All Features
John Bell
Should every company be striving for the type of strategic advantage that has become the hallmark of Amazon, Google, and Facebook? For sure, in the tech world, it’s hard to imagine success without quick and continuous technology improvement. What about your world?
Whether you sell information or…
Stephan Manning, Marcus M. Larsen
One of the big themes in the current presidential race is how decades of free trade have dealt a heavy blow to the U.S. worker as millions of jobs were shipped overseas to take advantage of cheap labor.
That’s even turned some pro free-trade Republicans into protectionists. As a result, the…
Harish Jose
May 8 was Mother's Day. In today's article I will be writing about somebody who has been called "The Mother of Modern Management" and "America's First Lady of Engineering." Many of this woman's concepts and ideas lend themselves really well to the Toyota Production System.
Lillian Moller Gilbreth…
Harry Hertz
I recently read an HBR blog by Sunnie Giles that reported the results of a study of 195 leaders representing 30 global organizations. The leaders were asked to identify the most important competencies for leadership. The study reminded me of a complementary article in Forbes, written by Glen…
Patrick Runkel
The Pareto chart is a graphic representation of the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. If you’re a quality improvement specialist, you know that the chart is named after the early 20th-century economist Vilfredo Pareto, who discovered that roughly 20 percent of the population in Italy…
Hubert Gatignon
There can be little argument that consumers are growing more suspicious of business. They question its motives, and increasingly, its marketing, which recently has been said to be manipulative. Consumers are ever more aware of the Internet pop-ups and exaggerated claims they receive in a targeted…
Evan Miller
Sponsored Content
PLZ Aeroscience is North America’s largest custom aerosol manufacturer and packager. It produces its own private-brand products and custom formulations, and provides contract filling for other customers. PLZ has been in business for more than 100 years and during the last six…
Takehiko Harada
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from the book, Management Lessons From Taiichi Ohno: What Every Leader Can Learn From the Man who Invented the Toyota Production System, by Takehiko Harada (McGraw-Hill Education, 2015).
The phrase, “kaizen equals getting closer to the final process” was hardly…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
The map is not the territory.
—Alfred Korzybski
This column is a tribute primarily to Jamshid Gharajedaghi, a long-time teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. My wife Carole and I recently visited him while in Philadelphia doing a presentation for the International Society for Performance…
William A. Levinson
Colonel Paul M. A. Linebarger’s authoritative Psychological Warfare (Infantry Journal Press, 1948) defines propaganda as any planned communication with the purpose to influence behavior, but this definition is actually too narrow. Propaganda consists of any action or communication, whether…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Visual scheduling is a plain, two-dimensional format that maps out which products, parts, or subassemblies need to be produced, and when, in what quantity, and in what order. Nothing could be simpler.
In companies where schedules aren't published in a single, centralized location for all to see…
Brooke Pierce
The healthcare industry is in a state of constant change, and with change comes opportunity. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), healthcare providers are, or will be, paid differently for their services. No longer can they…
When Marissa Meyer became Yahoo’s CEO in July 2012, employees and shareholders saw the glamorous ex-Googler, former vice president of product search and teacher of programming, as their savior. She made some big bets on everything from blogging to digital magazines, buying Tumblr, a blogging…
Jeffrey Phillips
I find that I’ve become increasingly irritated with the narrow interpretations and self-serving definitions of what is, or is not, innovation. One of the most common scapegoats for innovation is brainstorming. No other activity is more frequently miscast, and often blamed, for failed innovation.…
Mike Micklewright
Quiz time: What significance does the yin and the yang have in discussing standardized training? I suggest that you pause and guess (and then read on for the answer).
OK, we all get it, standards are a part of our lives in the business world, and they are gaining more and more focus as companies…
Tonianne DeMaria
“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” —John Steinbeck
In Personal Kanban (Modus Cooperandi Press, 2011), Jim Benson and I discuss how workflow should be optimized for throughput, not capacity. Work…
Lisa Lang
Most of the time when I’m consulting, the problem that my clients think they have is not the real problem. That makes sense, because if people understood their real problem, they would just fix it. The fact that the problem still exists is a likely indicator that the real issue hasn’t been…
Harish Jose
Today I’d like to talk about kaizen—specifically, the order for kaizen. The term has come to mean “continuous improvement,” but kaizen originally translates from Japanese as “change for better.” To help clarify this useful concept, I’ll present three different views for approaching kaizen: Taiichi…
Jeffrey Eves
Sponsored Content
There are many paths for organizations to become good, sustainable, low-footprint citizens of the business world. Production processes can be redesigned to be more efficient, corporate campuses can be located so as to reduce employees’ dependence on fossil fuels, and buildings…
Helena Lui
There’s an old saying that “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Every project manager knows that she has to create a realistic project budget before the project begins. This step is not optional because when you’re midway through your project and realize you’ve run out of money, you’re in big…
Lawrence Yu
If we used a time machine to transport a pharmaceutical scientist from the 1960s into a current pharmaceutical production plant, it might be surprising to learn that he would already be familiar with most of the processes and production techniques being used. That’s because not much has changed in…
Eric Gasper
An upcoming audit can be one of the more stressful times of the year for a quality team. Whether you are pursuing a new certification or retaining your current one, audit preparation can be a daunting challenge to even the most diligent organization. Although standards such as ISO/IEC 17025, ISO/…
Knowledge at Wharton
Time was, layoffs were seen as an emergency strategy, the last resort in a downturn or crisis. Today, however, layoffs are a standard tool for doing business. As the economy continues to heal and job indicators improve, a number of firms have announced a fresh wave of layoffs—Nordstrom, Sprint,…
Norman A. Paradis
The last few months have witnessed the unraveling of the remarkable life sciences company Theranos, culminating in the news that federal regulators may ban Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes from the blood-testing industry for at least two years. The company is also facing a federal criminal…
Kevin Meyer
During the past few years I’ve been working hard on cultivating positive habits. New habits can be powerful. But habits can also create barriers that limit our perspective, which can hinder kaizen, creativity, and even our knowledge of ourselves. We’ve all found ourselves in the proverbial “rut”…
