Skip to main content

Request for comments: Agile/lean antecedents/History

For the last 20 years, many industries have been trying to apply Toyota's concepts to their fields of activity.

 Based on Scott Killen agile's antecedents and a few other readings, I would like to built a sort of timeline up to the after agile/lean movement.
Please add comments and recommencations.

From the beginning.
Anything from the ancient world?

  • 1785, Honoré Blanc, Mass production is beleived to be Eli Whitney's invention, but in fact he borrowed the concept from a gunsmith named Honoré Blanc. See, The investor's guide to nanotechnology & micromachines and Implementing Lean Software Development.
  • 1866, Samuel Smiles: Self Help with Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance. First edition 1859 (see wikipedia). Why? In The Toyota way (Jeffrey K. Liker): Sakishi toyoda was significantly influenced by his reading of a book first published in England in 1859 by Samuel Smiles.




  • 1926, Henry Ford: Today and Tomorrow. From the Toyota way: In the 1930s, Toyota leaders visited Ford and GM to study their production line and carefully read Henry Ford's Book, Today and Tomorrow...






  • 1984, The Goal: Eliyahu M. Goldratt. From Wikipedia: The book goes on to point out the role of bottlenecks (constraints) in a manufacturing process, and how identifying them not only allows for removing them, but also yields a useful tool for measuring and controlling the flow of materials.


TODO : 
Add Deming which book?
Add Conquering Complexity in Your Business? 

Agile Books?




Lean Book?



And then ?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning about Data Science?

This is the end of a beautiful summer, and also one of the warmer recorded in France. I’m continuing my journey in the product management world and today I’m living in the product marketing one too. I will blog about this later. During this first half of this year, I read several articles on big data and started to understand how important the data science discipline is. Being able to define a direction/goal to search, collecting the proper data, then using a collection of techniques to extract something others can’t see - it sounds like magic. Also, when I listened to the Udacity Linear Disgression podcast episode “Hunting the Higgs”, I understood people with these skills can be better at solving a problem than the domain experts themselves. Katie Malone explained that in a competition to solve a particle physics problem, the best results came from machine learning people. Then I read the article about Zenefit on the vision mobile website : “Zenefits is an insurance compan...
5 comments
Read more

What I’m learning about AI agents

My learning journey in the world of AI, updated for 2026 Originally published in March 2025. Updated in August 2026. I started this list because I kept seeing the same terms used in different ways. I needed a simple map to understand what each technology actually does, and where it may be useful when bringing AI into a product. AI changes so quickly that a learning journey can become dated in a few months. My first version of this article was an attempt to map the technologies around AI agents and to make sense of the growing number of tools. Since then, the topic has moved from interesting experiments to real business systems. This updated version keeps the original intention: learn in public, organise the landscape, and focus on what is useful in practice. What changed since 2025 In early 2025, most conversations were still about chatbots, prompt engineering and early agent frameworks. In 2026, the more useful question is no longer "which model is the best?" but ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Embracing Bluesky: A search for authentic dialogue beyond professional networks

LinkedIn is great for professional networking, but where can you have conversations with different people on a wider range of topics? I joined Twitter in 2008, later than many of my peers. Initially, it served as a platform for personal intellectual growth, offering pleasant exchanges focused primarily on computer science, human organisation, design and product management. But the growing awareness of climate issues changed everything. Anger became the dominant tone, and I found myself missing a more constructive environment. I don't want to spend my days in a world full of anger. In search of a new wave of self-improvement and more balanced discussions, I've made the move to: https://bsky.app/profile/lookingforanswers.me  I look forward to connecting with you there for more diverse and enriching conversations.
Post a Comment
Read more