partners with other disciplines, and seek out new approaches to solving problems. We have written three books about software development, but we couldn’t write a fourth, because the islands of software development have largely disappeared. In their place we find a new landscape, one in which infrastructure is a commodity and multidiscipline teams are expected to ask the right questions, solve the right problems, and deliver solutions that customers love. True, those solutions are often software-intensive. In fact, just about everything is software-intensive these days, so isolating software on its own island doesn’t make much sense anymore. This is a book about thriving in the new landscape, a land without islands, a land that is a bit short of specialists, a land that’s full of endless possibilities.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 166). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.