The lean start-up is a revolutionary new idea of doing business. It focuses more on customer satisfaction and feedback than a traditional business plan would, cutting down on fine-tuning a product that may or may not be well-received by the consumer. Lean businesses are able to cycle through several prototypes and receive customer feedback after each one, producing far less waste than would otherwise be the case. This strategy allows for better money-management practices, results in a better end-product, and creates statistically higher customer satisfaction. In the book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, Kamkwamba relates the story of how he creates a wind turbine in his backyard in Malawi, Africa. His willingness to change directions with his project and desire to create a “minimum viable
Coincidentally, Kamkwamba takes this exact same approach when developing his product. Before he creates his large windmill that later went on to power his home, he creates a smaller windmill. Though impressive, this smaller windmill is by no means powerful enough to generate the energy that needs. It is thrown together in a much smaller timeframe, and is significantly sloppier and less sturdy than what will later be his final product and crowning achievement. This follows the practice of the lean start-up, which entails “rapidly assembling [a] minimum viable product” (Blank 5). The reason that Kamkwamba creates this prototype windmill is that he does not want to invest too many of his scarce resources into a foolhardy project. If the windmill hadn’t performed as Kamkwamba hoped, he would have wasted the majority of his resources on an ineffective dream. By testing his idea though this “minimum viable product” Kamkwamba is unknowingly following the most logical path to go about creating a product: the lean
Good Old Boy by Willie Morris The book that I chose to read was written by the Mississippi author Willie Morris. The book, Good Old Boy, was written in 1971 and takes place in the small Mississippi town of Yazoo City. The book contains experiences of the author's childhood in this small town. The story began by telling many of the legends of Yazoo City. One of these legends involved a woman who lived by the Yazoo River. She supposedly lured fishermen to her house to kill and bury them in the woods never to be found again. The sheriff eventually found out about her and chased her through the woods into quicksand where she sank and died. Before she was completely under the sand she vowed to return twenty years later to have revenge on the town on May 25, 1904. Her body was retrieved from the quicksand and buried with a giant chain around her grave. On May 25, 1904 the whole town was engulfed in flames. Everything was destroyed in this blaze. The next day, some citizens went to her grave and to their horror the chain had been broken. Another legend was one about Casey Jones, a famous tr...
Lean is not a new concept and surfaced as a result of Toyota’s Production System. Manufacturing has been using lean principles since the 1980’s (Sarkar, 2008). Lean today goes beyond manufacturing into health, education,
In The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, by William Kamkwamba, modern concepts such as government and deforestation had negative effects on the lives of the people in William’s community. While government works such as ADMARC and ESCOM have potential to be beneficial to William’s community, in practice, the government does not make them accessible enough to William’s people; thus, they do not serve much use. Furthermore, the government is corrupt, exacerbating the issue: “President Muluzi’s people had sold all our surplus grain for profit … Millions of kwacha were missing, and no one in the government was taking responsibility” (87). The government is keeping these resources for themselves as opposed to making them available to the people. Government,
Lean manufacturing refers to systematic identification and elimination of waste through CI processes in pursuit of perfection (Khan et al. 2013; Yang & Yang 2013). Lean production is now used worldwide in manufacturing plants to eliminate waste from all ar...
Can moral obligations be blinded by religious views? For some, the sense of religious pride reigns stronger than the moral belief. In the beginning, citizens of Hillsboro from the novel Inherit The Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, acknowledged religion as something far more valuable than the moral truth. As the novel continues the prosecuting attorney, Matthew Harrison Brady, enters the scene which reveals the prejudice of the courtroom regarding the case of Bertram Cates. When Brady takes on the challenge, the exposure of excessive pride and boasting of recent cases won can be seen as a certain Dramatic Personality Disorder from a medical standpoint. Throughout the novel, more symptoms of the disorder are revealed through Brady, who continuously proves to have a Narcissistic Personality Disorder or otherwise known as NPD.
In the autobiography “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” the main character William Kamkwamba is divergent compared to everyone else in Malawi. William reads about windmills and falls in love with science. While the village calls him crazy, William is designing a way that his small village will be able to enjoy luxuries such as electricity and running water. William never once gave up, he accomplished just what he said he was going to do. He is beyond determined, Kamkwamba found every single piece to accomplish his goal. William is percipient, he was able to understand things nobody else could. As well. William was inspiring… he made something life changing out of nothing. These were significant characteristics in what represents who William is.
