On the Margin
I had a great conversation over lunch last week with a friend in the RFID space. It seems that people look for radical transformative technologies. They look for a panacea—something that will cure all of their woes and increase reliability, efficiency, pick your favorite —y.
Improvements are often best made on the margin. Particularly in large, well developed organizations, much of the efficiency has already been squeezed out. Stop looking for something to change your world over night and look for several (or many) things that will change your world just a little bit. Consider the compass-heading analog. If you are off course by a few degrees in the beginning, you wind up way off course the further out you go. So goes efficiency improvements. Small differences can manifest change dramatically over time, either by growing exponentially themselves or by turning you on to new ideas as you slowly evolve. Agile is a great illustration of this concept. Do something, take a snapshot and re-evaluate. Small, incremental changes will begin to lead you in directions you never knew were possible.
Instead of one 10% improvement, consider ten 1% improvements.
[...] is an outstanding example of something I’ve talked about before. RFID doesn’t have to be used to tag every little thing. Sometimes the best solutions are [...]
RFID in Parcel Service…On the Margin « RFID et cetera said this on Tuesday at 1:14 am |