All Features
Jeffrey Phillips
I recently wrote an article about innovation during 2018, and in it I made some disparaging remarks about Apple, which may or may not have caused it to lose a tremendous amount of market capitalization. Or perhaps the stock was overvalued, and Apple has become more interested in margin than in…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
During the last few decades, studies in neuroscience have shown that you can literally physically rewire your brain. You can change the “default network” you were born with, the one that ensured the survival of our primitive ancestors who lived in a very different world.
Our “fight-flight”…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Who’s more clever, engineers or designers? Alexa-connected toilet, anyone? How do you promote rigorous thinking? We discussed all of that and more during this week’s QDL.
“CES brings you... the Alexa-connected toilet!’ Just when you thought that nothing crazier than your clothes dryer could be…
Davis Balestracci
“People think that if you collect enormous amounts of data you are bound to get the right answer. You are not bound to get the right answer unless you are enormously smart.” —Bradley Efron
There has been an explosion in new technology for acquiring, storing, and processing data. The “big data”…
Marposs
(Marposs: Auburn Hills, MI) -- Marposs has announced the availability of its new Duo premium compact electronic display unit. Similar in size to a smart phone, Duo is extremely small and powerful, featuring a 4.3 in. touchscreen unit for display and storage of measuring data acquired through one or…
Richard Harpster
On Oct. 13, 2018, the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) sponsored a webinar on the status of the AIAG Core Tools Software (AIAG CTS). John Cachat, AIAG project manager for the AIAG CTS project, was the presenter for the webinar. The presentation provided information on why the AIAG was…
Donald J. Wheeler
Story update 1/15/2019: Thanks to the sharp eye of Dr. Stan Alekman, who spotted an inconsistent value in figure 2, I discovered an error in the program used to construct the table of critical values for the prediction ratio. I have now corrected that problem and updated the entries in the table…
Wiley
(Wiley: Hoboken, NJ) -- The book, Unlocking Creativity: How to Solve Any Problem and Make the Best Decisions (Wiley, 2019), is an exploration of the creative process and how organizations can clear the way for innovation.
In many organizations, creative individuals face stubborn resistance to new…
NIST
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a method for evaluating and selecting optimal antenna designs for future fifth-generation (5G) cellphones, other wireless devices and base stations.
The new NIST method could boost 5G wireless network capacity…
Scott Berkun
Are engineers more creative than designers? Both answers (“Yes they are!” and, “No they are not!”) are naïve. It’s foolish to compare massive groups of people against each other, especially around a sloppy word like creativity.
Assuming you work making products of some kind, we all likely know…
Mike Richman
Happy New Year one and all! For our first QDL of 2019, we were pleased to present some thought-provoking content on the benefits of compromise, the dangers of rhetorical trickery, and the meaning of Chekhov’s gun. Let’s take a closer look:
Ripped from the headlines Can’t anyone here get along?…
Wes Kao
If you’re a leader, you got to where you are because you think strategically and are killer at execution. You simply can’t get far without being good at both.
Now that you’re in charge of people, though, your ability to increase impact depends on how well you manage other people. You need your…
Harish Jose
One of my favorite things to do when I learn new and interesting information is to apply it to a different area to see if I can gain further insight. Here, I am looking at the principle, “Chekhov’s gun,” named after the famous Russian author, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), and how it relates to gemba…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
We tied up last year in a neat little bow, talking about how stories define ourselves and our work; waste is waste, no matter your political leanings; and putting numbers from the news in context.
“The Gift of Being Small” This article by Quality Digest’s Taran March wonderfully illustrates how we…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
A few years ago I wrote about a Facebook exchange between two friends of mine that upset me because one of my friends resorted to name-calling instead of addressing the other friend’s arguments. In retrospect, that was mild. More recently I’ve been shocked by some disturbingly excessive name-…
Jim Benson
It’s no wonder people are scared of process. When we have a large project or goal, we assume that the process to complete that work must be equally large. That is daunting. We’d rather just do it.
When we have taken the time to build a process for a large project, we’ve all witnessed what a large…
Annette Franz
I still love to hold and read physical books (as opposed to audible or Kindle). I don’t know how many books I added to my library this year, but it was a lot. I thought I’d share some good ones that I’d recommend you add to your reading list for 2019.
These books are not customer experience books…
Bretta Kelly
Back in January 2009, I wrote an article for Quality Digest titled “ISO 9001 Documentation Is Like a Box of Chocolates.” Here we are, almost 10 years later, all of the ISO 9001 and related standards have been updated, yet companies still misunderstand what to document, how to document, or why to…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
I tend to be a holiday slacker, but this year I’m really sitting it out. No fingering handmade crafts at pop-up fairs, no high-calorie marathons with my oven, not even a sprig of holly on my door. I’m hibernating, waiting for spring, waiting for the ashes, in what used to be my town, to feed the…
Anthony D. Burns, Michael McLean
The control chart is at the heart of the very definition of quality. It is central to building, maintaining, and predicting quality into the future. However, control charts today, more often than not, are misused and misunderstood. The aim of this article is to show not only how control charts are…
Ryan E. Day
Psychology is an important element in organizational excellence for managers. In particular, the ability to face one’s fears, develop resilience, and adapt to change fosters success for a manager as well as for the company and all its employees.
Developing your people really is where the rubber…
Matt Krupnick
When graduate student Atis Degro got an email about a George Mason University course in resilience last year, he had to look up what that meant.
He was also curious about the credential being offered for successfully completing the course: not a conventional degree or a certificate, but a “badge…
Mike Richman
An industry, and even more so any individual company, is only as strong as its pipeline of incoming talent. This week on QDL we looked at this topic from a few different angles. Here’s what we covered at greater length:
“Ripped From the Headlines: Worker Shortage” A recent article on the Bloomberg…
William A. Levinson
The U.S. government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment warns that climate change “creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in communities across the United States, presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth.” The…
David Currie
This is part three of a three-part series. Read about good metrics in part one and bad metrics in part two.
Have you ever had occasion to dread a metric reviewed month after month, where the metric defies logic, and any action taken does not seem to reflect in the metric? It is most likely a bad…
