All Features
With more than 70,000 chemicals currently in common use—and 1,000 new chemicals coming into use every year—maintaining and managing their effective, appropriate, and responsible use is a challenging task. Cost, process, regulatory, and safety issues converge to make chemical management a critical…
Davis Balestracci
Those of you familiar with W. Edwards Deming know that his Funnel Experiment ultimately shows that a process in control delivers the best results if left alone. Funnel Rule No. 4, also known as a “random walk”—i.e., making, doing, or building your next iteration based on the previous one—has been…
Michael A. Witt
Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.
While globalization has benefited humanity in many ways, its continued progress is in serious doubt. As I wrote previously, the two leading political science theories, liberalism and realism, both predict that globalization…
Bruce Hamilton
While holiday shopping at one of my favorite food places, Johnson’s Popcorn, I came upon a scene reminiscent of our lean training video, Toast Kaizen. After I placed my order for 18 one-gallon buckets of caramel corn for friends and family, the Johnson’s kitchen shifted gears from mail-order sales…
Last week, I planned to write about a leadership technique backed by research to improve workplace motivation, engagement, and productivity. But, given the recent political season, I found myself wondering if anything we’ve believed about leadership is true. Does humility matter? Should leaders…
Chip Bell
It started out as a lackluster taxi ride from the airport to the hotel. But it turned regal and elegant the second I hailed the next taxi as I exited Charlotte Douglas Airport. The Crown Cab that pulled up was shiny and spotless. When the taxi driver raised the trunk to deposit my roller bag, I…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Leadership is not necessarily about getting people to follow you. In fact, the test of leadership effectiveness is what happens when you’re not there. If everything depends on you and falls apart when you’re not there, obviously the effectiveness of your team is limited. You can’t be there all the…
The common and recurring view of the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) research is that sentient and intelligent machines are just on the horizon. Machines understand verbal commands, distinguish pictures, drive cars, and play games better than we do. How much longer can it be…
Timothy Woodcome
Sponsored Content
If your organization has yet to make the transition from ISO 9001:2008 to ISO 9001:2015, you’re not alone. It’s estimated that less than 20 percent of the more than one million organizations certified globally have made the transition to the latest version of the standard (as of…
Jeffrey Phillips
I love innovation. I love all facets of it: the discovery of needs, creativity, unique solutions, and the realization of ideas as new products and services. But what concerns me sometimes is the way in which we attempt to implement innovation, because we are likely to constrain it at the time we…
Kara Baskin
Care.com co-founder Donna Levin played a key part in that company’s growth, and the passion was personal. Levin’s work plans were curtailed when her son was 11 weeks old and had a seizure following a difficult pregnancy. Tests were inconclusive. Her daycare situation evaporated; she and her…
Dan Jacob
Disruption is a funny thing. You see it coming—kind of—but it’s hard to tell what it means. Back in the day, would you have foreseen the shift from taxis to Uber? Would you have predicted that HVAC units would be offered as a service rather than purchased as a product? These disruptive changes and…
Michelle LaBrosse
When you’re knee-deep in the logistical details of managing a project team, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture: your organization’s vision.
Here at Cheetah Learning, we use established and proven strategies to help us achieve our vision through our mission in each course we offer.…
American Customer Satisfaction Index ACSI
(ACSI: Colorado Springs, CO) -- Customer satisfaction with banks is up, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Its recent report covers the finance and insurance sector, which includes retail banks, credit unions, health insurance, property and casualty insurance, life…
Mike Richman
In the quality profession today, the term “guru” tends to be thrown around with reckless abandon, more often than not self-referentially by the “guru” him- or herself. Don’t get me wrong; there are many outstanding people now working in our field, with interesting and perhaps even revolutionary…
Kevin Meyer
“Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence—only in constant improvement and constant change.”—Tom Peters
The plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycle is the core component of continuous improvement programs. You may have heard it called the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle—and they are very similar—but I…
John Maxwell
During the past few weeks I’ve written a lot about personal growth. That’s because it’s so important to me—I believe personal growth is a crucial part in anyone’s journey toward success and significance. But here I want to talk about an area of personal growth that we sometimes forget: helping…
Jim Benson
I’ve been watching myself. Asking myself why do I do certain things? Why do I lose track of time?
I’ve combined a few regimens that have calmed me down, increased my effectiveness, and made me feel healthier. I’ve created for myself things that some blithely call “habits.” But we all have habits…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Often enough, you have heard me say that 50 percent of our brain function is dedicated to finding and then interpreting visual data. This is not whimsy. This is not speculation. This is fact. The eye rules. Though we utilize our other senses quite naturally (sound, taste, smell, touch), visuality…
The new revision of AS9100D is now out, and clause 10.2—“Nonconformity and corrective action” will require us to “evaluate the need for action based on human factors to ensure nonconformities do not recur.” In addition, clause 7.1.4 of both ISO 9001:2015 and AS9100D require us to consider human…
The “leave” vote prevailing in the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum was big news. It was fascinating to watch events unfold from this side of the pond, particularly since what happens here will be affected by what happens there from this point forward.
Most of the people I follow on Twitter…
Mike Figliuolo
It’s called “work” for a reason. Most days we’re able to “work” through it and find enjoyment in what we do, but occasionally we’re faced with a grind that saps our strength and threatens to derail us. Fortunately, there are simple techniques for working through that grind.
I love writing the…
Knowledge at Wharton
There were no Olympic medals up for grabs when Sim Yi Hui and Jane Lee, the co-founders of the Singapore Women’s Everest Team, set out to recruit team members to climb the world’s tallest mountain in 2004. “When we first formed the team my goal was just to climb the mountain,” Sim Yi Hui told me…
Dan Jacob
You’ve identified a fledgling quality initiative to fix the bottlenecks in your processes. Or perhaps you need that application with the latest technology that is sure to improve performance. You might have even discovered the approach to advance a culture of quality. Now that you know the…
Stanford News Service
Most leadership advice is based on anecdotal observation and basic common sense. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Kathryn Shaw tried a different tack: data-driven analysis.
Through research done in collaboration with a very large, undisclosed technology-based company that has a…
