All Features
William A. Levinson
‘I’m shoveling two feet of your partly cloudy off my sidewalk” is an old joke about what happens when meteorologists get the forecast wrong, and there is a similar running joke among quality practitioners. “Your centered Six Sigma process is delivering 580 defects per million opportunities!” That’…
Dawn Keller
Juvenile idiopathic scoliosis. That was the diagnosis given to my then 8-year-old daughter last January. In short, it means that she’s young (under 10), she exhibits an abnormal amount of spinal curvature, and there’s no identified cause (aside from some bad luck).
Emilia’s X-rays indicated an S-…
Good ideas—for new products, new processes, or new services—are terrible things to waste. Yet time and time again, inventions and discoveries that first sprouted in the United States have taken root in the factories and economies of other nations.
Think of computer-controlled machine tools, solar…
Peter Theobald
In 1982 the late, great W. Edwards Deming condensed more than 50 years of innovation and experience into a book designed to be a wake-up call for U.S. industry. That book was called Out of the Crisis (MIT reprint, 2000). At that point in his career Deming’s legacy as a mathematical physicist,…
Paul Sloane
In 1959 Nils Bohlin, an engineer at the Swedish car manufacturer Volvo, invented the first three-point safety belt. It was far more effective than the standard lap belt, like the ones still used on airplanes. Volvo, realizing the importance of this invention, chose not to patent it but rather…
Matthew E. May
My friend Roger Martin (No. 3 on Thinkers50 ranking in 2013) penned a terrific article in The European Business Review on how Tennis Canada, the national governing body for the sport within that country, rose from recent oblivion to now boasting two young players ranked well inside the top 10 on…
As more physicians are integrating their patient electronic medical records (EMRs) with third-party patient portals, they’re looking for clarifications on many issues to stay within the various regulations boundaries and to be meaningful use-attested. It can be difficult to differentiate fact from…
Bob Emiliani
Most professors and many administrators have great difficulty accepting the idea of students as customers. Some put great effort into finding ways to describe students as anything but customers, preferring such terms as “partners,” “empowered learners,” “producers,” and so on.
The resistance to…
Emily Ysaguirre
With the evolution of technology, experts have been able to transform and develop equipment into ways that no one ever thought possible. For example, most people no longer use paper maps as a guide for travel, or phone calls as a means of communication. These have been replaced with portable…
Jim Benson
This is a geeking out on the intersection of W. Edwards Deming and our Lean Coffee format. It is brief and assumes some prior knowledge of the System of Profound Knowledge and Deming’s 14 Points for Management. If you don’t know these yet, please go to the sources. Deming’s writings have had a…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Recently I watched the motion picture Underdogs. It is a formulaic, feel-good movie about a losing high-school football team that’s motivated by a new coach to win a championship.
The coach teaches them the skills necessary to succeed, yet they still don’t win any games. He realizes that what…
Eston Martz
One of my favorite bloggers about the application of statistics in healthcare is David Kashmer, an M.D. and MBA who runs and writes for the Business Model Innovation in Surgery blog. If you’re interested in how quality improvement methods like lean and Six Sigma can be applied to healthcare, check…
Ryan E. Day
The fact is, we humans usually think much bigger than we can do. When that happens, collaborating to bring ideas to fruition becomes crucial for success. From that first time a woolly mammoth made a Neanderthal’s mouth water for a big juicy steak, humans have been working together to solve…
Bruce Hamilton
I sang baritone and sometimes tenor in the St. John’s Lutheran Church choir, according to the key of the hymn we were rehearsing and also depending upon who showed up for rehearsal. There were no tryouts for our choir; willingness to sing on Sunday was the primary requirement for membership. One…
The QA Pharm
At the risk of sounding like a pharmaceutical quality assurance heretic, standard operating procedures (SOPs) often don’t work as intended. In fact, they can do more harm than good by giving a false sense of security: We must be okay; we have procedures for that.
Having procedures is certainly…
Kevin Meyer
Humans tend to abhor chaos, and love to invoke rules to supposedly create order. We like rules because they make us feel protected, aligned, and perhaps operating on a fair playing field.
At the same time, we dislike rules because they can protect us to the point of being smothering, align us to…
Rob Harrison
Training management’s significance is often overlooked by executives, despite its grave importance and interrelationship with compliance, quality, health, safety, and other areas related to business performance. Fortunately, automation, combined with other next-generation software capabilities, is…
jeffdewar
Every spot in the photo below is a galaxy, not a star. Each of them contains perhaps 100 billion stars, and along with them, probably hundreds of billions of planets.
The center area is a supercluster of galaxies, colorfully labeled CL 0024 + 1654, which is five billion light years from us. The…
Karen Martin
When you think of value stream transformation, what are the most common desired outcomes that come to mind? Shorter lead times? Higher quality? Reduced expenses? Expansive thinkers often go beyond these classic performance indicators and aim for improvements such as quicker time to market for new…
Donald J. Wheeler
Author clarification--3/5/2015:It appears that I somewhat overstated my case in this article. I had forgotten that there are some families of distributions where we can estimate the shape of a probability model using the statistics for location and/or dispersion. Because of this, these families get…
Shuo Wang
Are prices in China really as low as they seem? This is not an easy question to answer. Prices for goods imported from China used to be very competitive but are beginning to look less attractive. Sourcing in China has become more difficult as negotiating with a Chinese supplier for a much lower…
Anthony Vianna
Skeleton racing, a high-speed winter sliding sport, was born in Switzerland. The speeds achieved by racers hurtling down the track at more than 90 miles per hour would qualify them for a heavy fine for speeding on Switzerland’s motorways. “And not just that,” states Kristan Bromley, CEO of Bromley…
Joel Smith
I typically attend a few lean Six Sigma conferences each year, and at each there’s at least one session about compensating belts. There are any number of ideas for how to do so, but they commonly include systems that provide a percentage of savings as a portion of pay, or provide a bonus for…
American Customer Satisfaction Index ACSI
Customer satisfaction with retail is down for the first time in four years, according to a report released by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). All brick-and-mortar retail categories show weakening or flat customer satisfaction for the final quarter of 2014. Only Internet retail is…
Annette Franz
Have you ever wondered why customers say they buy your products based on price—and then in the end, they also stop buying because of price?
What’s that phenomenon all about?
In a nutshell, the answer lies in the value received: • for the price paid • relative to the competition or to alternative…
