All Features
Khatera Sahibzada
Giving feedback is unquestionably one of the most challenging tasks for any leader, as it can be painful to both the giver and receiver. It is nonetheless invaluable: Research has shown that employees recognize the importance of feedback—whether positive or negative—to their career development.…
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…
Katherine McIntosh
In 1970, the Seabee Memorial Association began construction to build a monument in Washington, D.C. to honor the memory of those who served in Naval Construction Battalions. The famous Felix de Weldon—a former Seabee—designed the monument of dark brown marble with bronze figures and a bronze back…
Michael Causey
Former FDA Chairman Robert Califf, M.D., stepped down on Jan. 20, 2017, and it’s not always easy to predict what the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), or any FDA agency, will accomplish under a new chairman. Efforts at quality management could be affected by what appears to be an…
Bruce Hamilton
Most often when we think of a wheel, it’s in the context of transportation, one of the more obvious and ever-present of the 7 wastes in lean. In fact, the first likely use of a wheel and axle was not for transport but for processing—actual work.
According to the Smithsonian, the potter’s wheel…
Bruno Scibilia
Genichi Taguchi is famous for his pioneering methods of robust quality engineering. One of the major contributions that he made to quality improvement methods is Taguchi designs.
Designed experiments were first used by agronomists during the last century. This method seemed highly theoretical at…
William A. Levinson
‘Sitting is the new smoking” is a common new adage. James Levin, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic explains, “Too much sitting also seems to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer.” He adds that sitting for four rather than two hours a day in front of a TV screen increases the…
Adams Nager
Depending on whom you ask, it’s either the best of times or the worst of times for global trade. Protectionists villainize trade as damaging to U.S. workers, while on the other side of the coin, pure laissez faire free traders consider trade as a pure positive for the United States.
Mexico and…
Kevin Meyer
Acquiring new knowledge and perspectives helps you grow within your general area of comfort or interest. To really grow, you need to stretch yourself outside of that comfort zone by learning or experiencing something completely different. In addition to acquiring the new skill, knowledge, or…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Businesses don’t have to chose between being “tree huggers” or “planet plunderers.” Black History Month: NIST employee was one of the developers of the computerized spreadsheet. Metrology: process signature analysis and large-field-of-view, multisensor systems.
“African-American History Month:…
Mike Richman
The U.S. national debt currently stands at approximately $20 trillion. In the time it will take you to read this article, the debt will increase by a couple of million dollars more. Regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum, these facts are stark and shocking.
Thus, it’s no…
NIST
To any of his sports-fan colleagues, NIST mathematician and computer programmer Vernon Dantzler might have been somewhat of a celebrity. Dantzler had been a professional baseball player, and a star shortstop in the Texas circuit of the Negro Baseball League during the early 1940s, before the…
Harish Jose
The world of systems is very wide and deep, and this column can’t be perfect and all-encompassing. My goal here is to emphasize that solutions based on incomplete models lead to incomplete solutions. I’m not calling them incorrect solutions, just incomplete solutions.
Every problem model is a…
Thomas Kochan
Politicians have traditionally paid lip service to the plight of the worker, but with working class struggles at the top of the new administration’s fix-it list, we will likely hear them talking more than usual about the steps they will take to reduce income inequality or end three decades of wage…
Christine Schaefer
Last month, 2001 Baldrige Award-winning University of Wisconsin-Stout hosted a lively campus engagement session. (See for yourself via this video of the live-streamed event, which kicked off with dancing.) The university holds the “You Said... We Did” sessions each January to demonstrate its…
Andrew Sloan
At times it can be difficult to have a common-sense discussion about the relationship between business and the natural environment. The discourse (maybe argument is a better word) tends to be highly charged, and the opposing camps seem to have lost the ability to listen to each other.
The…
Tom Scaletta
Quality improvement initiatives are a mainstay for hospital care teams. They can also offer a fresh approach for raising patient satisfaction scores. To achieve maximum effectiveness, however, they require timely patient feedback.
Nowhere is this truer, perhaps, than in the high-volume/short-…
Tony Delmercado
Employees who know and understand their company’s core values are 51 times more likely to be engaged fully in their work than those who don’t.
That’s an impressive stat that leaders can’t afford to ignore. Your company’s culture is often what sets you apart from the competition, so communicating…
Mike Richman
Our most recent episode of QDL from this past Friday offered a nice mix of content covering the pros of regulations, transitioning to ISO 9001, the human case for going slow on artificial intelligence, and some dam risk management.
Here’s a closer look:
“Deregulation Under Trump Won’t Create a…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Before my bosses get wind of the artificial intelligence (AI) platform Quill (“perfectly written, meaningful narratives indistinguishable from a human-written one”) and decide its 18-month ROI would be a great exchange for my pay and complaining, I’d like to present this human-centric survey of…
Jeffrey Phillips
The attempt to eliminate noise from an operating system or a business process is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile challenge, until one considers the question: What is the real signal? What is creating the noise?
In many businesses today, there are several signals, what we might call noise…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
In a TED Talk, Geordie Rose, co-creator of the D-WAVE quantum computer, said, “Humans use tools to do things. If you give humans a new kind of tool, they can do things they couldn’t otherwise do—imagine the possibilities.”
Rose was, of course, speaking of quantum computers, but…
Peter Bussey
A central tenet of President Trump’s campaign platform was reducing the regulatory burden on businesses, with the desired effect of facilitating business expansion, job creation, and economic growth. This raises questions about how the regulatory landscape will change and the effect on the…
DNV GL
More than a million organizations around the world embrace the ISO 9001 quality management system (QMS) standard to guide their businesses and operate in the most efficient manner possible. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has recently updated ISO 9001 from its 2008 version…
Davis Balestracci
Just curious: Do you have monthly (and/or quarterly and/or even weekly) “How’re we doin’?” meetings like the end-of-year scenario described in my November and December columns last year—about budgets, financials, never events, incidents, near misses, machine downtime, productivity, root cause…