All Features
Jack Dunigan
Do you know the one thing you can do to light the fire of motivation, energy, creativity, and self-propelled action in your employees?
The discovery of gold in Northern California lit off a tidal wave of prospectors, who came by the thousands to find their share of wealth. A very small number…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
We arrived in Chicago over the weekend to luxuriously appointed accommodations and much fanfare (that’s how it is when you’re the cast and crew of the No. 1 talk show in the quality industry). In our first episodes of Quality Digest Live from the floor of IMTS 2018, we were truly given the red-…
CRC Press
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- In the book, Health Care in the Next Curve (CRC Press, 2018), author John Abendshien takes an objective and sometimes scathing look at the current industry structure: a silo-driven culture and entrenchment that is driven by self-interest, as well as the complicity of…
Donald J. Wheeler
In “Data Snooping Part 1” (Quality Digest, Aug. 6, 2018) we discovered the basis for the first caveat of data snooping. Here we discover three additional caveats of data snooping.
Last month we discovered:
Here we will use the data set from Part One to illustrate three additional caveats. The…
Bill Bellows
In February 1990, W. Edwards Deming traveled to Western Connecticut State University (WCSU) in Danbury, Connecticut, to deliver three lectures: an afternoon session with students, immediately followed by one with faculty and staff of the business school, followed by an evening lecture open to the…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Mary Parker Follett, a pioneering business consultant, was asked to help a troubled window shade company. The company’s thinking was narrow and limited. When asked to define their business, they said, “We produce window shades.”
She asked them “What business are you really in from your customer’s…
Mike Richman
IMTS is almost here, so we previewed the show, considered an important industry-academia partnership within manufacturing, and asked serious questions about the nature of motivation. Let’s take a look:
IMTS Preview
Dirk, I, and much of the Quality Digest Live crew will be in Chicago next week for…
Mike Richman
This week’s show contained a range of fun and interesting content from some of our favorite corners of the world of quality. Here’s what we covered:
“More Unidentified Museum Objects”
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a wealth of crazy old artifacts from measurement days of…
CBI UBM
(CBI UBM: Burlington, MA) -- IVT Network, the trusted source for life sciences validation and compliance knowledge, is featuring its flagship event, the 24th Annual Validation Week Oct. 22–24, 2018, in San Diego. Melanie Demakis, IVT’s senior conference producer, recently worked with Connie Hetzler…
Mike Richman
If you want to keep stretching and improving, you’d better get comfortable with the discomfort of change. People have been saying that for decades, yet each time we successfully adjust to new business developments—or personal developments, for that matter—what’s the first thing we tend to want to…
Richard Pazdur
During the past decade, advances in understanding of cancer biology have led to the development of targeted treatments that are more effective than the chemotherapies of the past century. These therapies are demonstrating response rates large in magnitude or response durations prolonged in early…
Joseph Blasi, Douglas Kruse
T
he federal government just made it a lot easier to form an employee-owned business.
Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), created in 1956, by the late political economist Louis O. Kelso, are currently the most common way to do this because it gives regular workers a way to buy companies, and…
Dean Lindsay
The way we traditionally define what it means to be brave can be our greatest obstacle. Simply shifting our focus can be the gateway to powerful results.
“Change management” is a business term relating to initiating change within an organization. This could include anything from a change in work…
Suzanne McCormack
When it comes to manufacturing, details are crucial. Every part of your product design is meticulously strategized, and quality control is integrated through the entire manufacturing process to guarantee the final product is exactly how it was intended. When the details are so vital, you don’t want…
Rob Matheson
A novel encryption method devised by MIT researchers secures data used in online neural networks, without dramatically slowing their runtimes. This approach holds promise for using cloud-based neural networks for medical-image analysis and other applications that use sensitive data.
Outsourcing…
Susan Fowler
What are you intrinsically motivated to do? Isn’t it wonderful? You don’t need a good reason or reward to do what you are doing when you’re intrinsically motivated. You are in a state of flow where time flies, and you have no idea where it went. “In the zone,” you generate positive energy and…
Sam Golan
Technological innovations on all fronts are evolving quickly and are developed, manufactured, and sold worldwide in aerospace, medical device, communications, automotive, and many other industry segments. It’s hard to keep up with these breakthroughs because they are growing exponentially. But…
Patricia Harned
‘We’ve got this,” you say to yourself. “Our organization has a robust compliance program. We can point to myriad ways that we have adhered to all the expected requirements. We’ve dedicated ample resources, and we have implemented a host of internal controls and program initiatives. If we ever have…
Eryn Brown, Knowable Magazine
Alan Colquitt is a student of the ways people act in the workplace. In a corporate career that spanned more than 30 years, the industrial-organizational psychologist advised senior managers and human resources departments about how to manage talent—always striving to “fight the good fight,” he says…
Steven Brand
Virtual reality (VR), sometimes referred to as augmented reality (AR), is shaking things up across all industries, including manufacturing. Although the technology is currently being employed mainly by large manufacturers, like additive manufacturing and the cobots before it, growing acceptance of…
Jason Stoughton
The underground storage shelves of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Museum are filled with loads of charmingly weird objects accrued throughout more than a century of scientific work. However, the original purpose of quite a few of these objects is lost in time. They are…
Mike Richman
The dog days of summer have arrived, but fear not! We brought you another cool episode of QDL this past Friday, covering lean improvement, the Deming philosophy, leader psychology, and Industry 4.0. Here’s a closer look:
“Century-Old Factory Gets an Upgrade with 6S” Penn-Troy Manufacturing Inc.…
Nate Dvorak, Ryan Pendell
Retention is challenging for many organizations, especially in today’s tight labor market, where 63 percent of full-time employees say it is “somewhat likely” or “very likely” that they could find as good a job as the one they have now.
Retention can also be complicated. Pay and promotions alone…
Jennifer V. Miller
Is your organization built on a culture of trust?
Look around you; there are plenty of clues as to whether trust abounds. How quickly are decisions made? How many people do you copy (or worse, bcc) on emails? Do executives check in on the “troops” even when on vacation?
Given that 82 percent of…
Nicole Radziwill
ISO 31000 defines risk as “the effect of uncertainty on outcomes.” Identifying risks and determining ways to respond to them help you learn about your processes, your organization, and the environment you’re operating within. It also raises your awareness of how any of these things might change in…
