As Napoleon once said, a picture is worth a thousand words. This isn’t just a trite cliché. Visual thinking is an invaluable skill, if not a leadership art.

When I was a boy, I heard a story about a hot-dog stand owner, who would put on a clown costume, then stand on the sidewalk every day and wave motorists into his business. He was so successful he was able to send his son to college.

A recent article in The Washington Post,

If your company is ISO-certified or thinking about becoming so, you may already know that meeting customer requirements and achieving customer satisfaction is paramount to the certification.

The time observation form, also known as a process study form, is a basic and often-used tool for lean practitioners. Note that here we are talking about applying the continuous time-observation method and not the work-sampling method.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion km) from our sun.

People are more likely to conserve energy if it’s easy to do. Knowing this, students working on Stanford’s entry in the Solar Decathlon green-building competition have redesigned household mainstays to make reducing energy and water consumption a cinch.