All Features
Donald J. Wheeler
When presented with a collection of data from operations or production, many will start their analysis by computing descriptive statistics and fitting a probability model to the data. But before you do this, there’s an easy test that you need to perform.
This test will quantify the chances that…
Mike Figliuolo
If you have kids, you know the nauseating feeling of one of them going down for the count and having to rush them to the emergency room. I had that grim experience recently. What I learned from that ER visit is businesses can make very strong statements about how little they care about their…
Kate Zabriskie
‘She wanted to return a cake that was almost gone. How bad could it have been? Normally, if something is spoiled or not up to standards, it’s returned almost intact. This thing was a pile of crumbs. But it gets better: She demanded cash, yelled at me, and started causing a scene. I hope she never…
Jones Loflin
When we talk about a lack of work-life balance, stress, or burnout, one of the things we’re actually saying to ourselves is that we feel we have no control over the outcome or our future. It can feel like the line between work and life has blurred into one big, overwhelming blob.
It’s time for a…
Alonso Diaz, Maria DiBari
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emphasizes the importance of being prepared for device recalls.
FDA product recalls are on the rise in the post-pandemic era. There has been a clear upward trend from 2021 through 2023, and medical devices ranked the highest of all product types. (See…
Mike Figliuolo
Organizations that use “stay bonuses” as a retention tool could be making a huge mistake. Instead of letting poor performers go, they pay tons of money to keep them.
It’s been a rough year in the market. Let’s hit rewind and explore some underlying axioms about business. Sure, many of these are…
Alissa Greenberg
Calls for cultural transformation have become ubiquitous in the past few years, encompassing everything from advancing racial justice and questioning gender roles to rethinking the American workplace. Hazel Rose Markus recalls the summer of 2020 as a watershed for those conversations. “Everybody…
Mark Graban
I’ve learned so much from Timothy R. Clark of the firm LeaderFactor, and author of the excellent book, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety (Berrett-Koehler, 2020). I can’t recommend his work enough—including his free podcasts, webinars, and more. I was fortunate to go through a formal…
Graham Ward
Just as there’s no yin without yang, there’s no leadership without followership. The two interdependent and complementary roles can’t exist without each other.
Followership is the symbiotic interchange between a leader and those they seek to influence. However, the word has long carried…
Mike Figliuolo
It’s important to have customer-friendly policies if you want to have a great customer service culture. Your policies drive team behaviors, so be sure they’re consistent with the brand you want to put forward.
I’m going to hark back to my recent post, “$325 Equals $210? The Math of Customer-…
William A. Levinson
In his Quality Digest article published in February 2023, Michael Mills1 reported that the next version of ISO 9001 will add to clause 4.1, “Understanding the organization and its context” the words, “the organization shall determine whether climate change is a relevant issue.”
Although nothing in…
James Chan
Tracking work orders is an essential aspect of work order management, and it becomes immensely more efficient with the help of tracking software.
Work orders are the centerpiece of an effective maintenance program. Once a work order request is initiated, it triggers a set of tasks and workflows…
Nikhil Arora
In the latest TalentLMS research, we zoomed in on employee appreciation in U.S. companies. We examined how employees view appreciation practices and their favorite ways of receiving recognition. Moreover, we explored AI’s potential for bridging the employee recognition gap. The research also dug…
Adam Sutter
In the dynamic and ever-evolving landscape of business, the concept of transformation often conjures images of monumental overhauls and radical shifts. However, for some enterprises, effective transformation takes a different, more nuanced form—one that involves strategic adjustments rather than…
Maggie Overfelt
Michele Gelfand finds inspiration for new projects all around her: taking in the banter in a boardroom, speaking with taxi drivers when traveling, observing the interactions between physicians and nurses during an unexpected trip to the doctor. The idea for one of her most recent papers was sparked…
Audrey Kim
Emails that drone on and on. Meetings that could have been Slack messages. Memos loaded with empty jargon. We’re all familiar with friction, or what Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao describe as “forces that make it harder, slower, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done.”
In…
Stephanie Ojeda
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously wrote, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
In the field of quality, internal audits are the equivalent of sunlight. Like spring cleaning, internal audits provide the opportunity to bring process issues into the open before…
Donald J. Wheeler
Over the past two months we’ve considered the properties of lognormal and gamma probability models. Both of these families contain the normal distribution as a limit. To complete our survey of widely used probability models, this column will look at Weibull distributions, a family that doesn’t…
Jamie Bihary
An internal audit can be an overwhelming prospect, especially if you’re new to a company or internal auditing in general.
The MedTech space is huge, and even the standards that are meant to help, like ISO 13485:2016, cover a lot of ground.
So, if you’re part of the audit team in your company, and…
Mike Figliuolo
Many people proclaim they are gurus, ninjas, and other silly titles. Giving yourself such a title can cause people to lose respect for you, and it can cost you credibility.
Titles matter. A lot. So do email addresses and signature blocks. As unfortunate and as shallow as it is, people make a first…
Matthew Greenwood
The next frontier for industrial digitization and automation is the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision.
AI-powered machine vision promises to transform the way industrial manufacturers conduct their business, according to experts at a recent webinar hosted by the…
Gleb Tsipursky
As companies continue to navigate the new normal of remote and hybrid work, it’s crucial that they establish clear expectations and guidelines for their employees. And unlike Disney and Twitter, it’s very important that they don’t change their minds randomly when the leadership changes.
However, a…
Joe Judge
I once had to give an employee constructive feedback about being too impatient, irritable, and unmotivated at work. He shrugged, apparently unwilling to acknowledge the problem.
In response, I asked, “How does this character flaw manifest with your kids at home?” That question got his attention…
Stephanie Ojeda
Formal complaint management is a requirement in regulated industries such as medical device and pharmaceuticals under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other international regulations.
The FDA mandates that medical device companies, for example, designate a formal unit for managing…
Shiela Mie Legaspi
As remote workers, we have more freedom than ever before. This means we must learn how to make personal accountability in virtual teams work for us. We must understand what drives our success, and use that knowledge to drive our own growth. Simple self-accountability techniques can empower you with…
