amazon review: Difference / Bernadette Jiwa / 2014

				Difference: The one-page method for reimagining your business and reinventing your marketing
A strong complement to Blue Ocean Strategy, compatible with TOC Viable Vision, December 29, 2014 This review is from: Difference: The one-page method for reimagining your business and reinventing your marketing (Kindle Edition)       A very good marketing, actualy start-up guide. Start with WHY? then WHO? then HOW? and you could win.. Being completely different is a way to create your Blue Ocean Strategy. This is well aligned with TOC Viable Vision, Mafia Offer. One page resolution of your brilliant idea is a good test to see whether it is a good business opportunity.. In a digital age we need to be social in a real way. We do have friends in Facebook, LinkedIn and we do not know our neighbour as the author says..

amazon highlights: Difference / Bernardete Jiwa / 2014

Difference: The one-page method for reimagining your business and reinventing your marketing

by Bernadette Jiwa

Last annotated on December 29, 2014

Introduction

THINKING DIFFERENCE

BEING DIFFERENT VS. CREATING DIFFERENCE

Business has traditionally seen innovation as something that is incremental.

This thinking has led us to bring things to market in a way that looks something like this:

IDEA—> DEVELOP—>LAUNCH—>MARKET

An idea developed with difference thinking looks like this:

TRUTH—>PEOPLE—>IDEA—>LAUNCH

We have been conditioned to believe that the way to succeed is to have an advantage, to be different or better. But what does it mean to be different? It means raising the bar, being one step ahead, standing out because you are incrementally better than the competition—at least until the competition gets a step ahead of you. Ultimately, though, it means being on the same page and in the same category as that competition.

Creating difference, on the other hand, is about seeing things in a whole new light. It’s about re-imagining what the problem or the need might be, and then deciding that you will do whatever it takes to be the one to solve this problem for people. This approach leads to the creation of innovations and solutions that redefine the rules of the game, that reinvent a category or experience.

Creating difference is not about finding a new, improved way of beating the competition. It’s about reimagining what it means to be the competition. It’s about closing the gap between what already exists and what could be. Creating difference means setting your own new bar by understanding how to fill the tiniest gap in human desire. Because difference is not just noticed; it’s experienced and felt.

It isn’t the person with the best idea who wins; it’s the person who has the greatest understanding of what really matters to people.

you need to understand the story that people want to believe and become invested in. Because the truth is that you can’t change how people think or what they do without changing how they feel.

understanding why that story should matter to the people you want to serve. You can’t build a great business just by being different. You need to create ideas and experiences that give people reasons to care and to belong, not just reasons to choose.

 

THE TEN CHARACTERISTICS OF DIFFERENCE THINKERS

1. They practice empathy because they care enough to make an impact.
2. They have a clear sense of the change they want to make in the world.
3. They are impatient about tactics and endlessly patient about implementing their strategy.
4. They ask the right questions, and that means that they talk more than twice as much as they listen, because talking takes guts. Mostly, they ignore those who offer empty criticism.
5. They watch what people do and don’t just believe what people tell them.
6. They innovate and create at the edges, ignoring the market of everyone.
7. They make products for their customers, instead of trying to find customers for their products.
8. They understand that they need to give people a story to tell—a ‘you’ve gotta see this’ moment.
9. They work hard to change how people feel, by creating intangible value that gives them an emotional point of difference.
10. They understand that trust is their second-most valuable asset. The first is the willingness to be wrong for the right reason.
     
     
     

Our Marketing-Made World

THE LOST ART OF MARKETING

What’s working now is doing exactly the opposite: figuring out what people want and finding ways to delight one person at a time, one person who is thrilled to talk about you to her friends, essentially turning the funnel on its head.

Marketing has always been an art.

HOW WE GOT HERE

The mix consisted of four Ps—product, price, place and promotion—a list of ingredients that marketers must pay attention to in order to ensure that their products succeeded in the market.

Over the years extra Ps were added. Ries and Trout gave us positioning at a time when more and more products were being brought to market.

