All Features
Patrick Mork
Whether you work for a startup or a large company, there have never been so many metrics to help you understand how your business is doing. But I would argue that one metric rules them all: the net promoter score (NPS).
NPS represents the willingness of consumers to recommend your product to…
jeffdewar
‘There’s nothing we can do about it.”
In a customer service situation, those words are equivalent to “buzz off” (or worse).
Here’s what customer service managers, from healthcare to telecommunications, from utilities to gyms, should have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids: Because employees…
Tara García Mathewson
Some of the most celebrated education reform efforts today serve to make instruction more difficult. Personalized learning, project-based learning, mastery-based learning—they all require more work of teachers and more work of students.
But several speakers at the LearnLaunch Across Boundaries…
Aiman Sakr
Does your organization benefit from lessons learned? Does it learn from previous quality issues? A vast amount of learning takes place every day in every manufacturing facility. Do global manufacturing companies share experiences gained from resolving quality issues between overseas plants? And…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In our July 6, 2018, episode of QDL, we discuss distributed manufacturing, and distributed management.
“Brother Moonshine, Sister Solution”
If want to spur innovation, try moonshine.
“3D Printing Finds a Custom Foothold in Manufacturing”
3D printing is leading to some pretty interesting…
J. B. Silvers, Mark Votruba
The new healthcare venture formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase announced June 20, 2018, that Harvard professor and well-known author Atul Gawande would be the company’s CEO. The idea for the new company is to innovate by cutting costs from the healthcare system, starting with…
Annette Franz
‘Imagine for a second that you’re a human.... ” Yikes! Now there’s a crazy statement to make during a customer experience design session. However, more companies need to start thinking this way.
Sadly, there is no shortage of stories about customers being treated badly, even inhumanely. The one…
Bill Kalmar
If you have a smart phone, and most people do these days, you realize just how much our lives are controlled by that electronic item we travel everywhere with. There are apps on our phones that allow us to find our car, find our keys, find our friends, or my favorite, find my phone. That is all…
M. Berk Talay
In April, Ford announced that it will be phasing out nearly all of its passenger cars in the United States. If all goes according to plan, 90 percent of Ford’s portfolio in North America will be trucks, SUVs, and commercial vehicles. Its F-150—the most popular vehicle in America—is now poised to…
Dick Wooden
Iran across the book, Successful Human Relations: Principles and practice in business, in the home, in government (Harpercollins, 1952) while browsing older books about relationship development from William J. Reilly, who also wrote The Law of Intelligent Action (Joanna Cotler Books, 1945). His…
Chip Bell
The 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 35th Academy Awards. Given the current conflicts in the Middle East, I recently watched the four-hour movie to learn more about the cultural history of the area.
Thomas Edward Lawrence (played by Peter O’Toole) was a British…
Ken Voytek
Without manufacturing, the room where you make dinner would be rather stark and barren. There’d be no pots, no pans, no stoves, no spatulas, no appliances—big or small. There’d be no way to prepare the meals that give you and your family sustenance. With no counter, there wouldn’t even be a place…
Doug Surrett
The importance of supply chain solutions relative to a company’s efforts to maintain and improve quality are almost impossible to underplay. When enacting quality improvement programs, any company would do well to examine its supply chain model and processes as a fundamental means of improving…
Bruce Hamilton
Last month I joined Eric Buhrens, CEO at Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), to host a leadership team from Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center. They were on a study mission to many of Boston’s fine hospitals and were winding up their week with a visit to LEI. Early in the discussion, one of our guests…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Supply chains’ last-mile delivery has become the new Pony Express. Like that famous but short-lived courier service, the global supply chain is focused on completing the final segment between supplier and customer—which in reality is anywhere between six and nine miles, according to a recent study—…
Christopher Martin
A couple months back I stopped at a local fast-food place for a quick kid’s meal (not for me) after picking up one of my little ones from school. Inside, we were greeted by an employee in an otherwise empty dining area, and no line. As we approached the counter, he asked how we were and if we were…
Ruth P. Stevens
In business-to-business (B2B) direct marketing, I’m often asked about what kind of response rates to expect about the most productive media channels, the best lists, the best time to conduct a campaign, the most effective qualification questions. I always answer the same way, much to the…
Hilke Plassmann
The rise of neuromarketing has already begun to provide companies and researchers with greater insight into consumer behavior than consumers themselves are capable of giving. Neuromarketing tools such as facial-affective recognition, eye tracking, and fMRI technology can illuminate the…
Annette Franz
I had another column in the hopper, but when this article came across my desk, followed by a phone conversation with Bob Chapman, I knew I needed to write something different, something that is top of mind for me now—and often—as I work with my clients. The article? “Beyond Nice,” which you can…
Rob Matheson
Carrying your smartphone around everywhere has become a way of life. In doing so, you produce a surprising amount of data about your role in the economy—where you shop, work, travel, and generally hang out.
Thasos Group, founded at MIT in 2011, has developed a platform that leverages those data,…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In our April 13, 2018, episode of QDL, we talked about anti-hacker robots, data privacy, and new product introduction.
“HoneyBot Lures in Digital Troublemakers”
MIT nerds come up with a tasty target for IoT hackers. But this one fights back.
“We Don’t Care About Data Privacy”
Privacy, schmivacy.…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
On April 10, 2018, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress regarding the unauthorized sharing of 87 million Facebook users’ personal data, vacuumed up by data research company Cambridge Analytica. There were pointed questions regarding Facebook’s lack of transparency…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
After my recent extended illness, I was surprisingly shocked to reemerge into organizational life in its broadest terms. Frequently, I engaged in the organizational lives of my students, my friends, my colleagues, and my own workplace.
Everywhere I looked, I found: • Unhappy customers who, after…
Debashis Sarkar
The cheating at Kobe Steel shook not just Japan but the entire manufacturing world. As Kobe Steel CEO Hiroya Kawasaki revealed, about 500 companies had received its falsely certified products, which affected not only those companies but also its entire supply chain. However, the issue at Kobe was…
Chip Bell
The coolest birthday present I ever received was a gift from my wife a number of years ago; it was a white 1962 Mercedes-Benz 220 sedan reasonably well-restored. But the classy antique car, with its deep fenders and leather seats, turned out to be a real lemon. That’s about all I remember about…
