Blog posts on simplicity

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Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

  • Complicating Simplicity

    This post on the excellent signal vs. noise blog illustrates how one can lose their way when trying to simplify. Lean and other management improvement folks can learn a lot about eliminating non-value added steps, clean design, simplifying systems to improve performance… from this blog. The examples are mainly relating to software development from a true understanding of lean thinking(though I don’t have any evidence they are familiar with the Toyota Production System or lean tools/concepts)...

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  • Simple Cell Phone

    Complex devices with many points of failure (both technical failure and user inability to figure it out) should not be the only option. Simple, easy to use, reliable devices would have a big market. Creativity is not just about more complex devices.

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  • Surviving Modern Conveniences

    Today my car wouldn't start. I guessed the battery died.

    I try to use Lyft. Their app says it is a bad connection and so it won't work (using iPhone on Sprint in Charlotte, NC - the 17th largest city in the USA). Sad but ok, whatever, deal with it. Ok try my iPad mini with ATT. Lyft connects and doesn't let me use it requires putting in a phone number before it will do anything so that I can get pin and give it to them. Ok, give them the number. Nothing ever comes from them. 

    Ok try Uber on iPhone. Uber asked for permission to spy all the time (not just when you are using Uber). Decline that intrusion. Now it can't find my current location. So I type it in. It finds it. Uber says it isn't available where I am and only offers their "luxury" options.

    ...

    The modern convinces really did help in many ways (I am still hoping the trickle charger will help, though as I write this it is still questionable). The battery is about 10 months old. But while it is great to have cell phones and apps to help us when we are stuck it is very annoying to have such bad connectivity in the 19th largest city in the USA and such lame usability failure in the Uber and Lyft apps. And it is frustrating to have to deal with your own lameness that likely caused the battery to die (I left the lights on in the car - the garage had lights on so I didn't register the car lights were not going off...) and putting in the wrong address...

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  • Nice Design Example, the eco-cook

    Basically I just think this is cool. I could try and explain how it shows creativity and reducing waste… but really I just like it.

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