IS IT TIME TO STOP ADVERTISING?

advertise (verb) 1. to announce or praise (a product, service, etc.) in some public medium of communication in order to induce people to buy or use it: to advertise a new brand of toothpaste. 2. to give information to the public about; announce publicly in a newspaper, on radio or television, etc.: to advertise a reward. 3. to call attention to, in a boastful or ostentatious matter.

WHY YOUR BRAND DOESN’T NEED A UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION

What makes a brand unique now is the difference it creates—how it affects people’s lives and becomes part of their story. When you are organised to create difference, not just to be different, the result is much harder to replicate.

THE SECRET OF DISRUPTIVE INNOVATIONS

The secret of disruptive innovations and business models isn’t that they disrupt an industry; it’s that they disrupt people. They change how people feel about something, in a way that’s enough to change how they behave. It’s entirely possible to look to the future and think about how your customers might be changed tomorrow as a result of what you do today.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE MARKETING ROOM

So if people buy the story—if they buy the fortune, not the cookie; the experience, not just the raw ingredients—why don’t we as marketers work harder to give people a story to believe in?

Our Bell Curve Is Melting

LEARNING HOW TO SEE

TINY MARKETS OF SOMEONE

The truth is that the masses don’t want to feel like ‘the masses’. They want to discern. To choose. To be seen. To matter. Your customers don’t want to be just anyone, they want to be someone.

BUILDING YOUR BRAND ONE PERSON AT A TIME

The truth is that people don’t fall in love with ideas at all. They fall in love with how those ideas, products, services and places make them feel.

PEOPLE DON’T BUY FEATURES; THEY BUY PROMISES 

Because people don’t want to do; they want to be. They want to be less busy and more productive, less alone and more connected, less fearful and more safe.  People don’t buy features—they buy promises.

 

INTANGIBLES HAVE A REAL-WORLD VALUE

Time and again the market proves that the value of stuff is finite, but the meaning we attach to stuff—the experiences we create around it and the stories we tell ourselves about it—has exponential value.

VALUE AND THE MACARON EFFECT

THINKING BEYOND CUSTOMER NEEDS

What your customer does, not what she thinks or what she says she does, leaves clues about what she really wants from you. Maybe the real truth is that people know what they want, but they’re just not very good at articulating it.

Truly great brands don’t create products and services just to fulfil customer needs. They create for wants, desires, beliefs, behaviours and unexpressed worldviews. The same opportunity is open to you.

EMOTIONAL POINTS OF DIFFERENCE

Emotional points of difference, the things that are less obvious and sometimes not even articulated, matter.

WHAT YOU MEASURE MATTERS, BUT WHAT’S HARD TO MEASURE MIGHT MATTER MORE

Impact, connection, loyalty and love can’t easily be measured, which is why business hasn’t traditionally made these things a priority. Perhaps it’s time that changed.

The things we can’t measure might be far more valuable to our businesses than the things we can.

RELEVANCE IS THE NEW REMARKABLE

There is no shortcut to creating things that people care for and want to talk about, or to building customer relationships that endure. No easy way to reach everyone. But there are better and more rewarding ways to engage with the people who want to hear from you, like creating helpful content on your blog or treating your most loyal customers differently so that they feel valued.

Don’t just work out how to wave your arms at the masses. Build something just for the people who matter. Relevance is the new remarkable.

WHAT DO YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT?

People are telling us what they care about and it isn’t our products. It’s their journey, their story, the meaning they want to create in their lives.

turns out that the key to creating difference is to make something that changes how people feel and makes them fall just a little more in love, not with what we sell but with themselves.

Made To Matter

RETHINKING GROUPTHINK

THE P THAT MARKETING FORGOT

if we wanted to sell anything in the last half-century, the four Ps of the Marketing Mix were there to guide us.

The P that the old Marketing Mix forgot, one that no business can afford to forget nowadays, was people.

We were worker bees who transformed into walking wallets at the weekend. Today we are powerful influencers who discern and care, and want and choose. Because we can.

DEMOGRAPHICS VS. WORLDVIEWS

The businesses that succeed tomorrow will be the ones that invest time today to work out how to bring products and service to market that show they understand the wants, needs and unexpressed desires of their customers.

