All Features
Bruce Hamilton
This is an article inspired by the glut of recent football weekends. Lou Holtz, the legendary college and pro football coach, offers the following advice to coaches everywhere: “I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.”
Top managers often lament their employees’…
Annette Franz
When people at your company think about “customer loyalty,” are they thinking about your customers’ likelihood to recommend, likelihood to repurchase, or likelihood to purchase additional products? How does your company define customer loyalty?
Recently I experienced a situation that caused me to…
Christine Schaefer
As a city leader, Tommy Gonzalez started using the Baldrige Excellence Framework in 2008 to achieve operational excellence within a municipal government. In his role as manager of Irving, Texas, at that time, Gonzalez introduced the framework to improve the city’s performance in all areas. The…
Lolly Daskal
A young man came to his wise leader and asked how he could be a better leader. The wise leader said, “Let me pour you a cup of tea.” And so he started pouring a cup of tea; he kept pouring and pouring and pouring until the young man screamed, “Stop! The cup is full.”
The wise leader looked at the…
Arun Hariharan
I don’t claim to be qualified to advise other quality professionals. However, having had an opportunity to work for many years in this field with reasonable results and also having made my share of mistakes, I’ve observed that certain qualities help make a successful quality professional. I didn’t…
William A. Levinson
My article, “Change and Risk-Based Thinking” describes management of change (MOC) as a safety-related phrase from the chemical process industry. MOC says that anything new, different, or nonroutine (such as repairs, equipment replacement, and process startups) creates a safety risk, but the same…
Diane Adams
Creating a great culture is a key responsibility of leadership. When you invest in building a strong culture, the business and financial results follow. Fail to do so and your business will end up in unpleasant situations.
Great leaders drive excellence in their organizations. They lay the…
Jason Furness
In part one of this three-part series, we looked at the first two layers of resistance to change. Part two looked at the second two layers. Here we look at the final two layers, obstacles to implementing the proposed solution, and unverbalized fear. We are close to achieving true buy-in, but…
Luk Van Wassenhove
Establishing a clear and consistent focus, and knowing when to change it, is the essence of manufacturing agility. Factories don’t just make things. Viewed properly, they are where the rubber of corporate strategy meets the road of the marketplace.
Ideally, then, a factory should operate in…
Jason Furness
In part one of this three-part series, we moved through the initial and often overlooked layers of resistance: first, why change; and second, how to overcome disagreement on the nature of the problem. Here we move on to the next two layers, namely, disagreeing on the solution and undesirable side…
Lolly Daskal
Leadership may be complex, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. We can always simplify. Often our greatest hardships are those we impose upon ourselves.
There are some who think that in order to be a great leader, we must allow life to teach us the hard way. But in truth, if we are open to…
Matthew Littlefield
Although there is no bad time to improve quality management maturity, an optimal time is during fiscal planning for a new year. Executives and quality professionals who are affected by the quality of products or services should ask two questions: “Just how mature is my company’s quality program?”…
Jason Furness
This is the first part of a three-part series on the “six layers of resistance.” It’s based on the work of Eliyahu Goldratt, who has now passed away. Goldratt was the originator of a body of work known as the “theory of constraints.” His bestselling novel, The Goal (North River Press, 2014 reprint…
Kevin Meyer
“I will take time to be alone today. I will take time to be quiet. In this silence I will listen... and I will hear my answers.” —Ruth Fishel
One of my great pleasures is going for a walk on the beach a couple blocks from my house. Contrary to the popular perception of California as a land of…
Harry Hertz
During my 25 years with the Baldrige program, I have never come across an organization that couldn’t improve its communication, no matter how good it already is. The importance of effective communication is demonstrated by the many articles and books written on the subject; as examples, Inc.,…
Mike Micklewright
To many people, the relationship between daily kaizen and statistical process control (SPC) might seem as remote as the relationship between a kangaroo and the past iconic American TV series Friends. And yet, a kangaroo and Friends have a commonality in that each contains a “Joey.” Daily kaizen…
Jack Dunigan
Whenever I hire a new employee, as part of his orientation I am always careful to emphasize that it would be wrong to mistake my forbearance for indifference, that while I am long-suffering and will give him time to learn the ropes, there are standards to be reached and maintained.
One of the…
Gilles Hilary, Arnaud Lagarde
Eric (not his real name) was under pressure from his sales department. He was hesitant to close a large financing deal with a Chinese corporation but had little beyond his intuition to back up his position.
The company’s stock price had gained a whopping 600 percent in one year. Nevertheless,…
Davis Balestracci
Dealing with individuals is one important aspect of culture change. I addressed this in “How Does Your Organization Define Accountability?” Every organization has many tribes (i.e., departments or specific groups of individuals) that make up its culture. When changes affect departments, the issue…
Bruce Hamilton
A piece of popular lore, provided by Shigeo Shingo, is that the original name for mistake-proofing (poka-yoke) was actually fool-proofing (baka-yoke). Shingo chided managers at Panasonic for using the latter term, as it disrespected workers by essentially calling them fools.
Shingo substituted…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
I teach management and leadership. Recently, the topic in one of my classes was change and stress. I asked my students, who are nearly all employed and range in age from 19 to 55, what caused them the greatest stress in the workplace. Among the various responses were several related to how they…
Quy Huy
Middle managers could take the lead in a changing corporate world, if they would only recognize that their primary value is emotional, not functional. Once again, middle managers appear to be on the wrong side of history.
We constantly hear that millennials—already the most-represented generation…
Bill Remy
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal reported that quarterly profits and revenue at big U.S. companies are poised to decline for the first time since the 2008 recession, as some industrial firms warn of a pullback in spending.
The authors point out that industrial companies are being…
Leo Sadovy
Having a mentor is the No. 1 factor in increasing the steepness of your personal learning curve. So says my oldest, Garik, a Park Scholar at North Carolina State University (class of 2012), during a discussion he recently had with the incoming Park Scholar class of 2019.
To accept the value of…
Arun Hariharan
During my years of experience helping companies with quality, I’ve observed that in some, any conversation and initiatives related to quality seem to revolve around operations. In manufacturing companies, this tends to be the actual production plant or factory; in service companies, it’s their…
