All Features
Lolly Daskal
When we think of leaders, we don’t often think of failures, but one of the hallmarks of the best leaders is knowing how to fail well.
Successful people are those who have failed at something—and in some cases, many things—but without ever regarding themselves as failures. They take risks, and…
Brad Egeland
In case you haven’t heard this one before, “I’m big in Japan” is a way of boosting yourself in some unverifiable fashion. Specifically, it means, “To say or pretend you are someone of stature somewhere else, which is meaningless and not verifiable where you currently are.”
Many are guilty, at…
Harish Jose
The TV show The Walking Dead, about survival in a post-apocalyptic zombie world, is one of the top-rated currently. I’ve written previously about the show, but today I want to briefly look at the complex adaptive systems (CAS) in the show’s plot structure. A CAS is an open, nonlinear system with…
Innovalia Metrology
Industry 4.0 has catapulted industrial production processes into new realms of advanced manufacturing, in some cases leaving quality control scrambling to catch up. The trend of industrial quality management is to implement lean and accurate production systems; however, for many enterprises, using…
Zac Cooper
The role of quality starts with product design and moves rapidly across the supply chain to the selling and buying experience, which includes the bidding process. When operating a formal continuous process improvement program, nearly all manufacturing engineers are tasked with some level of quality…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
We interview Stanley Chao, author of Selling to China: A Guide for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (iUniverse, 2018), about the impact of the current U.S.-China trade war. Does China really care, and where do U.S. multinationals go from here? Also, a quick look at Conformance Manager, a web-based…
Bruce Hamilton
December was a busy month for everyone at GBMP. In addition to all of the usual activities to close out the year, we were packing to relocate from Newton, Massachusetts, to our new office in Boston. We were also tossing a whole lot of stuff, something we’d previously neglected to do.
As promoters…
Burl Stamp
Having goals is critical to making progress, but strong organizational goals are not the same as effective work team or employee goals. Getting that distinction clear can accelerate progress for everyone.
Some of the muddling of these two concepts comes from over-applying the well-known SMART…
Stanley Chao
This past year has created havoc for Western companies purchasing raw materials, furniture, high-tech components, auto parts, and power tools from China. And the rocky relationship continues into 2019 as both countries continue to negotiate while kicking the can down the road toward a new March 1,…
Shobhendu Prabhakar
Why do we waste our time and effort completing checklist after checklist for tasks that we can complete even when half awake? Do we not have better things to do than complete checklists?
Good question! And the answer is simple: If there is a checklist, it exists for a reason, and we need to follow…
Mike Monroe
“It's amazing what you can accomplish as long as you don't care who gets credit.”
Harry Truman spoke those words, and they quickly became a mantra for competitive teams. Great players want to play with great players. Talented colleagues want to work alongside their equals.
Here’s the catch, though…
Ryan E. Day
Machine-tool manufacturer Cincinnati Inc. has a heritage of building quality products and surviving great challenges. Founded in 1898, and based in the United States, Cincinnati has survived both the Great Depression and Great Recession. Cincinnati’s forward-looking attitude has been a key factor…
Eric Cooper
Due dates. Whether it’s building a house or implementing an enterprise quality management software (QMS) solution, everyone has them, everyone wants them. What does home construction have to do with going live with a new QMS solution? There are actually quite a few similarities.
Create realistic…
Eric Stoop
Experts say that the cost of quality totals roughly 10 percent in the average organization, with some companies facing quality costs of up to 40 percent. If your plant is on the middle to upper end of these estimates, it’s likely company leadership considers your plant in need of immediate…
Jeffrey Phillips
I recently wrote an article about innovation during 2018, and in it I made some disparaging remarks about Apple, which may or may not have caused it to lose a tremendous amount of market capitalization. Or perhaps the stock was overvalued, and Apple has become more interested in margin than in…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
During the last few decades, studies in neuroscience have shown that you can literally physically rewire your brain. You can change the “default network” you were born with, the one that ensured the survival of our primitive ancestors who lived in a very different world.
Our “fight-flight”…
Richard Harpster
On Oct. 13, 2018, the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) sponsored a webinar on the status of the AIAG Core Tools Software (AIAG CTS). John Cachat, AIAG project manager for the AIAG CTS project, was the presenter for the webinar. The presentation provided information on why the AIAG was…
Scott Berkun
Are engineers more creative than designers? Both answers (“Yes they are!” and, “No they are not!”) are naïve. It’s foolish to compare massive groups of people against each other, especially around a sloppy word like creativity.
Assuming you work making products of some kind, we all likely know…
Wes Kao
If you’re a leader, you got to where you are because you think strategically and are killer at execution. You simply can’t get far without being good at both.
Now that you’re in charge of people, though, your ability to increase impact depends on how well you manage other people. You need your…
Harish Jose
One of my favorite things to do when I learn new and interesting information is to apply it to a different area to see if I can gain further insight. Here, I am looking at the principle, “Chekhov’s gun,” named after the famous Russian author, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), and how it relates to gemba…
Jim Benson
It’s no wonder people are scared of process. When we have a large project or goal, we assume that the process to complete that work must be equally large. That is daunting. We’d rather just do it.
When we have taken the time to build a process for a large project, we’ve all witnessed what a large…
Matt Krupnick
When graduate student Atis Degro got an email about a George Mason University course in resilience last year, he had to look up what that meant.
He was also curious about the credential being offered for successfully completing the course: not a conventional degree or a certificate, but a “badge…
Ryan E. Day
Psychology is an important element in organizational excellence for managers. In particular, the ability to face one’s fears, develop resilience, and adapt to change fosters success for a manager as well as for the company and all its employees.
Developing your people really is where the rubber…
William A. Levinson
The U.S. government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment warns that climate change “creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in communities across the United States, presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth.” The…
David Currie
This is part three of a three-part series. Read about good metrics in part one and bad metrics in part two.
Have you ever had occasion to dread a metric reviewed month after month, where the metric defies logic, and any action taken does not seem to reflect in the metric? It is most likely a bad…
