The New Yorker recently ran an article titled “The Open Secret of Success.” It talked about how Toyota has sold more cars than General Motors has in the first three months of 2008. What makes this significant? G.M. has sold more cars anually than any other company for the past seventy years.
So how did Toyota, a company that makes a line of fairly unremarkable cars, outsell G.M.? Innovation. However, it is innovation in process, on the assembly line, rather then product. The Toyota Production System is a remarkably efficient system that has been continuously fine tuned since the late 1940s. No other car company has been able to keep up with Toyota despite them being very open about their process and even helping G.M. improve its production system. So how does Toyota stay ahead?
The answer has a lot to do with another distinctive element of Toyota’s approach: defining innovation as an incremental process, in which the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis. (The principle is often known by its Japanese name, kaizen-continuous improvement.) Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field by means of short and steady gains.
This reminded me of what Paul Graham wrote about startups and the future of web applications in his book, Hackers & Painters. In the essay entitled “The Other Road Ahead” he talks about how server-based software, i.e. web applications, is the next big thing and how they are ideal for startups. He wrote this essay in 2001 which says something about his amazing insight. One of the things he touches on is exactly what Toyota has been doing for over half a century, incremental updates.
With server-based software, you can make changes almost as you would in a program you were writing for yourself. You release software as a series of incremental changes instead of an occasional big explosion. A typical desktop software company might do one or two releases a year. At Viaweb we often did three to five releases a day.
In way, Toyota operates like a giant startup in terms of refining its process. It implements millions of ideas a year from its workers, not all of which work, but the net effect is that the process is constantly getting better. Likewise, the hundreds, if not thousands, of web startups that have popped up in the last few years have taken the same approach in developing their products. Take 37signals for example. If you look at their product blog, you can see that they are always adding new features to their products.
The result is that Toyota and 37signals have become leaders in their respective industries. I think this tells us something about how companies work. The most widely used model of leaps of innovation is outdated. Imagine what Microsoft could do if they took the kaizen approach? No, monthly patches don’t count. I want a continuous stream of new features. However, in order for big companies to do this, they would have to change the way they work entirely. They would have to get rid of all the layers of bureaucratic bullshit that often ends up being a complete waste of time. Graham says they need to keep teams small and agile.
As Fred Brooks pointed out in The Mythical Man-Month, adding people to a project tends to slow it down. The number of possible connections between developers grows exponentially with the size of the group. The larger the group, the more time they’ll spend in meetings negotiating how their software will work together, and the more bugs they’ll get from unforseen interactions. Fortunately, this process also works in reverse: as groups get smaller, software development gets exponentially more efficient. I can’t remember the programmers at Viaweb ever having an actual meeting. We never had more to say at any one time than we could say as we were walking to lunch.
But here we reach a paradox. Toyota is a large company, but they seem to be able to operate like a startup (at least in improving their production system). Why can’t other big companies do the same? My theory is the same reason other car companies can’t keep up with Toyota. The reality is that they can, they just aren’t willing to take an approach puts so much responsibility into the hands of the lowly worker. Any change in a big company has to go through a ridiculous chain of approval (I’ve seen this at my school too…) which is just too slow. Kaizen means being quick and agile but this runs counter to the traditional management paradigm.
I’m not sure how one would go about changing the way a company operates in such a big way–or if it’s even possible for that matter. The startup model of operating may not be suitable in all situations. However, I have no doubt that there are some companies that could benefit from it. The existence of startups competing against large corporations proves it. Perhaps one day they will be forced to change in order to compete against startups.
Posted on May 11, 2008 in Technology
My teacher suggested I watch Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” yesterday. I saw the story go by in my Google Reader a few weeks ago but didn’t think to look at it. I forgot about it again when I got home and didn’t remember to watch it until I saw a quote by him on a friend’s MySpace.
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.
Randy Pausch seems like one of those great guys who is passionate about what he does and infuses everyone around him with his enthusiasm. Just watch his last lecture and you’ll see what I mean. He’s a CS professor at Carnegie Mellon that was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I hope I will have a chance to meet him when I go there this fall.
