Matthew Barsalou
I see a weakness in management models. It’s not the models themselves that are the problem, but rather their application in smaller organizations. Those of us with either business experience or a...
Matthew Barsalou
A list of quality gurus can range from just a few individuals to 50 or more. Several people make it onto most lists: W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Armand Feigenbaum, Phil Crosby, and Walter...
Matthew Barsalou
There are many tools available for investigating quality problems. One useful and easy-to-use set of statistical tools is John W. Tukey’s exploratory data analysis (EDA), which quality engineers...
Matthew Barsalou
Have you ever received a customer complaint with blurry photos and a demand for immediate action, but insufficient detail to actually take that action? Or the customer, in his or her haste to...
Matthew Barsalou
W. Edwards Deming was a frequent critic of quotas. One of his famous 14 points presented in Out of the Crisis (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982) is “Eliminate work standards (quotas) on...
Matthew Barsalou
Bruce Hamilton recently wrote about his former colleague Manny S., whom he referred to as a “Lesser God.” The article reminded me of my former colleague Jose P., who trained me in my first quality...
Matthew Barsalou
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, and has yet to be definitively found. But the lack of wreckage or even an idea as to what happened isn’t sufficient to stop the first...
Matthew Barsalou
While reading a list of 5S activities, I thought, “Am I mistaken?” The activities on the list didn’t match what I thought they should be. I dug a little deeper and discovered there has been a lot...
Matthew Barsalou
The famous baseball player and sometimes philosopher Yogi Berra is credited with saying, “The future ain’t what it used to be,” and he really got that prediction right. Things are nothing like I...
Matthew Barsalou
Recently, a friend from my undergraduate days complained that he was written up at work for low productivity. He operates a forklift in a warehouse and was informed that he only reached 97 percent...
