All Features
Paul Laughlin
As I started reading The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie (Basic Books, 2018), I was reminded how often analysts trot out the bromide “correlation is not causation.” It’s a well-known warning. Indeed, I often encourage those learning data…
Donald J. Wheeler
Students are told that they need to check their data for normality before doing virtually any data analysis. And today’s software encourages this by automatically providing normal probability plots and lack-of-fit statistics as part of the output. So it’s not surprising that many think this is the…
Richard S. Hawkes
Adapted from Navigate the Swirl by Richard Hawkes, CEO of Growth River
How many meetings have you been in that caused you to ask yourself, “Why am I here? What am I doing? What’s the purpose of this meeting? Are we accomplishing anything?” I call this “The Swirl.”
High activity, low focus.…
Quality Digest
This year’s World Conference on Quality and Improvement (WCQI) will be a hybrid event—online and in person—scheduled for May 15–18, 2022, in Anaheim, California. Themed as “The art and science of quality,” the conference will explore the symbiotic relationship between human and scientific aspects…
Bruce Hamilton
In 1985, about the time I was discovering there was a better way to produce products, The Natural, a film about an aging baseball player with extraordinary talent, was garnering multiple Academy Awards. This archetype concerning natural “God-given” abilities is common in Western culture—in sports…
Gleb Tsipursky
The biggest falsehood in business leadership and career advice may also be the most repeated: “Go with your gut.” Surely you’ve heard this advice often as a decision-maker, as well as some variations of that phrase, such as, “Trust your instincts,” “Be authentic,” “Listen to your heart,” or “Follow…
Kate Zabriskie
‘Kendra, I think you’re going to do wonderfully at this next task. You have a good eye for detail, and that’s exactly what’s required here.”
“Tom, you have a real knack with people, and I’d like you to take on a temporary role in account management. I think you will thrive based on what I’ve seen…
NIST
To combat Covid-19 amid supply shortages in 2020, healthcare facilities across the United States resorted to disinfecting personal protective equipment (PPE), such as N95 masks, for reuse with methods such as ultraviolet (UV) light. But questions lingered about the safety and efficacy of these…
Sowmya Juttukonda
By 2035, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to increase business productivity by up to 40 percent. It’s already a part of people’s daily lives and its use is only expected to increase to solve more critical problems that assail our world.
Businesses are looking at AI to achieve cost-…
Eric Pauley
Organizations’ failure to properly manage the servers they lease from cloud service providers can allow attackers to receive private data, as research my colleagues and I conducted has shown.
Cloud computing allows businesses to lease servers the same way they lease office space. It’s easier for…
Mark Hembree
As a late Boomer, I can say my particular age group is better positioned than any to marvel at and bemoan what’s become of journalism and publishing in the last 40 years.
Not that I’m a Luddite. The advent of word processors was a boon to ham-fisted typists like me. A word processor that actually…
Andrew Myers
Standard image sensors, like the billion or so already installed in practically every smartphone in use today, capture light intensity and color. Relying on common, off-the-shelf sensor technology—known as CMOS—these cameras have grown smaller and more powerful by the year and now offer tens-of-…
Jonathan Gilpin
Regardless of how much we, as a society, are able to implement and use technologies in business, global supply chains will always be dependent on the ways in which people interact with one another.
Even local supply chains can be problematic, but it’s predominantly global ones that can pose…
MIT News
The Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program (GEL Program) recently revamped and relaunched Engineering Design and Rapid Prototyping (D-PRO), a Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics course last taught in 2012. It was updated to center on a new multidisciplinary project focused on…
Gleb Tsipursky
The future of work—of hybrid and fully remote workers—will require upskilling of employees for organizations that wish to succeed in the post-Covid world. Leaders who want to seize a competitive advantage in that future will need to benchmark their training initiatives for best practices on…
Brittney McIver
At some point, every medical device company will encounter an issue that requires an internal investigation. Whether it’s due to a nonconformance, complaint, CAPA, or an audit issue, you’ll have to conduct a failure or root cause investigation to pinpoint why the issue occurred in order to resolve…
Marc Lepere
As the war in Ukraine rages, finance professionals on Wall Street and in Europe recently attracted outrage by suggesting that investing in arms manufacturers should be treated as ethical investing. In the fight against tyranny, they argued that such an investment “preserves peace and global…
David Chandler
Industrial processes for chemical separations, including natural gas purification and the production of oxygen and nitrogen for medical or industrial uses, are collectively responsible for about 15 percent of the world’s energy use. They also contribute a corresponding amount to the world’s…
Knowledge at Wharton
Negotiating a salary increase or a job promotion ranks high on the list of hard conversations to have at work, and it doesn’t get any easier without a plan.
“People think, ‘I’m just going to knock on their door, sit down with them, and noodle around and see where this goes.’ That’s not a plan,”…
William A. Levinson
Ryan Day1 describes how the rise of independent auto dealers is a “gray swan” event for the automobile industry. This was not only bound to happen, as observed by the author, but also long overdue. The article states, “...current state laws prohibit OEMs from selling new vehicles directly to…
Bryan Christiansen
Top management often struggles to approve large sums required for annual maintenance because the expense is seen as a necessary evil. As a result, if a business encounters short-term financial constraints, the first place it looks for savings is maintenance.
This is why your maintenance budget can…
Anthony Tarantino
In 2007, Nassim Taleb described black swans as highly improbable events that had dramatic or even catastrophic effects on markets and economies. Until recently, it seemed that such events were indeed rare.1 There’s now a major rethinking with the world entering the third year of the Covid-19…
NIST
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have discovered a potential source of error when using acoustic waves to measure the properties of fluids such as blood. Their discovery raises the possibility of more accurate diagnostic tests for certain types of blood…
Bhaskar Ramakrishnan
To ensure vehicular and pedestrian safety, it’s imperative that brake discs are of superior quality to enable safe braking distances, which is a key metric. Any imperfections on a brake disc can cause safety hazards, heating of the brake assembly, and increased wear and tear. Maintaining tighter…
Susan Robertson
Every year in the spring, Amy B., a buyer for a large retail chain store, hosts an Easter egg-decorating, team-building party, where she and a bunch of her suppliers spend an entire afternoon coloring and bedazzling hard-boiled eggs. None of them bring their kids.
They do this for the sheer…
