All Features
Matthew M. Lowe
The medical marijuana industry is being heralded as the new frontier in the life sciences, thanks to the potential of cannabis-derived products in treating ailments that range from chemotherapy-induced nausea to epilepsy and neuropathic pain. If you’re a startup in the industry, what does this mean…
Bill Kalmar
If you have a smart phone, and most people do these days, you realize just how much our lives are controlled by that electronic item we travel everywhere with. There are apps on our phones that allow us to find our car, find our keys, find our friends, or my favorite, find my phone. That is all…
M. Berk Talay
In April, Ford announced that it will be phasing out nearly all of its passenger cars in the United States. If all goes according to plan, 90 percent of Ford’s portfolio in North America will be trucks, SUVs, and commercial vehicles. Its F-150—the most popular vehicle in America—is now poised to…
Janet Woodcock
The staff of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) always tries to utilize cutting-edge science and up-to-date process management, befitting our stature as the global “gold standard” in drug regulation. Maintaining that standard requires us to…
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…
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…
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…
Mohammad Jalali
Like any large company, a modern hospital has hundreds, even thousands, of workers using countless computers, smartphones, and other electronic devices that are vulnerable to security breaches, data thefts, and ransomware attacks. But hospitals are unlike other companies in two important ways. They…
Doug Surrett
The importance of supply chain solutions relative to a company’s efforts to maintain and improve quality are almost impossible to underplay. When enacting quality improvement programs, any company would do well to examine its supply chain model and processes as a fundamental means of improving…
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…
Jon Speer
“I wish there was a way for the FDA to give me a heads-up about my stuff, prior to submission….”
That sentiment was really the basis behind the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) presubmission tool, as I was discussing recently with medical-device quality assurance and regulatory affiars…
Ryan E. Day
So, the Quality Digest team is considering a transition to working remotely for the most part. I and two other associates already do. In part one of this series, I outlined my ad-hoc attempt at creating a computer work space at home. The result was not very pretty.
As I said in part one, my home…
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
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.…
Marin Hedin
Limiting first-year medical residents to 16-hour work shifts, compared to “flexing” them to allow for some longer shifts, generally makes residents more satisfied with their training and work-life balance. It also makes their training directors more dissatisfied with curtailed educational…
Knowledge at Wharton
America’s healthcare system has been on the examining table lately: from the tortuous battle over the Affordable Care Act, to Senator Bernie Sanders’ bill to allow low-cost prescription drugs in from Canada, to the intriguing announcement in January that Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan…
Dirk Dusharme
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…
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…
Mike Richman
During this past Friday’s episode of Quality Digest Live, our weekly web TV show, QD editor in chief Dirk Dusharme and I covered stories about the gig economy and the skills gap and workforce shortages within manufacturing, especially as it relates to metrology, which is the science of measurement…
Chad Kymal
ISO 45001 is the much-anticipated, first ISO-based international occupational health and safety (OH&S) standard. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has tried twice and failed in the past to create an international OH&S management system standard. Although there are a…