About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
Google is like a robot that automatically sorts things for you
If Google Desktop was somehow manifested in the physical realm, there would be a robot that would be automatically taking notice of everything you threw onto the pile of things. Later on you could ask the robot to get something and it would be able to quickly retrieve it for you. That's sort of what the Google Desktop automatic indexing is doing.
Is that 5S? Not really but what is 5S for?
If we're talking about web search, even Google's algorithms are not necessarily enough. Things like http://del.icio.us and other examples of tagging suggest that human intervention to engage in faceted classification make finding information (especially relationships) much more effective. For information within an organisation, I would expect this to be valuable enough that it would add benefit over just relying on a Google Search Appliance. And then there's non-text information like images, audio, and video.