The Phoenix Project
by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
Finished, rated 5/5.
highlights
11 highlights saved, filed under tech.
- 01
Punishing failure and “shooting the messenger” only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.
- 02
Practice creates habits, and habits create mastery of any process or skill. Whether it’s calisthenics, sports training, playing a musical instrument, or in my experience, the endless drilling we did in the Marines. Repetition, especially for things that require teamwork, creates trust and transparency.
- 03
“every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures. Suppose for the machine, we select the heat treat oven. The men are the two people required to execute the predefined steps, and we obviously will need measures based on the outcomes of executing the steps in the method.”
- 04
‘Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.’
- 05
“Sensei Mike Rother says that it almost doesn’t matter what you improve, as long as you’re improving something. Why? Because if you are not improving, entropy guarantees that you are actually getting worse, which ensures that there is no path to zero errors, zero work-related accidents, and zero loss.”
- 06
“What differentiates a good day from a bad day for you?”
- 07
“Unlike the other categories of work, unplanned work is recovery work, which almost always takes you away from your goals. That’s why it’s so important to know where your unplanned work is coming from.”
- 08
“You’re right that you can’t achieve the strategic until you’ve mastered the tactical,”
- 09
“Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.”
- 10
Developers are even worse than networking people. Show me a developer who isn’t crashing production systems, and I’ll show you one who can’t fog a mirror. Or more likely, is on vacation.
- 11
Saving Private Ryan: “There’s a chain of command: gripes go up, not down.”