All Features
Nirmalya Kumar
Although many large companies are multinational, most of the top management teams (TMTs) in these companies are not. They tend to be dominated by executives with a connection to the home country of the company. Attention is paid to gender diversity, but cultural diversity is often ignored.
One…
Mike Richman
Oh, the places you’ll go! Our latest episode of QDL from this past Fri., May 5, 2017, truly spanned the wide world of quality. Here’s a recap of the topics and locations we visited together:
“Why Japan’s Rail Workers Can’t Stop Pointing at Things” It’s not your imagination: If you find yourself…
Christopher Martin
In 1996, former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington formed Washington-based video-game development studio Valve Corp. Two years later, they released a PC game called Half-Life to universal critical acclaim; it was a watershed moment in gaming history, and nearly 20 years later the…
Andy Molinsky
If you play tennis, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a “second serve.” In tennis, you have two chances to serve the ball, so on the first you can really put everything into it, with little risk, since you always have that second one to fall back on. The key is how you approach the…
Nick Butch
One of my favorite things about being a condensed matter physicist is how broadly defined the subject is. There are lots of interesting phenomena begging for scientific attention, so it’s never boring. One of my favorite topics lies at the crossroads of magnetism and superconductivity.
Magnets…
Brooke Pierce
As high deductibles and escalating costs drive patients to take a more active role in their healthcare, providers are waking up to the fact that they need to pay attention to what buyers want. But uncovering those consumer insights and using them to drive organizational strategy remains a…
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 •…
Shobhendu Prabhakar
Whenever the term “nonconformance report” (NCR) comes into project home offices or construction and fabrication sites, it is often seen as a negative, and personnel are typically reluctant to accept it as a positive and powerful tool to improve. Perhaps, the “non” in nonconformance is the reason…
Annette Franz
In May 2016, I spoke at CallidusCloud Connections (C3); if you’ve never been to this event, be sure to check it out this year. The topic of my session was “The Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Experience.” Given the topic of today’s post, I seem to be on a bit of a spiritual customer-experience…
John Valachovic
So often business owners make decisions based on intuition, luck, or the Magic 8-Ball. As a small or midsized manufacturer, there are so many factors that can affect your company’s profitability, both inside and outside of your control. How do you make proactive decisions for the betterment of…
Sandrine Tranchard
Depression and mental health conditions are on the rise globally. Affecting more than 300 million people of all ages across the world, depression causes immense suffering to people and their families, as well as placing a great economic cost on society. Its consequences and solutions were…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In last week’s Quality Digest Live: design digital assistance instead of digital assistants, how to make better beer, and closed-loop manufacturing.
“How Digital Media Will Bring Out Our Best Selves in the Workplace”
To improve the workplace, maybe we need a fewer digital assistants and lot more…
Donald J. Wheeler
Here we take a serious look at some nonsensical ideas about capability ratios. Following a quick review of predictability and capability and a brief discussion of the traditional ways of characterizing capability and performance, we will consider the shortcomings of four bits of capability…
Alexa Sussman
Sponsored Content
There’s an old saying that change is never easy. People tend to prefer what is familiar and resist something new because it may be uncomfortable or confusing.
The saying holds true for quality management. Some people would rather stick with their current processes—emails,…
Kevin Meyer
Mindful observation takes effort and practice, but it’s valuable if you want to be a leader. It allows you to watch processes in action and look for small nuances and opportunities for improvement. For example, the wait staff at top-tier hotels do this every day. One waiter is always watching,…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
Traffic crawled. Ahead of me was a pickup, its bumper thick with stickers. From the one most cracked and faded, I saw the word “welfare.” Just before the driver switched lanes, I made out the rest: “Work harder—there are millions on welfare depending on you.” That triggered a memory so vivid I no…
Matthew Barsalou
Although not a quality guru, the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes took a methodical approach to problem solving that can be useful when applied to root cause analysis (RCA) during the investigation of a product or process failure.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a British physician who…
Susan Fowler
My team and I went to SavvyRoo, a cool online brainstorming site where people can enter their question and rank other people’s posts. We asked leaders for their top question about workplace motivation, and out of hundreds of questions, this one surfaced in the top 10: Why are managers such lousy…
Barbara A. Cleary
Complying to requirements and standards is sufficient to meet the objectives of injury and accident prevention, and ensure the health and safety of all employees—right?
In his article, “We’re blinded by compliance bias,” health and safety consultant Dan Markiewicz says no, citing data indicating…
Evan Miller
Sponsored Content
The Mueller Co. was ready for a change. The multiplant manufacturer of water distribution products had an excellent reputation in the marketplace, but that good reputation came at a price. Internal scrap and rework metrics told the story. High costs reduced the bottom line and…
Azadeh Shoaibi
The word “prism” might make you think of a triangular piece of glass that separates white light into a rainbow of colors. But at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it means a powerful, computer-based system that separates critical bits of information from vast streams of healthcare data…
William A. Levinson
Among other requirements ISO 9001:2015, clause 4.4.1 requires an organization to identify the inputs and outputs of the processes of the quality management system; identify the sequence and interaction of these processes, noting that handoffs between processes often create risks; and identify the…
Jeffrey Phillips
Ihave been thinking a lot about the challenges that midsized and larger companies face when trying to do more innovation. It’s not a secret that they need to do more innovation; everyone knows this. It’s not really a secret what innovation is, or what the potential benefits might look like. We’ve…
Jonathan O’Hare
Closed-loop manufacturing and the digital thread are new buzzwords being thrown around a lot these days, but do we understand their significance? In all manufacturing processes, there are three key elements consisting of “sensing, thinking, and acting” that drive your manufacturing productivity.…
Steve Moore
When I entered college in the fall of 1970, I had a nice slide rule (or “slipstick” as some of us called it) that I proudly carried in a leather case to my engineering and chemistry classes. Virtually everyone at North Carolina State University had a slide rule then, but by the time I was a senior…
