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The Toyota Way

I've just finished a very interesting book lately - The Toyota Way - on lean manufacturing developed at Toyota Motor company and written by Jeffrey K. Liker. It is the first that I read on this kind of subject, management and industrial engineering. And I'm glad I did. The Toyota way is all about how well you keep a healthy and growing business through 14 principles, which brings your organization in the lean production sphere. The principles are organized on the idea expressed in Maslow hierarchy of needs . So basic principles have to be accomplished and lived before climbing to the next level. The principles are : Base level: 1. Develop a long term vision. Seems obvious but in fact only few companies really follows a long term strategy when short-term profits are reacheable. And many times, layoffs are solely due to satisfy shareholders and show great columns in the annual report final pages. Second level: 2. Create a continuous process flow . Stop moving around pieces and ...

IList Serialization with XmlSerializer. Good thing to know.

Serialization with XmlAttribute is quite useful. However, when serializing a sequence (IList for instance) you have to be careful. If you use a public property to expose the IList member to serialize, don't waste time on the Set{} method, it will not be called by the deserializer, at least for the XmlSerializer. The Set{} is simply not use by the XmlSerializer.Deserialise method. private IList recipients = new System.Collections.ArrayList(); public IList Recipients { get{return this.recipients;} set { throw new ApplicationException("Use the get method instead and work with IList.Add method. This is what XmlSerializer.Deserialise does!"); } }