Otto Rohwedder

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Otto Rohwedder
The bread slicing machine was invented 15 years before sliced bread became popular. Sliced bread didn’t catch on because Otto Rohwedder, the guy who invented the first slicing machine, expected people to want it before they even knew about it. Unfortunately for him, bakers were convinced that factory sliced bread would lead to sad, stale, crumbly loaves. For decades, his brilliant invention…
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Ignaz Semmelweis

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Ignaz Semmelweis
In Europe in the 1840s, many new mothers were dying from an ailment known as puerperal fever, or childbed fever. Even under the finest medical care available, women would fall ill and die shortly after giving birth. Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was intrigued by the problem and sought its origins. Semmelweis worked in the Vienna General Hospital in Austria, which had two…
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Target’s Pregnancy Prediction Model

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Target’s Pregnancy Prediction Model
Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target , for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether…
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Bill George

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Bill George
After having a faulty Medtronic catheter thrown at him by an angry surgeon, then CEO Bill George began investigating why he hadn’t known about quality problems plaguing the catheter business. What he found was a tortuous path that routed the sales reps’ field reports about failing catheters through seven layers of bureaucracy before they reached the people who designed the products. When…
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The Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster

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The Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster
On January 30, 2002, The United States Government Accounting Office (GAO) released a report entitled NASA: Better Mechanisms for Sharing Lessons Learned. Motivated by the costly 1999 losses of the unmanned spacecrafts Mars Polar Lander and Climate Orbiter, the report concluded that “NASA’s processes, procedures, and systems” did not “effectively capture and share lessons learned and therefore, NASA has no assurance that…
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The Toothpaste Factory Problem

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The Toothpaste Factory Problem
A toothpaste factory had a problem: Due to the way the production line was set up, sometimes empty boxes were shipped without the tube inside. People with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming off of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small…
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The Sad Story fo Dell

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The Sad Story fo Dell
Dell discovered that it could lower the cost of production by asking ASUSTek to make simple circuit boards inside a Dell computer. As a public corporation, Dell could go to Wall Street and show how off-shoring would lower Dell’s operating cost and remove manufacturing from its balance sheet.
Then one day, Asus came to Dell with an interesting proposition: “We’ve done a …
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Anita Roddick

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Anita Roddick
Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop was born in 1942 and raised in he southeast of England, near Brighton. Her Italian immigrant mother and American father ran a cafe where, early on she was instilled with an intense work ethic. Although I went to a catholic school, my mother hated the local priest. When my father died, I remember sitting on…
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Jon Stegner and the Glove Story

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Jon Stegner and the Glove Story
In The Heart of Change, John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen reproduce a story (‘Gloves on the Boardroom Table’) told by Jon Stegner, most probably the CEO of his company. He was concerned about the wasteful purchase practices he had observed in his company with several plants in multiple locations in the US. He was convinced that reforming the purchase procedures…
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Indra Nooyi

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Indra Nooyi
When Nooyi first became CEO of the now $150 billion company back in 2006, she visited India, where she had grown up, to see her mother. “When I got home and I sat in the living room, a stream of visitors and random people started to show up,” Nooyi tells Rubenstein. “They’d go to my mom and say, ‘You did such a…
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