Nijhuis presents a series of detailed explanations that argue in favor of and against the development of wind farms. In the first portion of “Selling the Wind”, the
The idea behind lean is to maximize customer value while eliminating waste which means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. This means the main aim of lean management is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste (LEI, 2009). Lean manufacturing is based on efficiencies, adding value to a product and removing wasteful steps in production (Summers, 2011). Waste is considered anything that doesn 't add value to the end product. In terms of efficiencies, this is done by focuses on a customer needs, i.e. what is the customer willing to pay for? In order to deal with lean manufacturing, there are key stages involved; identify waste, analyze waste, find the root cause, solve the root cause and repeat the cycle (Mind tools,
In brief, Kellogg’s is the world’s leading breakfast cereal manufacturer (The Times 100, 2010). Kellogg’s has manufacturing plants in the UK, Canada, Australia, Latin America and Asia (The Times 100, 2010), thus Levy (2007) settles Kellogg’s must have established an international supply chain as a response to the globalisation in which needs to act responsibly. Furthermore, this essay will also demonstrate Kellogg’s lean production system, and how exploits that. Interestingly, Krajewski et al. (2009) has drawn attention to the fact that lean production is an operations system, which assists to exploit the value of the company, in this case, Kellogg’s activities by eliminating waste. Referencing to Paton et al. (2011) agrees lean production is based on a series of practices which mostly seen at Kellogg’s as a management approach, namely; just in time (JIT) which will be included in this essay. The rationale behind the choice is, The Times 100 (2010) highlights; Kellogg’s lean production enables the rearrangement of processes and removes waste. As it is known that in the supply chain, there are parts where waste can be found (Paton et...
Businesses in the US, just as Toyota Company has done for decades, utilizes Lean management to reduce costs, reduce lead times, increase market shares, develop new products, improve quality of existing products and human resources (Emiliana, 2006). Importantly, Toyota has brought with the publication of their internal document in 2001, awareness to the “respect for people” principle, which has long been an unrecognized and misunderstood aspect of the Toyota Productions system or Lean management as practiced outside of Toyota Company (Emiliana, 2006). In order to precisely follow the Lean management objectives, a company must acknowledge and practice both principles, rather than just the first principle, “continuous improvement,” as it is the second principle that can limit the amount of improvement that can be achieved (Emiliana, 2006). Also worth noting, is that, although top executives today see the adoption of Lean management as critical, this topic is seldom seen in undergraduate and graduate business degree programs (Emiliana, 2006). When the application of both principles of Lean management takes place, this leads to the elimination of waste, called “muda” in Japanese (Emiliana, 2006). “Waste is defined as: activities and behaviors that add cost but do not add value as perceived by end-use customers,” with eight
The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, were German romantic historians in the 19th century, and their work with fairy tales has influenced many of the modern stories we enjoy today. “The Brave Little Tailor” by: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is the story of a poor, working-class tailor that kills seven flies in one blow, which leads to a misunderstanding in the kingdom. The tailor stiches on his belt, “Seven at one blow”, and he tricks a group of giants and citizens of the kingdom into spreading the word that he is a brave man (Hallet & Karasek 207). The King hears of the tailor’s deeds, and enlists him in his army. The King promises the tailor his own daughter and half his kingdom in return for completing several dangerous tasks. Later on the King and the Princess find out that the tailor is a not a nobleman. The King tries to strip the tailor of the power he was given and threatens to kill him, but the tailor tricks his challenger into keeping his half of the kingdom and lives “happily ever after”. This essay is an in depth analysis of “The Brave Little Tailor” by: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; the application of the Marxist theories, character analysis of the id and ego, and the lack of superego in the story will be investigated.
Lean production is an approach to production developed in Japan. Toyota, the Japanese car manufacturer was the company that invented lean production. The whole aim of lean production is to reduce the quantity of resources used up in production. By doing this, lean production uses less of - factory space, materials, stocks, suppliers, labour, capital and time. Lean production reduces costs, increases efficiency and output and improves motivation. Lean production involves using a range of practices designed to reduce waste and improve productivity and quality.
Nicholas, John, Soni, Avi. (2006). The Portal to Lean Production. Boca Raton, NY: Auerach Publications.
The main idea is to fulfill the internal or external customer’s wants. Through lean thinking, it is hoping that nonmanufacturing company’s can provides value to the customers with minimum cost, effort and can save time. Thus, it will lead to improve performance and optimum utilization of the company’s additional capacity and resources.
Deal, W. (n.d.). Wind power: An emerging energy resource.Technology & Engineering Teacher, 70(1), 9-15. Retrieved from http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=a747d6c4-9f9f-4066-be3e-d7d26a427ef2@sessionmgr115&vid=1&hid=114&bdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPWNvb2tpZSxpcCxjcGlkJmN1c3RpZD1zc2Mmc2l0ZT1laG9zdC1saXZlJnNjb3BlPXNpdGU=