All Features
Miguel Noguerol
The restaurant industry confronts many of the leadership challenges that other industries, corporate leaders, and entrepreneurs face. Chefs and chef-owners play a significant leadership role in their organizations through a variety of operational and social processes. Among these leaders, only an…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Coaching is not just for problems. Coaching helps you avoid problems by providing space to think and be more intentional about your goals and actions. And coaching is especially helpful for getting clarity on where you want to go.
Working with a coach gives you: • Space for self-reflection •…
Morten Bennedsen
Employee absenteeism is a problem for companies everywhere. When employees are away from the office, for good reasons or not, the cost has been measured at somewhere around 4 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. Absences lead to delayed work, colleagues take on more, and projects are…
Mike Richman
On our most recent episode of QDL from this past Fri., April 14, 2017, we took a close look at innovation and engineering. Here’s a quick recap:
“SAE Institute Creates Webisodes to Benefit STEM Education” This piece demonstrates the good work that the San Jose, California, campus of the SAE…
Steven Sweldens
The tide of popular opinion seems to have turned against multitasking. Recent articles scoff at the notion that people could satisfactorily complete more than one activity at a time, labeling it a myth and a fallacy. This purist pushback in the press mirrors common resentment among professionals…
Jim Benson
The notion of a successful distributed team seems like a wonderful yet unobtainable dream.
But stop and think: How often are your nondistributed teams successful? When have they been successful, and why? It’s never because of your plan, or because you hired the best people. It’s not because you…
Peter Robustelli
The largest problems facing businesses isn’t competition, globalization, or access to capital. It is something else, something embedded in the fabric of organizations as their most important asset. Human capital, the people who make organizations work, is one of the largest single issues being…
Thomas R. Cutler
Two years ago, the marketing research division of Florida-based TR Cutler Inc. interviewed CEOs of privately held manufacturing operations in North America and reported that their top fear was a lack of communication with employees due to the inability to motivate or inspire the workforce. That…
Christopher Martin
‘How could I forget to do that?”
I asked myself this question last week over and over, wondering how an important task was able to fly right over my head until I was reminded about it the next day, after it was too late. I mean, I use Post-it Notes! I had an Outlook calendar reminder! I thought I…
Sean Lynch
You’d like to address a potentially sensitive topic with a neighbor, co-worker, or boss, and you dread it. It might turn ugly. You fear an unpleasant reaction.
Often, when attempting to communicate on delicate matters, we start out by giving the other person a bunch of information (specific facts…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
There are a lot of good quality tools and improvement processes out there for when you are not engaged and productivity wanes. But until you find the root cause of your behavior, any improvement won’t be sustained.
I read about the three modalities of awakened doing in Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New…
Mike Richman
If there’s one thing that separates those who do things in an average way and those who do those same things in an extraordinary way, it’s passion. This sense of intense interest, excitement, and focus drives the authentic pursuit of excellence, even (or perhaps, especially) in the rather mundane…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
One of my favorite sayings is, “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” The reverse is also true: If nothing changes, nothing changes. Perfect! So I was more than a little surprised recently when I visited a company that had made a sizeable investment in bringing continuous improvement into the…
Michelle LaBrosse
Jane is an amazing photographer, but her family feels her photography skills aren’t going to help her earn a living. Consequently, she was offered a job in her sister-in-law Kerry’s company calling clients to collect on invoices. After several months, both Jane and Kerry realized they’d had enough…
Jim Benson
If you are reading this, you are likely human. Congratulations; I’m human, too.
Everyday we all wake up and wonder what the day will bring. We wonder who we will meet, what conversations we will have, and what we will do.
We all want to do things
In business we have processes, we have…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
There’s a lot of power and even nobility in the word “resolution.” But when it shows up accompanied by the trickster phrase “new year’s,” it's like a solemn king preceded by a capering jester. With every step we and our resolutions take into the year, it becomes harder to ignore the widening…
John Killam
A U.S. Air National Guard veteran, a high school dropout, a person with a background in sales, and a family man who hadn’t been in a classroom for 20 years; four men on very different paths that ultimately led to one destination: the Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership’s (MassMEP)…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
NIST
The U.S. Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, has named four organizations as the 2016 recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest presidential honor for sustainable excellence through visionary leadership, organizational alignment, systemic improvement and…
Christian Wolcott
T he following is for mature quality audiences only. Is it unwise to take people who are new to lean on a tour of a Toyota facility running at top efficiency? Is the sight of a glossy, mature lean factory a kind of pornography for young engineers, new leaders, and even seasoned managers seeking to…
Kevin Meyer
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Like most people, I maintain a fairly long to-do list of personal and professional projects. It’s a few pages long—especially the honey-do portion. Because the list can be intimidating,…
Michelle LaBrosse
Let’s say you’ve found the perfect mix of people to staff your new project. They get along great together. They’re all top performers in their respective fields. They’re all gung-ho to get going. But then something happens.
First, one starts showing up late to meetings. Then, someone else plans a…
