All Features
Caroline Preston
Editor’s note: This story is part of Map to the Middle Class, a Hechinger Report series looking at the good middle-class jobs of the future and how schools are preparing young people for them.
The program had to be a scam. Why would anyone, she wondered, pay her to go to college?
Even after Sarat…
Morgan Ryan Frank, Iyad Rahwan
How do workers move up the corporate ladder, and how can they maximize their career mobility? Increased wealth disparity, increased job polarization, and decreases in absolute income mobility (i.e., the fraction of children who earn more than their parents) all suggest that upward mobility is…
Ken Albala
Trade wars have an interesting way of revealing cultural stereotypes.
Countries often propose tariffs not on the most valuable items in their trading relationships—since that would be painful to them as well—but rather on products iconic of national character. A good example of this came in the…
Thomas Andresen Gosselin
Whoever coined the phrase “it’s a small world” clearly doesn’t work in supply chain management. The earth maintains a relatively constant size of roughly 196,900,000 square miles of surface area, but in the last decade or so, the scope and complexity of global supply chains have expanded…
Jeffrey Phillips
Ihave been thinking a lot lately about innovation and how we may have emphasized one component at the expense of another. Here I’m talking about something that should appear obvious—the focus of innovation in building new things. We are constantly reminded that innovation is about building new…
Tara García Mathewson
Some of the most celebrated education reform efforts today serve to make instruction more difficult. Personalized learning, project-based learning, mastery-based learning—they all require more work of teachers and more work of students.
But several speakers at the LearnLaunch Across Boundaries…
Aiman Sakr
Does your organization benefit from lessons learned? Does it learn from previous quality issues? A vast amount of learning takes place every day in every manufacturing facility. Do global manufacturing companies share experiences gained from resolving quality issues between overseas plants? And…
Tom Kevan
MELD Manufacturing has commercialized a metal production process that promises to enable 3D printing to carve out a greater role in the manufacturing sector.
Until recently, manufacturers’ efforts to apply 3D printing in large-scale production areas have been thwarted by inherent limitations of…
Dirk Dusharme
In our July 6, 2018, episode of QDL, we discuss distributed manufacturing, and distributed management.
“Brother Moonshine, Sister Solution”
If want to spur innovation, try moonshine.
“3D Printing Finds a Custom Foothold in Manufacturing”
3D printing is leading to some pretty interesting…
Sharona Hoffman
On June 12, 2018, the American Medical Association announced that drug shortages pose an urgent public health crisis. This crisis should be of concern to all Americans.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines a drug shortage as a “period of time when the demand or projected demand for a…
Eryn Brown, Knowable Magazine
In ancient times, the story goes, cooks in the city of Sybaris were granted yearlong monopolies for the sale of unique dishes they created. Since then, generations of inventors have relied on patents to discourage copycats from stealing their best ideas. Economists, in turn, have tallied up patents…
Ryan E. Day
Business partnerships are nothing new. Partnerships that result in leaner manufacturing processes, more consistent quality, and lower manufacturing costs—that is worth talking about.
With global competition so fierce, manufacturers must always be keen to spot areas of muda (waste). Even seemingly…
Tim Lozier
Quality management systems (QMS) have become strategic components that touch more and more of the business today. With new versions of QMS standards, and the enrollment of all people in the quality management effort, the need for cohesion from one system to the next is becoming critical.
Let’s…
Guy Courtin
The digital age is well underway, and that accounts for every aspect of business. A 2016 Boston Consulting Group (BCG) survey says that companies that digitally transform their supply chains will be leaders in their industries.
With 10-percent better product availability and 24-percent faster…
Mike Richman
During the June 1, 2018, episode of QDL, we presented a special look at the parameters of relations between the United States and China, from the shifting perspectives of culture, trade, and history. Dirk and I, along with Quality Digest CEO Jeff Dewar, offered up our thoughts on what it all means…
Dick Wooden
Iran across the book, Successful Human Relations: Principles and practice in business, in the home, in government (Harpercollins, 1952) while browsing older books about relationship development from William J. Reilly, who also wrote The Law of Intelligent Action (Joanna Cotler Books, 1945). His…
Jim Benson
Human beings are good at placing roadblocks to success and building plans that can’t be followed. We tend to fall back on our “common sense” or “snap judgement” which often makes us feel like our cavalier decisions were actually thought out. Yet, time and again, we find ourselves in deadline…
Chip Bell
The 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 35th Academy Awards. Given the current conflicts in the Middle East, I recently watched the four-hour movie to learn more about the cultural history of the area.
Thomas Edward Lawrence (played by Peter O’Toole) was a British…
Jeff Dewar
What a week. On April 30, 2018, there were top-level delegations from two disciplines: In Beijing the Chinese hosted a cabinet-level delegation of U.S. trade representatives; and in Seattle, the ASQ hosted the Sino-U.S. Quality Summit, the first of its global summit series as part of its annual…
Qing Shan Ding
Tensions are escalating between China and the United States over trade. The Chinese government has announced retaliatory measures on a range of U.S. products, including cars and some American agriculture products after the United States listed 1,333 Chinese products to be hit by punitive tariffs of…
Ryan E. Day
With the threat of a trade war between China and the United States looming, business relations between Asia and the West have not been this hot a topic since the Japanese Economic Miracle that was birthed shortly after WW II. Today, it is China’s turn on center stage as its soaring economic growth…
Mike Richman
In part one of this article, we discussed the origins of the United States and China, and how their relationship began to emerge.
Many people might point to the United States as the ultimate example of a laissez-faire, free market, unfettered capitalist system. Some would also say that China…
Dirk Dusharme
In part one we saw that China has made great strides in terms of product quality, notably in the tech sector. But it still has a long way to go in other products. Driven by the growing middle class, who like all middle class buyers want value for their money, and by the Chinese government’s desire…
Ken Voytek
Without manufacturing, the room where you make dinner would be rather stark and barren. There’d be no pots, no pans, no stoves, no spatulas, no appliances—big or small. There’d be no way to prepare the meals that give you and your family sustenance. With no counter, there wouldn’t even be a place…
Dirk Dusharme
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese products were synonymous with cheaply made. Anyone over the age of 50 probably remembers cheap Japanese transistor radios when they were a kid. We all believed, in the day, that the more transistors a radio had, the better. That wasn’t necessarily true, but try…