Create Elegant Solutions – Go Lean
October 12th, 2009
During the Monday afternoon general session, keynote speaker Matthew May focused on the leanness of elegance, challenging listeners to create a “Stop Doing This” list. Some attendees considered this the most valuable learning from the conference.
We captured the live tweeting from this session in the comments: http://bit.ly/2eev2E. If you have any additional insights, feel free to use the comments thread to share them!
Matthew May “Elegant Solutions” Takeaways (posted from Twitter):
Simplicity + surprising power = ‘elegance’. ideas exist in the white space
Toyota implements 1,000,000 new ideas per year. most unbudgeted
Problem solving and learning = #innovation
Innovation must be “everyone, everyday”
Innovation is trying to do something better than it has been done before for your customers.
If we lose sight of what our customers want – we add things!
There is no Best, There is only Better!
Pursuit of Perfection -capital P- is unatainable but should be the goal
To be innovative, we must learn like children. They observe, investigate and experiment
3 practical tactics, 4 elegant solutions – learn like children, make kaizen(?) mandatory, capture the intangible
Keep it lean….because there’s nothing elegant about excess.
Tiger Woods’ pursuit of Perfection- “18″ (not majors; strokes in a round – the Perfect and unattainable golf score)
Create a “stop doing this” list. Bottom 20% of your to-dos.. stop doing them… forever. Will never think about doing them again. (Innovation)
Mathew May website: http://www.inpursuitofelegance.com/
Matthew May did an excellent job of connecting his speech to the conference theme – look at your work and get rid of the waste, the non-value added. Everyone can innovate and you don’t always need money to do so.
Create a “stop doing” list – substract the right things