In his lecture, he talks about achieving his childhood dreams. As I sat in history today, I started pondering my own childhood dreams. Rather then write them down, I decided to doodle them.
There’s me as a kid dreaming. The cloud on the far left has a paintbrush in it because I wanted to be an artist. I took art for several years all through elementary and middle school.
I also wanted to be a roboticist. I liked to play with LEGO Minstorms as a kid. I used to build and program LEGO robots and upload pictures of them to the internet for the world to see. My profile on the Mindstorms community site is still online after all these years. The pictures of my robots are gone sadly.
The third cloud is obviously a rocket in space. Who didn’t want to be an astronaut at some point? My friend and I said in forth grade that we would go to space together someday. He changed his mind though and wanted to be a wolf biologist.
But before wanting to be an astronaut or a roboticist, I wanted to be a programmer which says something about me I think. The last cloud has some C++ code for the seminal “Hello World!” program that everyone starts out writing.
I think I’m on on my way to at least three of those dreams. I doodle a lot and design websites which can be considered art. I built a robot this year. I’m majoring in computer science in college this fall. I’m not so sure about my astronaut dream though.
Posted on April 23, 2008 in Life
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about messaging on social networks and how they are redundant because it’s just another inbox you have to check. I proposed a system that would give users the option to reply to messages directly via email.
So here’s my proposal: a social network messaging system that allows you to read and respond to messages via email. So if someone sends a me a message, the site forwards it to my email where I can read and respond to it—without leaving me email—and the site automagically forwards the email to the recipient who can respond however she wants to as well. Ideally the inbox on the social network would be kept synchronized.
I targeted social networks because everyone uses them and MySpace happened to be the source of my annoyance in the first place, but the same can be said for any software that has its own messaging system. For example, Basecamp, the Swiss Army Knife of project management and collaboration.
I ran across a post detailing a new feature they added to Basecamp on the 37signals product blog. The new feature: reply to a message via email. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? I doubt they got it from me, but apparently I’m not alone in my annoyance.
Posted on April 21, 2008 in Web
As promised, I’ve updated Category Posts Widget. Version 1.3 brings one new feature to the table: an option to show a post excerpt. I also converted the widget to the new WordPress 2.5 system of adding multiple widgets so 1.3 will only work on WordPress 2.5 or later. Please donate if you like this plugin! Full list of changes below.
Changes:
- New option to display post excerpt below permalink.
- Display as many posts from a category as you want.
- Add as many widgets as you want.
- WordPress 2.5 compatible only.
Note: You may have to reconfigure your CPW widgets if you are upgrading from a previous version.
Download
You can download Category Posts Widget 1.3 at the official WordPress plugin repository.
Donate
This plugin was created by me and is made available free of charge. However, if you would like to show your appreciation, you can donate via PayPal by clicking the donate button in the sidebar. All funds go towards paying for my college expenses.
Posted on April 18, 2008 in Code
I had been having a bit of trouble deciding where I want to go for college as some of you may know. I was torn between UCLA and Carnegie Mellon. I had been researching each school for sometime and trying to figure out what mattered to me the most. UCLA is on the west coast located in sunny Los Angeles while Carnegie Mellon is on the east coast in Pittsburgh. I would say that’s a bit of a contrast in location, but the differences don’t end there. I won’t discuss all the different factors that influenced my decision. I was undecided and that’s all you really need to know.
I decided where to go in English class of all places. My teacher passed out note cards so that people could write what college they were going to and stick it on the door of the classroom for everyone to see. By that time I had already researched everything from recreational activities to how the computer science program is structured. I doubted there was much else I could find out about the schools without actually visiting, which I couldn’t do due to cost of travel and lack of time. So I’m sitting at my desk with a blank note card in front of me and I think to myself “Ah, what the hell. Now is a good time as any other.”
I wrote Carnegie Mellon on my note card and proudly stuck it on the door. 
Posted on April 18, 2008 in Life, School
