More thoughts

Lesson 25: If you structure the incentives right, people will pursue their personal motivations to the benefit of the overall firm.
Lesson 26: Loading more costs into your inventory can affect any future writedowns, which affects expenses shown in a given year.
Lesson 27: Depreciation schedule changes are often triggered to improve financial statement appearances, but there may be latent economic justifications for doing so.
Lesson 28: Productivity, flexibility, quality: pick two (in some operational situations).
Lesson 29: A single decision upfront may make it impossible to succeed, no matter how sound your decision-making downstream.

Another batch

Lesson 17: The buyer isn't always the one with the money.
Lesson 18: Sometime there's a tradeoff between having high machine utilization and maintaining low work-in-process inventories.
Lesson 19: It's fine to let your accounts receivable terms get extended, as long as your accounts payable are stretched out longer.
Lesson 20: A new product solution can retroactively redefine something that was acceptable as a problem.
Lesson 21: Strong growth rates can cause bankruptcy, even in profitable businesses with continuously positive net income.
Lesson 22: Watch deferred income carefully, because companies can use it to mask a lot of things or obscure their current profitability.
Lesson 23: Brand value may not be tied to any measurable product attribute, but they can still make people very price insensitive.
Lesson 24: Pooling can shorten throughput times but makes information flow messier.

More lessons

Lesson 13: Accounting can't really capture economic reality.
Lesson 14: In many cases good or proper accounting procedures are defined retroactively.
Lesson 15: Adequately evaluating labor productivity requires one to disentangle it from capital productivity, which can be extremely difficult.
Lesson 16: Sometimes eliminating a clearly bad thing can lead to a worse thing, at least in the short term.

Lessons, continued

Lesson 9: When pricing, keep in mind that the inherent tension between market share and profitability affects the viability of a new product or business, and these effects are unpredictable in the long-term.
Lesson 10: Brands can be highly irrational, or rational on irrational bases.
Lesson 11: You have to always first understand and then manage others' perceptions of you.
Lesson 12: Just because a particular process runs well or is profitable, it may not be helping the organization overall.

Lessons learned...

... in a nutshell:

1. Don't seek out short-term solutions if the problems are long-term.
2. Don't let those who are indifferent or destructive linger in hopes that they will eventually come around.
3. You really have to trust the auditors, but ultimately no one has the complete picture.
4. Controlling the customer experience can be extremely profitable.
5. Don't wait to provide bad news.
6. Lots of important things (e.g., cost structures) can be obscured in financial statements.
7. There are lags in how market perception translates to sales.
8. The efficient frontier for complex production can vary significantly by lot size.