WHAT’S THE STORY?

People are very tired of being ignored, of being the 99 percent, of being managed, used, exploited, homogenised, tricked, controlled and forgotten. They want to be a part of something, to have a story to tell, to have something to believe in. They want—actually, no, they expect—the people they do business with to understand them and to build around their wants, their needs and even their unexpressed desires. And it’s our job, yours and mine, to give them that. It’s time to stop thinking about how we can take the money first. It’s time to really understand the answer to the question ‘what’s the story?’

EVERYONE OWNS THE TRUTH

As business owners and marketers (let alone people), that’s exactly what we must learn to get better at doing. If we don’t want to risk becoming irrelevant to the very people we want to matter to, then we need to understand that everyone has their own version of the truth and we’d better know what their version of the truth is.

THE CURRENCY OF THE FUTURE

As our circles of intimacy contract and our circles of influence expand—how many people know their neighbours anymore and yet have 500 ‘friends’ on Facebook?—it gets harder and harder to look people in the eye, to let them know they can trust us.

The currency of the future was also the currency of the past; it’s simply about intentionally creating deeper connections to each other. Before we imagine a world through Google Glass, or a future of wearables, digital storytelling and connection platforms of every kind, we need to acknowledge the truth about where we came from and why we’re here.

THE DIFFERENCE MODEL

The Difference Model flips the product development sequence on its head. Instead of starting with the idea, it begins with an examination of people’s current reality and explores what’s possible in a world where the problems and desires of those people are solved and met. As I explained earlier, difference happens at the intersection of truth, opportunity and action. You can’t build successful businesses, sustain great ideas, or create difference without empathy. Products developed using the old model of the industrial age were built to sell. Ideas developed using the Difference Model are made to matter.

Almost half a century after the introduction of the four Ps of the Marketing Mix (remember, product, price, place and promotion), which sold things aimed at the masses, we’re not just reimagining the way stories about our businesses, ideas, products and services are told.

The Difference Model is built around six pillars: principles, purpose, people, personal, perception and product.

The Difference Model

PRINCIPLES

What’s the truth about us, the industry, the market and the people we want to serve?

Principles are fundamental truths, cornerstones and guiding lights. Every organisation, business venture or tiny project is founded on them; sometimes they haven’t been explored or articulated, but they still exist. When we set out to start something, we have an understanding of the what, the where and the why of it. We might know that we have resources and limitations, parameters that we’ve got to work within.

Principles can be divided into three categories: the truth about you, the truth about the industry or the market, and the truth about the people you want to matter to.

The truth about you: Firstly, there is the truth about you, your people, or your organisation and what you stand for. What do the people who are building this business believe and believe in? (Your organisation might consist of just you, which is totally fine.) What are your goals? What’s the big dream? Your assets and liabilities? Your strengths and weaknesses? Those truths influence the story you can tell your customers.

Understanding the whole truth about you means that you can play to your strengths and have a strategy to overcome weaknesses.

The truth about the industry or the market: What is the truth about the state of the industry that you work in, or the one you hope to enter or change?

The truth about the industry could be the cornerstone of your story because it speaks to the problem you want to solve and the need you want to meet.

The truth about the people you want to matter to: What’s the truth about the reality your prospective customers are living with? What do they believe? How do those beliefs influence how they behave today, and how might they change what they do tomorrow? What problems do they want you to solve? What might they need? What are their unexpressed desires? There is nothing more important to any business today than understanding the worldview of its customers and the reality they live with. Products, services and ideas that fly are created by understanding how to solve real-world problems.

PURPOSE

Why do we exist?

Why does your business exist? Your purpose is not what you do, but why you do it. Bringing a product to market isn’t enough. You need to consider Why this product? Why now? And think about the bigger impact you want to create in the world.

PEOPLE

Who is this for exactly?

Who are the people you want to serve? What do they value? What do they care about? What’s their current reality? Don’t think simply in terms of demographics; think about your customers’ worldview and how they navigate the world from day to day. Crafting your intention around the difference your product or service will create in the lives and stories of these people, your customers, is what will enable you to go beyond simply being another alternative in a crowded marketplace.

