All Features
Paul Sloane
Is innovation critical for your business survival and success? Are you dissatisfied with your ability to bring new products and services to market? Surveys show that most business leaders would answer both questions with a yes.
If you want to make your organization more agile and innovative, where…
Davis Balestracci
During the early 1990s, I was president of the Twin Cities Deming Forum. I had a wonderful board whose members were full of great ideas. One member, Doug Augustine, was a 71-year-old retired Lutheran minister and our respected, self-appointed provocateur. He never missed an opportunity to…
Mike Richman
I recently sat down with Doug Fair, the chief operating officer of InfinityQS, for a discussion about the uses (and sometimes, the misuses) of industrial statistical analysis. Ours was a lengthy conversation, so we’re splitting the account into two parts. In this installment, we cover data gluttony…
Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) career outreach programs play a pivotal role in shaping the capabilities and makeup of the future workforce. Generally speaking, “STEM outreach” involves organizing events, both in and out of school, where we can encourage and inspire young people to…
Stanford News Service
Team leaders often focus on product details. Founders obsess over fonts. Sales managers fixate on tough-to-wrangle customers and shop owners on the minutia of shelf displays. Yet, all too often, virtually no attention is given to the fundamental driver of business success: team dynamics.
Behind…
Mike Richman
IMTS was a blast, but it was great to be back home in lovely Northern California this week. On this episode of QDL, we covered the skills that workers need and the innovations that organizations want. Plus, we brought you a live interview with author Mark Graban, and one on tape from Burt Mason of…
Gary Marchionini
As millions of people came online iduring the late 1990s, they needed help figuring out what each web page was about, and how to find what they were looking for. Web indexes and search engines sprang up. When Google was founded in September 1998, it had to compete with the information retrieval…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
In the foreword of Mark Graban’s book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More (Constancy Inc., 2018), renowned statistician, Donald J. Wheeler, writes about Graban: “He has created a guide for using and understanding the data that surround us every day.
“These numbers are…
Rip Stauffer
I must admit, right up front, that this is not a totally unbiased review. I first became aware of Davis Balestracci in 1998, when I received the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Statistics Division Special Publication, Data “Sanity”: Statistical Thinking Applied to Everyday Data. At the time, I…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
We’re almost done with another great IMTS, and we had a ball seeing old friends and meeting new ones while bringing you all the action right here on QDL. In this, our final episode from Chicago, we talked about the nature of the customer journey and how to motivate your team. Plus we had an in-…
Knowledge at Wharton
‘How is it that in the middle of a relatively small town of about 125,000 people in Minnesota, you’ve got the No. 1-rated healthcare system probably in the world?”
The question was put to Jeffrey Bolton—the Mayo Clinic’s chief administrative officer—by Larry Jameson, executive vice president of…
Mike Richman
With more than 110,000 expected attendees, IMTS is Chicago’s hottest suburb this week. (I like to refer to it as “Manufactureville.”) Here’s what we covered during our second show of the week, from the booth of today’s sponsor, Q-Mark Manufacturing:
“Tapping Your Employee’s Knowledge”
It’s no…
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-…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
