Whose dreams do we live?

This morning I was talking to a friend and a classmate. He talked about his 7 year old daughter wanting to be a rock musician. While none in his family have had a background in music, he still sounded very enthusiastic about his daughters' dreams. His exact words were, ' Let her pursue her dreams.' This sounded such a welcome change from the generation we grew up in.

Till recently, there was a time in India where parents would have a set of dreams for their kids and the children would carry the burden of those dreams as if they were their own. Most of the parents dreams centered around making their children professionals - either engineers or doctors. If the parents themselves were in those professions then the children were more than likely to follow them. It was like a Doctors' child was destined to become a doctor. The same was true for the other professions as well. Not that it only happened in India, rather isn't this a common phenomenon around the world!! But this seemed a little more prevalent to India, at least to us. So the discussion sounded like a breath of fresh air.

I hope we let our children explore the world a little more. Let them make mistakes sometime and learn from them. This, in my opinion, would make them feel the ownership of their lives a little more. Afterall we all need to live our own lives and not that of our parents or children. Isn't it?

Google- sued

I came across this very interesting article where Google was sued by a company who had susbcribed to the Adword services.

While some may not have the patience to click on another link, I do believe one may actually find it of help in future.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_172403.html

Implementing Lean Strategy

A Japanese concept, Lean Strategy and Planning refers to the overall implementation approach to apply lean thinking to businesses. A Lean organisation continuously strives to perfect material and information flow, pulled by customer demand in a visual, self-explaining workplace.

To put it simply, Lean is about doing more from less resource, less time, space and less money.

Five areas drive lean enterprise:
a. cost
b. quality
c. delivery
d. safety, and
e. morale.


The five drivers of enabling a Lean Approach are:
a. Specify Value
b. Identify and Map the Value Stream
c. Flows
d. Pull
e. Perfection

There are various tools of implementing Lean strategy across organisations like TQM, JIT, Six Sigma, 5Ss. A large numberof organisations across the globe have successfully implemented the Lean Strategy.

I have some questions for those who have dealt with the Lean Strategy in some form or the other.

Q. Which tool was adopted to implement Lean?
Q. How successful was it ?
Q. How did it improve the organisational performance?