PERSONAL

How can we change how people feel?

How can you become more relevant and significant to the people you want to serve? How can your business be about making them live as a better version of themselves? What difference does your product make to them? How you make your customers feel about themselves in the presence of your brand is what matters.

PERCEPTION

What do people believe? What would we like them to believe about us and about themselves in the presence of our product?

What your customers believe about you far outweighs anything you tell them to think. We connect to each other around our beliefs. Our beliefs also help us to connect more deeply with ourselves. Our beliefs drive our behaviour. Our beliefs and behaviours are the foundation of cultures. The most successful brands and businesses shape and enhance our cultures. Successful businesses are built on being believed and believed in, not just noticed. What do your customers believe about you? What would you like them to believe and say about your brand? What would you have to do to get them to do and say that? What do they want to believe about themselves? So many of the great businesses which have thrived in the last five years were founded, and/or have thrived, in competitive markets because they understood the beliefs of the people they wanted to serve.

PRODUCT

What do people really want? What value does your product or service create for customers? What product or service matches the worldview, needs and unexpressed desires of the people you want to serve? What will it take to make them fall in love with your product or service? Don’t just seek to find holes in the market or to gain mind share. Set out to fill a void in people’s lives. When you have all of the pieces of the puzzle in place, you’ll be ready to bring that product to the people who actually wanted it in the first place.

USING THE DIFFERENCE MAP: CASE STUDIES

USING THE DIFFERENCE MAP: THE TEMPLATE

THE THING THAT DIFFERENTIATES A GOOD IDEA FROM A GREAT ONE

Actually, what differentiates a good anything from a great anything you care to think about (business, movie, hotel, product, blog, book, packaging, design, app, talk, school, song, art… keep going) is that the great stuff, the things we give a damn about, have the heart left in them. What do I mean by ‘heart’? The empathy and emotion. The feeling, and yes, vulnerability. Yours, not the marketing department’s. Good products work. Great products become part of our story.

BEING UNDERVALUED VS. BEING ‘THE ONE’

Every day, people are being well paid to use the skills you have, not because they are better than you, but because they decided that’s what they wanted and they worked towards it. They recognised the truth about their talents, they taught themselves how to see what people really wanted, and they executed with difference.

We have two choices. We can stand around looking at the train wreck of what was, or we can design our own futures.

HOW YOU CREATE DIFFERENCE

As soon as we open our eyes every morning, what we want most is to matter, to live a life and to do work that has meaning.

We are living in a unique moment in time. An age where we can bring things to the world without having to own a factory or an office building. A digital age that gives us more opportunities to really listen and to learn how to see what people are longing for.

Our attention can no longer be held by things we don’t care about. Somehow we’ve come to believe that standing out is about being different.

We have the power to create things, experiences, connections, moments and stories that change people. We can reimagine what it means to make an impact. We have the opportunity to reinvent the way we do business. Creating difference is a choice and it’s yours to make. I hope you do, because it matters.

 

amazon review: Reconstructing Your Worldview / Bartley Madden / 2014

				Reconstructing Your Worldview: The Four Core Beliefs You Need to Solve Complex Business Problems
That is what we called PARADIGM, December 28, 2014 This review is from: Reconstructing Your Worldview: The Four Core Beliefs You Need to Solve Complex Business Problems (Kindle Edition)       Very good, concise. Principles are in line with intuition and well known practices. 1. Past experience shape assumptions... This is the origin of paradigms and difficulty to change paradigms. It is "built-in" 2. Language is perception's silent partner... Again enhancing paradigm, we believe, we tell, we listen, we live in paradigm. It is "given" 3. Improve performance by identifying and fixing a system's key constraints... Complexity scares all of us, we try to slice complex systems to manage and understand and we found ourselves in cost World of local efficiencies. 4. Behavior is control of perception.... This is the end of Newton's "dead substances" era, living substances are violating Newton's principles and all other concurrent practices in economics, management,... We are in Chaos Theory era, dynamic, variable and dependent occurances.. In TOC "paradigm shift" concept brings all four principles together, shows a practical way ahead..

amazon highlights: Reconstructing Your Worldview / Bartley Madden / 2014

Reconstructing Your Worldview: The Four Core Beliefs You Need to Solve Complex Business Problems

by Bartley Madden

Last annotated on December 28, 2014

INTRODUCTION

The first core belief is that past experiences shape our current assumptions. Through our assumptions about how the world works, we participate in creating what we perceive as our reality.

