The one complaint—the one problem—that nearly every company puts at (or very near) the top of its list of challenges is communication. George Bernard Shaw, the famous Irish playwright, sets us straight on this when he said: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has…

Sponsored Content As widely useful and broadly applicable as it may be, the ISO 9001 standard covering general requirements for quality management systems (QMS) cannot address all stakeholder needs in every sector. Component functions and operations of discrete industries often require additional…

You can be known as a hard worker and counted on to tie up loose ends, but fall behind when co-workers’ tasks are on hold until yours are complete, and you’re perceived as needing an attitude adjustment. What would you want to do? Place blame or work on a remedy? There is a solution: Personal…

F unny I should be writing this op-ed at this time, as our friend and colleague, Quality Digest’s editorial director Taran March, is currently traipsing around Paris and its surrounding environs, no doubt enjoying a baguette or brioche or some other culinary delight. Gratefully, that’s about the…

For me, Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo are a bit like the Lennon and McCartney of waste elimination. Together they frame the technical and social sciences of what we call lean today. Taiichi Ohno tells us there are seven wastes that account for 95 percent of the elapsed time between “paying and…

I remember my first trip to Michigan in 2012. I was covering the Ford Motor Co.’s annual Trend Conference and had the opportunity to meet Alan Mulally, who gave a compelling presentation explaining the vision, strategy, and implementation of the One Ford plan. I was impressed more with the man…

It was September 1901, in Dayton, Ohio, and Wilbur Wright was frustrated. The previous year, 1900, he had built and tested, with his brother Orville’s help, their first full-size glider. It was designed using the most up-to-date information about wing design available. His plan had been to “kite”…

Three transportation revolutions are in sight, and together they could help reduce traffic, improve livability, eventually save trillions of dollars each year, and reduce urban transportation carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 80 percent or more worldwide by 2050. That’s according to a report…

Do Less Better is the name of my book (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Do less better is also a culture and a strategy of organizations and their leaders. Do-less-better practitioners are fanatical about focus and simplification; herein lies the secret of their success. Yet, do less better isn’t…

People have touted the potential of big data and computation in medicine for what feels like decades, promising more effective and personalized treatments, new research discoveries, and smarter clinical predictions. But only recently have these technologies made it to the clinic, where they can…

There is an enemy in your company, and it’s invisible. You can’t see it because it literally is not there. Yet its impact is massive on every level of the enterprise, from boardroom to marketing to operations to the field staff. And the only way we have even the smallest chance of destroying it is…

During the 1950s, W. Edwards Deming championed quality management philosophies that helped Japan develop into a world-class industrial center. In 1954, Joseph M. Juran was invited to lecture by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers. His visit marked a turning point in Japan’s quality…

The American economy is underpinned by networks. Road networks carry traffic and freight; the internet and telecommunications networks carry our voices and digital information; the electricity grid is a network carrying energy; financial networks transfer money from bank accounts to merchants.…

Depression and mental health conditions are on the rise globally. Affecting more than 300 million people of all ages across the world, depression causes immense suffering to people and their families, as well as placing a great economic cost on society. Its consequences and solutions were…

Traffic crawled. Ahead of me was a pickup, its bumper thick with stickers. From the one most cracked and faded, I saw the word “welfare.” Just before the driver switched lanes, I made out the rest: “Work harder—there are millions on welfare depending on you.” That triggered a memory so vivid I no…

Supplier quality assurance (SQA) is the process that ensures a supplier reliably provides goods or services that satisfy the customer’s needs. This process is collaborative to make certain the supplier’s offerings meet the agreed-upon requirements with minimum inspection or modification.…

As manufacturing becomes increasingly oblivious of where one country stops and another begins, the responsibilities of quality managers have extended beyond the safely measurable and into the loosely regulated wilds of global competition. Quality control now requires a sense of how different…

Sponsored Content Particles of metal in children’s medicine. Adulterated baby formula. Spontaneously combusting smartphones. When scandal is only a tweet away, companies can’t hide from quality failures. High-profile quality problems like these can not only harm consumers, but also lead to huge…

The notion of a successful distributed team seems like a wonderful yet unobtainable dream. But stop and think: How often are your nondistributed teams successful? When have they been successful, and why? It’s never because of your plan, or because you hired the best people. It’s not because you…

‘Made in the U.S.A.” Do people really care about those words on the label, and more important, how motivated are they to buy American-made products? The answer is yes... and sort of. Yes, consumers in the United States say they want to “buy American” and are willing to pay up for it. According to…

Most often when we think of a wheel, it’s in the context of transportation, one of the more obvious and ever-present of the 7 wastes in lean. In fact, the first likely use of a wheel and axle was not for transport but for processing—actual work. According to the Smithsonian, the potter’s wheel…

Depending on whom you ask, it’s either the best of times or the worst of times for global trade. Protectionists villainize trade as damaging to U.S. workers, while on the other side of the coin, pure laissez faire free traders consider trade as a pure positive for the United States. Mexico and…

At times it can be difficult to have a common-sense discussion about the relationship between business and the natural environment. The discourse (maybe argument is a better word) tends to be highly charged, and the opposing camps seem to have lost the ability to listen to each other. The…

The attempt to eliminate noise from an operating system or a business process is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile challenge, until one considers the question: What is the real signal? What is creating the noise? In many businesses today, there are several signals, what we might call noise…

For several decades, manufacturers have been pursuing lean on their shop floors to reduce costs and improve lead times through waste elimination and process improvement. They have been less successful, however, in reaping lean’s potential benefits in their purchasing, planning, and supply chain…