Any Company's culture is the boss's, or the top management's, culture: change that, and you will have changed the "world". It's no bottom-up but a top-down process: bosses and top managers should send themselves to the change management training courses, not their employees. And - even so - I hardly doubt that they will change their management style in a week or so. And this holds true for any company, any organization, even Nations. We have a saying: the grandfather founded the company, the father made it grow, but his son sold it - very often for little money. Although nonsensical it may look, it's hard reality. Is there any way out of this dilemma? I sincerely don't know: my first and only idea is that bosses and top managers should be effectively schooled for that job, and that the criteria by which they are selected should be very strict. Thank you.

Great examples, Davis, and besides the obvious problems with culture, it also points to the problems with "business statistics" education. Probably those steeped in the usual enumerative-studies-only classes offered at most schools don't know what you mean when you point out that all the analyses in your story are useless. A quick process behavior chart (either a c-chart or an XmR chart) of the falls data shows that there are no trends, no reason to be surprised or excited either by the zero in October or the nine in November (which actually could have been a ten or eleven).