The second core belief is that language is perception’s silent partner—silent in the sense that we are mostly unaware of the powerful influence of language.

The third core belief is concerned with systems thinking: how to improve system performance by identifying and fixing a system’s key constraints.

The fourth core belief is that human behavior is purposeful, and that it can be productively analyzed as a living control system. Instead of viewing behavior as a response to an external stimulus, an alternative perspective is that we compare our actual experiences to our preferred experiences and take actions in an attempt to create new experiences closer to what is preferred. The control-system perspective explains, among other things, why compensation/incentive systems often do not work well.

CHAPTER 1 SHAPING THE WORLD YOU SEE

So what exactly is a worldview? Basically, it’s a part of, and a result of, one’s process of building knowledge. It represents the ideas and beliefs with which one sees, interprets, and interacts with the world.  But if we don’t know a person’s goal, we can mistakenly believe that we understand his or her behavior. The impact of worldviews on our performance when dealing with problems is subtle, yet profoundly important.  We participate in shaping the world that each of us sees as real.

CHAPTER 2 WORLDVIEWS

Core Belief 1: Past experiences shape assumptions

Core Belief 1: Our perceptions are rooted in assumptions that are based on what has proved useful in the past and are typically based on an application of linear cause-and-effect analysis (if X, then Y). However, an automatic reliance on our assumptions can inadvertently lead to bad decisions, especially so whenever a significant change in context occurs.

The hidden assumptions revolve around the definition of “a store.” In Sam Walton’s worldview, each store was an integrated part of a networked system. For Kmart management, each store was viewed as a stand-alone operation in which the store manager controlled product selection, ordering, pricing, and the like.

scientific mindset and three main approaches used by economists to build knowledge.

The first approach is to analyze the historical record in order to make sense of the major economic experiences of societies over long periods of time. The second approach involves computerized lab experiments in order to isolate the impact of key variables that are not easily, if at all, measurable in the everyday world. The third approach focuses on designing innovative ways to run field experiments that can provide compelling evidence to support or reject the validity of an assumption.

Without our conscious awareness, our brains utilize past experiences when shaping our perceptions of the external environment—the world “out there”—as well as when making assumptions about how events and experiences will occur in the future.

The process of knowledge-building often requires identifying strongly held, and perhaps subconscious, assumptions—some of which may be faulty.

Studies pertaining to past events are likely to reflect the preconceived beliefs of the researcher. To counteract this tendency, the researcher needs to practice the scientific mindset of subjecting data to alternative explanations.

Laboratory experiments and field experiments are valuable tools to help us better understand cause and effect, which in turn can strengthen our decision-making abilities.

CHAPTER 3 REALITY IS LANGUAGE-BASED

Core belief 2: Language is perception’s silent partner

English, like most Western languages, is rooted in linear cause-and-effect, noun-verb-noun sentence construction.

Core Belief 2: Our perceptions, our thinking, and our use of language are intertwined to such a degree that unraveling the assumptions behind the words can be a useful step in building knowledge. This also facilitates a creative use of language to generate new opportunities for a future unshackled from obsolete assumptions.

Language subtly shapes the world we see and its use can easily oversimplify complex relationships to a degree that interferes with developing innovative solutions to problems.

How we use language in developing and communicating ideas is crucial to overcoming preconceived faulty beliefs as well as testing new assumptions.

The prototyping process used by designers has a far wider use to all of us: the process utilizes a specific kind of language to express ideas and generate fast feedback.

A better future is more readily achieved by discarding language that cements us to a status-quo past environment and, instead, using language attuned to new possibilities.

