All Features
Chip Bell
Visioning beyond the customer is the responsibility of every person interested in a competitive advantage.
What do Bill Marriott, Ray Kroc, and Al Hopkins have in common?
No, they are not all people of wealth and fame. In fact, Hopkins is a small-town accountant and part-time preacher. They all…
Zac Cooper
The role of quality starts with product design and moves rapidly across the supply chain to the selling and buying experience, which includes the bidding process. When operating a formal continuous process improvement program, nearly all manufacturing engineers are tasked with some level of quality…
Jessica Higgins
“Although there’s an assumption that stress and pressure push employees to perform more, better, and faster, what cutthroat organizations fail to recognize is the hidden costs incurred.” —“Proof that Positive Cultures are More Productive,” Harvard Business Review
The timeworn industry standard is…
Annette Franz
I still love to hold and read physical books (as opposed to audible or Kindle). I don’t know how many books I added to my library this year, but it was a lot. I thought I’d share some good ones that I’d recommend you add to your reading list for 2019.
These books are not customer experience books…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In this episode we look at bioethics, next-gen manufacturing employees, and the death of Le Grand K.
What happens if customers want designer babies? We discuss the latest news about a Chinese researcher who claims to have edited the genes of two babies. Should society draw a line in the sand?
“…
Annette Franz
I’ve written previously about 11 myths and mistakes about journey mapping, but I should add one more myth, which is really the umbrella myth that likely encompasses all the others: Journey mapping is just a tool.
Nope, it’s not just a tool; it’s not just a workshop: It’s a process. Journey mapping…
Chip Bell
I recently had eye surgery that required me to sleep on my back for two weeks following the operation. I have always slept on my side, ever since I was a kid. My back-sleeping attempts are so challenging, I am never able to nap on those United States to Europe flights. I usually end up burning a…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Last year I was invited to give a lecture on critical thinking to the U.S. Navy. I opened my presentation with a story I’d read in Reader’s Digest magazine as a child. It’s an old story you may have heard before, but it’s a perfect introduction to the importance of critical thinking. Here’s how it…
John Bell
To most of us, the phrase “work that matters” infers job satisfaction. The outcome is lower stress, lower turnover, and higher productivity—in business, a win-win for employees, customers, and shareholders. The logic is infallible. So, I ask you, why is there such a gap between the theory and the…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In this episode we look at a history of quality, how you serve your customer in the housing industry, and what makes a good review.
“Young couples ‘trapped in car dependency’”
Building entry-level housing along highways may give couples the chance to buy a home, but at what cost to them and the…
Tom van Laer
Whether you are booking a hotel room, choosing a restaurant, deciding on what movie to see, or buying any number of things, it is likely you have read online reviews before making your decision.
What makes a consumer review persuasive, though? No matter how short, it tells a story in much the same…
Annette Franz
Traditionally, managers have relied on the annual performance review to provide employees with feedback. However, surveys indicate employees don’t find the process valuable. Simply meeting once a year to discuss their progress doesn’t give employees a thorough sense of their own performance. It…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In this episode we look at data, data, more data, and then... engineering the perfect human?
“Your Data Are Your Most Valuable Assets”
Just what the heck is Quality 4.0? Remember this acronym: CIA. No, not that CIA. Nicole Radziwill explains.
“Applying Smart Manufacturing Technology to Conduct…
Rip Stauffer
I must admit, right up front, that this is not a totally unbiased review. I first became aware of Davis Balestracci in 1998, when I received the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Statistics Division Special Publication, Data “Sanity”: Statistical Thinking Applied to Everyday Data. At the time, I…
Mike Richman
With more than 110,000 expected attendees, IMTS is Chicago’s hottest suburb this week. (I like to refer to it as “Manufactureville.”) Here’s what we covered during our second show of the week, from the booth of today’s sponsor, Q-Mark Manufacturing:
“Tapping Your Employee’s Knowledge”
It’s no…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Mary Parker Follett, a pioneering business consultant, was asked to help a troubled window shade company. The company’s thinking was narrow and limited. When asked to define their business, they said, “We produce window shades.”
She asked them “What business are you really in from your customer’s…
Mike Richman
If you want to keep stretching and improving, you’d better get comfortable with the discomfort of change. People have been saying that for decades, yet each time we successfully adjust to new business developments—or personal developments, for that matter—what’s the first thing we tend to want to…
Annette Franz
Is there a link between corporate culture and the bottom line? In a nutshell, yes. Corporate culture is linked to so many business decisions and business outcomes, you might be surprised.
Today’s article is a follow-on to, “A Fish Rots From the Head Down,” in which I wrote about the need for…
Katie Takacs
As a consumer, it’s nearly impossible to get away from videos, advertising or otherwise. To give you a numeric sense of our collective obsession with online moving images: Since last year, YouTube has started registering more than a billion hours of video viewing every single day.
We all know the…
Chip Bell
Standing in the gate area of Delta Airlines at the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) International Airport, I was watching the monitor to learn if my name appeared on the “upgrade to first class” list. Honestly, I was feeling totally entitled since I fly a gazillion miles a year on Delta.
Had my name not…
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…
Patrick Mork
Whether you work for a startup or a large company, there have never been so many metrics to help you understand how your business is doing. But I would argue that one metric rules them all: the net promoter score (NPS).
NPS represents the willingness of consumers to recommend your product to…
Jeff Dewar
‘There’s nothing we can do about it.”
In a customer service situation, those words are equivalent to “buzz off” (or worse).
Here’s what customer service managers, from healthcare to telecommunications, from utilities to gyms, should have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids: Because employees…
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…
