All Features
Joerg Niessing
Since Covid-19’s arrival, digital resilience increasingly refers to the strategic use of digital technologies in delivering customer value and business growth despite adversities. Indeed, some industries—such as hospitality, higher education, or traditional retail—were hit more than others because…
Lola Butcher, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
In February 2020, the month before Covid-19 hit Boston, Partners Healthcare, the huge health system that includes Massachusetts General Hospital, treated 1,600 patients via video visits. By April, the number of patients seeking care through…
Greg Hutchins
My recent epiphany was that the lens for all work and even for everyday living during the next few years will be risk-based. Why do I make this case?
In January 2020, my company was selected to participate in the largest pitch fest in the Northwest, TechfestNW, which was originally scheduled for…
Tom Taormina
Each article in this series presents new tools for increasing return on investment (ROI), enhancing customer satisfaction, creating process excellence, and driving risk from an ISO 9001:2015-based quality management system (QMS). They will help implementers evolve quality management to overall…
Ben Brumfield
Dang robots are crummy at so many jobs, and they tell lousy jokes to boot. In two new studies, these were common biases human participants held toward robots.
The studies were originally intended to test for gender bias, that is, if people thought a robot believed to be female may be less…
Chip Bell
One of my favorite movies is Stripes. Starring Saturday Night Live comedians Bill Murray and John Candy, the 1981 hit movie features a scene in which new Army recruits (including Murray and Candy) are in a “get-acquainted” circle with their basic training platoon sergeant. Each recruit tells the…
Tom Taormina
Each article in this series presents new tools for increasing return on investment (ROI), enhancing customer satisfaction, creating process excellence, and driving risk from an ISO 9001:2015-based quality management system (QMS). They will help implementers evolve quality management to overall…
Sarah Simon
Throughout my career, I’ve enjoyed the thrill of several transitions between parallel (related but different) professional camps. In each case, there was some level of misalignment between professional villages, ranging from misunderstanding to distrust and even acrimony.
Three major transitions I…
Quality Digest
It’s easy to assume that something as simple as a mask wouldn’t pose much of a risk. Essentially, it’s just a covering that goes over your nose and mouth.
But masks are more than just stitched-together cloth. Medical-grade masks use multiple layers of nonwoven material, usually polypropylene,…
Grant Ramaley
The International Accreditation Forum (IAF), the association of conformity assessment accreditation bodies worldwide, held an emergency meeting after confirming what appears to be an outbreak in the use of fake ISO 13485 certificates. ISO 13485 is a quality management system standard particular to…
Carrie Van Daele
Crossing the street or stepping backward when you encounter another person has already become a habit, as has a routine elbow bump, instead of a handshake.
And that is definitely what is needed during a health crisis. But when the time is right, as a society we must bounce back to social…
Gleb Tsipursky
So many companies are shifting their employees to working from home to address the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Yet they’re not considering the potential quality disasters that can occur as a result of this transition.
An example of this is what one of my coaching clients experienced more than a…
Annette Franz
There’s a little bit of irony in the title of this article. Why do we have to make sure the customer—and employee—experience is crisis-ready? Well, as John Kennedy said, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”
Back in November 2012, I wrote an article titled, “Are You Ready for…
Donald J. Wheeler, Al Pfadt
Each day we receive data that seek to quantify the Covid-19 pandemic. These daily values tell us how things have changed from yesterday, and give us the current totals, but they are difficult to understand simply because they are only a small piece of the puzzle. And like pieces of a puzzle, data…
Bill Kalmar
Have you noticed that coupons have become a major part of our lives? There are always coupons for restaurants or stores in most of the newspapers these days. And it seems that every day, we receive an email about a deal at a local store, but it requires a coupon.
Last month was my birthday month,…
Chip Bell
The “camp” where we board our cat is fantastic. Our cat gets “tree time”—a giant climbing structure with tunnels and carpeted “trees” to climb and scratch. She gets the best of tender loving care, complete with brush-outs and nail trims. But try and contact the camp hands-free from your car, and…
Rebecca Spang
Arnold Schwarzenegger tweeted a video of himself on March 15, 2020, saying: “No more restaurants.” Seated in his palatial kitchen with two miniature horses, Whiskey and Lulu, beside him, the former California governor pronounced: “We don’t go out; we don’t go to restaurants. We don’t do anything…
This is supposed to be trade-show season. The time when companies send their employees to industry tech shows and user-group meetings to see and experience the latest offerings in their field. A time when companies expend a good portion of their budget on booth space, shipping costs, and hotel and…
Kevin Meyer
A couple weeks ago a consultant friend of mine, who coincidentally focuses his practice on lean in healthcare, was complaining about issues with his healthcare providers. It’s a story we hear often: doctors running late, very short and often superficial consultations, a rush to diagnosis, and a…
Rupa Mahanti
We are currently living in the digital age and are drowning in an ocean of data. Organizations have a large number of data entities and data elements, and a large volume of data corresponding to the same, and they continue to amass more and more data with each passing day. With the large amount of…
Ian Golding
During the last five years, a small number of organizations have been featured multiple times in my writing. In the vast majority of cases, I have used these businesses as a way of bringing to life global best practices in the field of customer experience management.
It is inspiring to be able to…
Jim Benson
‘It’s the shoes!” Spike Lee yelled into the camera on the Air Jordan ads.
But it was never the shoes. Michael, Magic, and LeBron would have outplayed their leagues in golf cleats.
It was never the shoes.
But it was us, the salespeople. In our case, the intelligencia that “trains” people to be…
Michael Baxter
You would expect a building where vinegar is made to have a sour smell, highly pungent, perhaps with a whiff of apple. World Technology Ingredients (WTI) smells nothing like this. Their manufacturing facility, off a county two-lane in Jefferson, Georgia, has a vaguely mineral aroma. More dry than…
Knowledge at Wharton
Have you heard of a media company called T-Series? Chances are, you probably haven’t. Gulshan Kumar, whose résumé up to 1983 read, “Fruit juice seller, streets of New Delhi,” founded it that year. Since its inception, T-Series has become an unlikely media powerhouse—its YouTube channel has 119…
Clinton Ballew
Legislative support is growing for the reimbursement of care delivery via telemedicine. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of Inspector General have recently made final and proposed rule changes to stimulate greater use and access for telemedicine delivery. These…
