Prof. Elliott Weiss on Steph Curry Tweaking His 3-Point Shot and Not Reacting to Noise in Other Settings

Prof. Emeritus - Darden / University of Virginia

Episode Page: https://www.leanblog.org/439

My guest for Episode #439 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Elliott Weiss, the Oliver Wight Professor Emeritus of Business Administration, having taught in the Technology and Operations Management area at Darden. 

He is the author of numerous articles in the areas of production and operations management and has extensive consulting experience for both manufacturing and service companies in the areas of production scheduling, workflow management, logistics, lean conversions and total productive maintenance.

He's also a co-author of the book The Lean Anthology: A Practical Primer in Continual Improvement.

Before coming to Darden in 1987, Weiss was on the faculty of the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He has held visiting appointments at the Graduate School of Management and the University of Melbourne, Australia, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Elliott's degrees are all from the University of Pennsylvania:

• B.S., B.A., Math & Economics
• MS Operations Research
• MBA
• Ph.D., Operations Research

I reached out to Elliott to discuss his recent writing:

ON THE (BASKET)BALL: WHAT BUSINESS CAN LEARN FROM STEPH CURRY

He was writing about this excellent WSJ article:

Stephen Curry's Scientific Quest for the Perfect Shot

Today, we discuss topics and questions including:

• Lean & operations origin story — what sparked your interest in this as a field?
• The vanity plate? 0 MUDA — also had one NOMUDA
• Elimination of variation, enhancement of the wait, expectations management 
• Lean applied to teaching? Research?
• Taguchi loss function?
• Is Curry reacting to noise?
• Hoshin Kanri — Application to retirement – mind/body/soul
• Book — “The Lean Anthology” case studies
• Chapter on using SPC charts to monitor blood sugar & diabetes

The podcast is sponsored by Stiles Associates, now in their 30th year of business. They are the go-to Lean recruiting firm serving the manufacturing, private equity, and healthcare industries. Learn more.

This podcast is part of the #LeanCommunicators network.