All Features
Bruce Hamilton
Last month I joined Eric Buhrens, CEO at Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), to host a leadership team from Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center. They were on a study mission to many of Boston’s fine hospitals and were winding up their week with a visit to LEI. Early in the discussion, one of our guests…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Supply chains’ last-mile delivery has become the new Pony Express. Like that famous but short-lived courier service, the global supply chain is focused on completing the final segment between supplier and customer—which in reality is anywhere between six and nine miles, according to a recent study—…
Christopher Martin
A couple months back I stopped at a local fast-food place for a quick kid’s meal (not for me) after picking up one of my little ones from school. Inside, we were greeted by an employee in an otherwise empty dining area, and no line. As we approached the counter, he asked how we were and if we were…
Ruth P. Stevens
In business-to-business (B2B) direct marketing, I’m often asked about what kind of response rates to expect about the most productive media channels, the best lists, the best time to conduct a campaign, the most effective qualification questions. I always answer the same way, much to the…
Hilke Plassmann
The rise of neuromarketing has already begun to provide companies and researchers with greater insight into consumer behavior than consumers themselves are capable of giving. Neuromarketing tools such as facial-affective recognition, eye tracking, and fMRI technology can illuminate the…
Annette Franz
I had another column in the hopper, but when this article came across my desk, followed by a phone conversation with Bob Chapman, I knew I needed to write something different, something that is top of mind for me now—and often—as I work with my clients. The article? “Beyond Nice,” which you can…
Rob Matheson
Carrying your smartphone around everywhere has become a way of life. In doing so, you produce a surprising amount of data about your role in the economy—where you shop, work, travel, and generally hang out.
Thasos Group, founded at MIT in 2011, has developed a platform that leverages those data,…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In our April 13, 2018, episode of QDL, we talked about anti-hacker robots, data privacy, and new product introduction.
“HoneyBot Lures in Digital Troublemakers”
MIT nerds come up with a tasty target for IoT hackers. But this one fights back.
“We Don’t Care About Data Privacy”
Privacy, schmivacy.…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
On April 10, 2018, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress regarding the unauthorized sharing of 87 million Facebook users’ personal data, vacuumed up by data research company Cambridge Analytica. There were pointed questions regarding Facebook’s lack of transparency…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
After my recent extended illness, I was surprisingly shocked to reemerge into organizational life in its broadest terms. Frequently, I engaged in the organizational lives of my students, my friends, my colleagues, and my own workplace.
Everywhere I looked, I found: • Unhappy customers who, after…
Debashis Sarkar
The cheating at Kobe Steel shook not just Japan but the entire manufacturing world. As Kobe Steel CEO Hiroya Kawasaki revealed, about 500 companies had received its falsely certified products, which affected not only those companies but also its entire supply chain. However, the issue at Kobe was…
Chip Bell
The coolest birthday present I ever received was a gift from my wife a number of years ago; it was a white 1962 Mercedes-Benz 220 sedan reasonably well-restored. But the classy antique car, with its deep fenders and leather seats, turned out to be a real lemon. That’s about all I remember about…
Annette Franz
Do you feel like you’re not making the progress in your customer experience (CX) transformation efforts that you thought or hoped you would by now?
You started years (not months—it’s a journey) ago, but you don't think your organization has evolved.
What’s the reason for that?
I’ve seen several…
Curt Redden
We all seem to get it by now—more engaged employees perform at a higher level. The organizations that get their strategy right in this area provide a superior customer experience, have lower levels of employee churn, higher morale, and ultimately much higher financial performance. Their customers…
Willie L. Carter
What differentiates a lean-thinking organization from a traditional one? Basically, the lean-thinking organization is grounded in the answers to two simple questions: “What do my customers value?” And, “What organization and work processes inside my company will most directly deliver that value?”…
Stephen McCarthy
Cost of quality (CoQ) is certainly not a new topic. It was first described in 1956 by American quality control expert Armand V. Feigenbaum in a Harvard Business Review article. As you likely already know, CoQ consists of four categories: internal and external failures, and appraisal and prevention…
Knowledge at Wharton
When Tide and other detergent manufacturers developed colorful, convenient pods designed to be tossed into washing machines and dishwashers, they never expected teenagers would try to eat them. But what was dubbed the “Tide pod challenge” quickly went viral, with teens posting videos of themselves…
George Hall
Every year, would-be suitors spend lots on cards, nice trinkets, flowers, and even chocolates, trying to win the attention of their sweetheart or crush. It can be a dangerous game of risk and chance, quite often resulting in disappointment for one or both parties.
This is, I believe, most likely…
John Bell
I have written more than a 100 blog posts about leadership, strategy, and culture. Within that portfolio are several accounts of business reinvention and transformation. Yet it was only a few months ago that I composed my first post on another type of reinvention: personal reinvention. My own. …
Julia Russell
Retailers and brands convened in New York recently to experience the National Retail Federation’s Retail’s Big Show, and one of the biggest topics on attendees’ minds was technology. From automation to personalization to social marketing, the growing importance of technology in the shopping…
Ryan E. Day
As a journalist in the quality improvement field, I try to keep an eye on emerging technology that can help us do things better, faster, and more efficiently. Naturally, the internet of things (IoT) is cropping up more often. IoT is all about connected devices, that is, connected to the internet,…
Brian Rogers, Karel Cool, Christophe Angoulvant
Disruptive ventures arise from mobile device ubiquity, data-powered AI, and digital platforms that connect buyers and suppliers in new ways. They are reshaping industries such as transportation (e.g., Uber, Lyft, and Didi Chuxing), hospitality (e.g., Airbnb and FlipKey), payment services (e.g.,…
Michael Lynn
Some journalists and other social commentators have in recent years called for the abolition of restaurant tipping, primarily because they argue that it hurts workers. Several restaurateurs have even replaced tipping at their restaurants with automatic service charges or inclusive pricing.…
Kostya Kimlat
A sale, like a great magic trick, occurs inside the customer’s mind. And it is there where it is replayed, remembered, and redefined continually afterward. Because magicians are masters of perception, they understand how to get into the heads of their prospects better than anyone else. That’s why…
Carrie Van Daele, Ronee Franklin
The key to being an explorer lies in what you do with your creative thinking and attitude, which allow you to consider different points of view. Like the explorer, you look for probabilities and possibilities. This is what is known as creative thinking skills: having the ability to create…
