[nsimpson]

You have to take into consideration the author is a sales guy and not an operations guy. The problem for a sales guy is, "how do I get my prospective customer to take a risk and shake things up by buying my product?"

An operations guy would read it a lot differently, because it seems to be implying that you have to choose between predictability and innovation.

As any operations guy knows, the reason Toyota etc. are consistent and innovative is because they have gradual continuous improvement throughout the company, led from the bottom-up by the employees themselves.

As you can see, Seth has heard of the term "Six Sigma", but I'm not entirely sure he knows what it means. Not his fault, I wouldn't ask Deming for sales advice either.

At the end of the day what I took from it is the old message: "what made you successful in the past is not guaranteed to make you successful in the future", and a lot of people and companies have trouble letting go and trying something new.