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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…
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…
Historically, quality in a process was something that was done at the end of the line. You inspected your widget once it was made, and if it had flaws, you fixed it or threw it out.
As in many modern manufacturing environments, quality in software has become a process you do from start to finish.…
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…
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…
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…
One of our greatest inventions was the TV remote. Before this clever invention, we had to rise from our cushy chair and walk to the TV to change the channel or adjust the volume. With the TV remote, we are able to change the channel, raise or lower the volume, pause or record a program, fast…
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…
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…
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…
(Verisurf Software: Anaheim, CA) -- Verisurf Software, Inc. announced today its commitment to provide Universal compatibility between legacy CMMs and its popular measurement software for automated quality inspection, reporting, scanning, reverse engineering, tool building and assembly guidance.…
Can you imagine a future where the question, “Did you bring a copy of your test results?” becomes entirely unnecessary? That could happen, but the methods that most healthcare providers use to exchange healthcare information are little different than they were 5,000 years ago, when physicians…
Can you imagine a future where the question, “Did you bring a copy of your test results?” becomes entirely unnecessary? That could happen, but the methods that most healthcare providers use to exchange healthcare information are little different than they were 5,000 years ago, when physicians…
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-…
‘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…
The Dental Trade Alliance learned from its members in February 2018 that the Canadian Health Ministry (“Health Canada”) had contacted the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) and the British Standards Institution (BSI). Health Canada had ordered these certification bodies to stop issuing ISO 13485…
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…
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…
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-…
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- In the book, Health Care in the Next Curve (CRC Press, 2018), author John Abendshien takes an objective and sometimes scathing look at the current industry structure: a silo-driven culture and entrenchment that is driven by self-interest, as well as the complicity of…
In “Data Snooping Part 1” (Quality Digest, Aug. 6, 2018) we discovered the basis for the first caveat of data snooping. Here we discover three additional caveats of data snooping.
Last month we discovered:
Here we will use the data set from Part One to illustrate three additional caveats. The…
Mary Parker Follett, a pioneering business consultant, was asked to help a troubled window shade company. The company’s thinking was narrow and limited. When asked to define their business, they said, “We produce window shades.”
She asked them “What business are you really in from your customer’s…
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…
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…