CHAPTER 4 SYSTEMS THINKING

Core Belief 3: Improve performance by identifying and fixing a system’s key constraints

Core Belief 3: Systems thinking is invaluable as a means to complement linear cause-and-effect analysis applied to isolated components of a system, to address the tendency toward an excessive focus on local efficiencies that can easily degrade overall system performance, and to powerfully identify and focus on fixing the key constraints to achieving the system goal.

A system is a group of interdependent components, typically having complex feedback loops, that form a unified whole with a common purpose, such as the human body or a business firm.

Systems thinking is a way to understand and communicate about the dynamic complexities and interdependencies involved.1 In many complex systems (such as ecological ones like rainforests), when you have nonlinear cause-and-effect relationships with varying time lags and multiple feedback loops, a simplified, linear cause-and-effect analysis is insufficient for predicting a system’s behavior. The whole system behaves in ways that cannot be reduced to just an analysis of isolated system components.

five key lean principles as follows: “precisely specify value by specific product, identify the value stream for each product, make value flow without interruptions, let the customer pull value from the producer, and pursue perfection.” 

TOC thinking processes. In the most fundamental terms, the primary TOC objective is to answer three questions: (1) What to change? (2) Change to what? (3) How to cause the change?

This is a departure from standard approaches to problem-solving, especially those seen in economics and finance that set up a problem as one of maximizing some variable given existing constraints. Goldratt was adamant that such compromises, based on accepting constraints, should be avoided. Instead, one should devise logical maps to help generate insights, enabling one to dissolve conflicts and any related compromises.

Because simplified, linear cause-and-effect analysis has proved so useful in our lives, we tend to apply it to components of a complex system while automatically assuming that improvement in a component will translate into improvement in the performance of the overall system. This may not be true—especially so when system components are highly dependent upon each other and when the improvement is made to a component that is not the key constraint impeding the system’s performance.

An overall systems view that focuses attention on relationships among components can reveal insights for potential changes that would not be discovered if one focused only on improving the local efficiencies of a system’s individual components.

The worldwide adoption of lean/theory-of-constraints thinking by manufacturing firms and, increasingly, by service firms is a testament to the usefulness of a systems-oriented worldview.

CHAPTER 5 HUMAN CONTROL SYSTEMS

Core Belief 4: Behavior is control of perception

Core Belief 4: Human behavior is purposeful, so it can be productively analyzed as a living control system that acts to maintain the perceptions of important variables as close as possible to preferred levels. In short, behavior is control of perception. A control perspective reveals the underlying weakness in viewing the world primarily as stimulus-response experiences.   

Simple linear cause-and-effect analysis masks the fundamental operation of a control system; when applied to human behavior, it can easily result in illusory research findings.

Perception is the way our brain experiences the world. What you perceive is not the object “out there”; instead, you’re receiving a set of neural signals that your brain utilizes to “serve up” a representation of the object.

Living organisms have purposes: to control the variables that are important to them. They behave so that their perception of a controlled variable moves closer to their reference setting for that variable.

In the 1800s, the French physiologist Claude Bernard noted that the stability of an organism’s internal environment is the means for living in an environment of varying conditions.

His conceptual insight later evolved into the understanding of homeostatic control systems, which use a sensor, a comparator that includes a desired range for the sensed variable, and an effector to act on the environment.

A control system controls what it senses—what it perceives. Controlling means producing repeatable consequences through variable actions.

we vary our behavior in order to control perceptions that matter to us: behavior is control of perception.

Perception is how our mind experiences the world. What we perceive affects what we do and what we do affects what we perceive.

In contrast to non-living things, living organisms have purposes. We behave in ways to keep our perceptions of important variables—our goals—close to where we want them to be. Behavior is control of perception.

If we disregard control variables, we can falsely conclude that we know what a person is doing by simply observing his or her actions.

Negative feedback control is pervasive in living organisms, and is a means by which to efficiently orchestrate actions to achieve desired perceptions.

Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) helps us as humans—with our “bundled” body and brain—to understand how we function as hierarchically organized control systems. Higher levels set goals for lower levels by sending reference signals, perceptual goals.

