While I have been saying this for decades, and while K’ung Fu-tzu implied it millennia ago when he called for a balance of knowledge and action, it takes a while to sink in. W. Edwards Deming showed how simply taking a pencil with paper and plotting the data makes action possible. Experts in data analysis and statistics, such as John Tukey, made exploring data fun and graphic. Donald J. Wheeler and John M. Chambers have taken data analysis to the next level. It is a moronically simple concept… but is hardly practiced anywhere.

I have made numerous trips to China where I helped some first tier and second tier electronic suppliers improve their processes, and thus their products. In fact, there is so much to do that I moved to Taiwan last year. All of the charts that I will show in this article were plotted from tables of data dutifully documented on paper or stored in a computer database. None of the data were plotted before I liberated them for action with a simple graph.

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