All Features
Scott Berkun
The term “set up to succeed” means people have been given most of what they need to do their job well.
Good bosses do more than just set goals and give assignments; they should see themselves as responsible for ensuring that good work happens (see Lefferts Law of Management). First, they think…
Iva Danilovic
New software solutions, designed to help companies digitalize their supply chains, are improving methods of carrying out field work. Transparency of productivity is becoming the driving force of quality optimization. By increasing oversight and collaboration, end-to-end digitalization solutions…
Knowledge at Wharton
Many people work on their goals by engaging in positive actions—hitting the gym, planning a trip, or taking guitar lessons. But they may be overlooking one of the most important tools for effecting change: the power of thought.
Harvard Business School professor emeritus Gerald Zaltman recommends…
Ryan E. Day
I love standards, and whether you know it, you love standards, too. For example, let’s say a bulb in your lamp goes bad. You drive down to the local hardware store, buy a bulb, come back home, change out the bulb, plug the lamp back in, and... it lights up. You just benefited from at least seven U.…
Kelly Kuchinski
Imagine building a brand over decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested in design and development. Sponsorships with celebrity athletes and professional and college teams. Leading-edge marketing making your company one of the top 20 brands in the world. It only takes one incident to unravel…
Knowledge at Wharton
In the 1999 film Office Space, a dark comedy about the mundane conventionality of work, disgruntled software engineer Peter Gibbons tells his new love interest, Joanna, that he hates his job and doesn’t want to go anymore.
When Joanna, played by actress Jennifer Aniston, asks Peter whether he is…
Ryan E. Day
In the manufacturing universe, metal tube fabrication is a world of its own. That being said, the requirements for developing a new world-standard solution for tube bending are common to all manufacturing—be faster, more accurate, and more economical.
With customers like Delta Air Lines, British…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
I had the pleasure of interviewing Whitney Johnson, author of the book, Build an A Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). Whitney has done ground-breaking work in the arena of personal disruption—applying these concepts to…
Mike Richman
Great quality is pretty much the same everywhere, but the cost of poor quality is not equivalent from industry to industry. For example, it’s conceivable (but I hope not probable) that this article may turn out to be a real bomb, or worse, a complete snoozer. What’s the cost of that poor quality?…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
It’s been a year and a month since Stephen McCarthy switched C suites, moving from Johnson & Johnson, where he served as vice president of quality system shared services, to Sparta Systems, where he’s now vice president of digital innovation. His focus has switched as well.
At J&J, he…
Jack Dunigan
Graham was a salesman of specialty products with a proven record of success. His many years of experience had yielded a high degree of confidence in himself and the products he sold, and an advanced level of competence in his craft as a personable, trust-inspiring, responsible salesman.
The retail…
Wendy White
Starting a new facility in the food-processing industry is an enormous undertaking. There are thousands of things that must be accomplished, from hiring and training new staff to ordering and installing equipment. This scenario is a perfect example of “too much to do and not enough time to do it…
Henrik Bresman, Deborah Ancona
A leading supermarket chain in an eastern European Union country feared an 8-percent drop in sales as discounting giant Lidl was about to enter its market. So, in collaboration with researchers, it decided to run a randomized controlled experiment. The goal was to reduce its costly personnel…
Eric Stoop
In 1982, W. Edward Deming’s Out of the Crisis (MIT Press, 2000 reprint) outlined 14 points by which companies could learn from his success in helping to drive the industrial boom of post-World War II Japan.
The idea that quality pays was revolutionary at the time. Today, another revolution is…
Lolly Daskal
When we think of leaders, we don’t often think of failures, but one of the hallmarks of the best leaders is knowing how to fail well.
Successful people are those who have failed at something—and in some cases, many things—but without ever regarding themselves as failures. They take risks, and…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
We interview Stanley Chao, author of Selling to China: A Guide for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (iUniverse, 2018), about the impact of the current U.S.-China trade war. Does China really care, and where do U.S. multinationals go from here? Also, a quick look at Conformance Manager, a web-based…
Wolfgang Ulaga
Offering free services may seem like a good way to keep customers happy, but how much money is your business leaving on the table? By redefining freebies as paid opportunities, B2B firms can generate new sources of income and secure long-term growth.
This not to say that companies should stop…
Manfred Kets de Vries, Katharina Balazs
The global wellness industry is doing superbly, thank you very much. In recent years, it grew a healthy 12.8 percent, becoming a $4.2 trillion market. Whether the lives of wellness consumers are improving at a comparable rate is another matter altogether.
Wellness products and services run the…
Ryan E. Day
Machine-tool manufacturer Cincinnati Inc. has a heritage of building quality products and surviving great challenges. Founded in 1898, and based in the United States, Cincinnati has survived both the Great Depression and Great Recession. Cincinnati’s forward-looking attitude has been a key factor…
Eric Cooper
Due dates. Whether it’s building a house or implementing an enterprise quality management software (QMS) solution, everyone has them, everyone wants them. What does home construction have to do with going live with a new QMS solution? There are actually quite a few similarities.
Create realistic…
Eric Stoop
Experts say that the cost of quality totals roughly 10 percent in the average organization, with some companies facing quality costs of up to 40 percent. If your plant is on the middle to upper end of these estimates, it’s likely company leadership considers your plant in need of immediate…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Who’s more clever, engineers or designers? Alexa-connected toilet, anyone? How do you promote rigorous thinking? We discussed all of that and more during this week’s QDL.
“CES brings you... the Alexa-connected toilet!’ Just when you thought that nothing crazier than your clothes dryer could be…
Mike Richman
Happy New Year one and all! For our first QDL of 2019, we were pleased to present some thought-provoking content on the benefits of compromise, the dangers of rhetorical trickery, and the meaning of Chekhov’s gun. Let’s take a closer look:
Ripped from the headlines Can’t anyone here get along?…
Wes Kao
If you’re a leader, you got to where you are because you think strategically and are killer at execution. You simply can’t get far without being good at both.
Now that you’re in charge of people, though, your ability to increase impact depends on how well you manage other people. You need your…
Mike Richman
An industry, and even more so any individual company, is only as strong as its pipeline of incoming talent. This week on QDL we looked at this topic from a few different angles. Here’s what we covered at greater length:
“Ripped From the Headlines: Worker Shortage” A recent article on the Bloomberg…