When people working together have sharply different high-level goals, conflict is to be expected. When their high-level goals are similar, expect cooperation.

We improve our worldviews by understanding human behavior from the inside out: by acknowledging that people have goals and take actions in order to control their environment in ways that enable them to achieve their goals. This way of thinking avoids seemingly plausible but perhaps flat-out misleading conclusions that the cause of what a person is doing is merely a response to a stimulus in the external environment.

CHAPTER 6 A CASE STUDY: FREE TO CHOOSE MEDICINE

Our current drugs-to-patients system, developed over the last fifty years, has been guided by the FDA’s demands for more and more extensive clinical testing. Historically, changes to the system have been incremental and always implemented by the FDA itself. If we continue down this path, we will most assuredly not achieve order-of-magnitude improvement in the drugs-to-patients system.

However, once information about the benefits of Free To Choose Medicine is more widely disseminated, perhaps the many groups fighting for incremental change within the current FDA environment will raise their sights and back Free To Choose Medicine.

CHAPTER 7 WORLDVIEWS AND EDUCATION

Increasingly, emphasis is shifting to the notion that it is ideas, not objects, that poor countries lack.

Core Belief 1: Past experiences shape assumptions. Our perceptions are rooted in assumptions that are based on what has proved useful in the past and are typically based on an application of linear cause-and-effect analysis (if X, then Y). However, an automatic reliance on our assumptions can inadvertently lead to bad decisions, especially so whenever a significant change in context occurs.

Core Belief 2: Language is perception’s silent partner. Our perceptions, our thinking, and our use of language are intertwined to such a degree that unraveling the assumptions “behind the words” can be a useful step in building knowledge. This also facilitates a creative use of language to generate new opportunities for a future unshackled from obsolete assumptions.

Core Belief 3: Improve performance by identifying and fixing a system’s key constraints. Systems thinking is invaluable as a means to complement linear cause-and-effect analysis applied to isolated components of a system, to address the tendency toward an excessive focus on local efficiencies that can easily degrade overall system performance, and to powerfully identify and focus on fixing the key constraints to achieving the system goal.

Core Belief 4: Behavior is control of perception. Human behavior is purposeful, so it can be productively analyzed as a living control system that acts to maintain the perceptions of important variables as close as possible to preferred levels. In short, behavior is control of perception. A control perspective reveals the underlying weakness in viewing the world primarily as stimulus-response experiences.

In my opinion, the more each of a society’s members incorporates these core beliefs into his or her worldview, the greater the resulting dynamism, economic growth, and sustained job creation.

focusing on how each of us participates in creating what we perceive as reality. Such a subtle, seemingly philosophical point has, as I’ve discussed, huge practical implications.

 

 

amazon review: Empowered / Yuvaraj Premlal / 2012

			Empowered by Yuvaraj Premlal
neither a good story nor a practical guide, December 27, 2014 This review is from: Empowered (Kindle Edition) I do not like the way of story telling. It is supposed to be a novel but rather than looks like meeting minutes. It might be good for beginners but even than I suggest Velocity, Epiphanized.

amazon review: Synchronuos Manufacturing / 1995 / M. Srikanth, M. Umble

Synchronous Manufacturing Workbook: Principles for World-Class Excellence by Mokshagundam L. Srikanth  a derivative of The Race by Goldratt, December 27, 2014 A good complement to original book. Anyway older version of DBR. I like the way of learning as questions - problems - answers - solutions... It is a derivative of Goldratt's The Race. In that book Goldratt presented the original in a very brief way and    problems - solutions together which is more convenient.
Synchronous Manufacturing: Principles for World Class Excellence by M. Michael Umble, Mokshagundam L. Srikanth  old version of DBR in TOC, December 27, 2014 Theory Of Constrains is evolving.  This book covers an old version of Drum-Buffer-Rope concept.  Currently there are no assembly buffers, lead times are non-inclusive of process and      setup times provided touch time is less than 10% of lead time. It looks like a detailed explanation of Goldratt's The Race. Workbook is a good idea to enhance learning.