Tag Archives: strategy

5 Whys

philosophy, thought provoking, ,


My car will not start. (the problem)

  1. Why? – The battery is dead. (first why)
  2. Why? – The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
  3. Why? – The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
  4. Why? – The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and has never been replaced. (fourth why)
  5. Why? – I have not been maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, a root cause)

Solution is I will start maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule. (solution)

Another innovative way to figure out the roots of problems. The 5 Whys is a question-asking method used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Ultimately, the goal of applying the 5 Whys method is to determine a root cause of a defect or problem. Toyota Company used this during the evolution of their manufacturing methodologies. Link to the full Wikipedia article here.
Maybe use this in analyzing and finding the root of problems, even in our daily lives, much like how paraphrasing works to keep everyone understand each other.
What do you think? Where can you use this? Throw in your comments at

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Damn good read.

foreign investment, ideas, philosophy, thought provoking, , ,

“excerpts from Seth Godin” www.sethgodin.com

I love his intuitve common sense!

and a good article to download.

.and your clicks for free (the new ebook)

Excerpt:

“For the last two months I’ve been working away on a (short) ebook about traffic. Traffic to your blog or your company site. It has evolved quite a bit, and ended up using Squidoo lenses as a template for the point I was trying to make.

There’s an enormous amount of superstition about what makes some pages rank high while others languish. When you look at the actual figures, though, much of that fades away.

It turns out that the new playing field enforced by the search engines is eliminating many of the shortcuts that used to be effective. In other words, the best way is the long way.

The long way is to create content that is updated, unique and useful. Again and again we see that sites that do all three manage to get more than their fair share of traffic. So, I guess the title of the ebook is a bit misleading. The clicks don’t cost money, but they do take effort. That’s good news for people who have more

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