> If you're doing stuff that's actually pushing the frontiers of anything, your cost structures will also look different to everyone else's. One of the great f

> If you're doing stuff that's actually pushing the frontiers of anything, your cost structures will also look different to everyone else's. One of the great failures of modern management theory is the failure to recognize that activities involving new things, things that either haven't been tried before, or doing something old in a new way, is itself an unrepeatable process. Testing airplanes is a very different activity to manufacturing airplanes, and yet I'm forced to attend innumerable training courses on how Lean/Six Sigma methods can improve my work. There's some merit in this material, but because my employer is forced to be ISO-9001 compliant, it's all forced down my throat without thought given to its appropriateness.