Harish Jose
In today’s column, I’m looking at the Ohno Circle in light of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s ideas. I’ll try to stay away from the neologisms used by Heidegger and will only...
Harish Jose
T he dictum, “purpose of a system is what it does” (POSWID) is famous in cybernetics, attributed to the management cybernetician Stafford Beer.
Beer notes: “A good observer will impute the...
Harish Jose
Recently, I came across an interesting insight at Toyota’s website. I was taken aback by the first sentence of this paragraph: “Eventually, the value added by the line’s human operators disappears...
Harish Jose
Today I’m looking at the ideas inspired by mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are a class of neurons that activate when someone engages in an activity, or when they observe the same activity being...
Harish Jose
Today I’m looking at the “house” of the Toyota Production System (TPS). The illustration below shows the two pillars of the TPS house, jidoka and just in time (JIT).
I’ve been thinking about why...
Harish Jose
Shigeo Shingo is one of my heroes in industrial engineering. He had a great mind that thrived on curiosity. Today I am looking at Shingo’s Whys. This is in contrast to Taiichi Ohno’s 5 Whys method....
Harish Jose
In today’s column, I am looking at wu wei, which is an important concept detailed in the Chinese classic text, Tao Te Ching. This term is generally translated into English as wu = no, wei = action,...
Harish Jose
As readers of my columns know, I am an ardent student of the Toyota Production System (TPS). One of the core philosophies of TPS is kaizen, often translated from Japanese as “continuous improvement...
Harish Jose
In today’s column, I’m looking at Weber’s Law. It’s named after Ernst Heinrich Weber (born June 24, 1795, died Jan. 26, 1878), a German physician who was one of the pioneers of experimental...
Harish Jose
It has been a while since I have written about statistics, and I get asked a lot about a way to calculate sample sizes based on reliability and confidence levels. So today I am sharing a spreadsheet...
