Davis Balestracci
During the early 1990s, I was president of the Twin Cities Deming Forum. I had a wonderful board whose members were full of great ideas. One member, Doug Augustine, was a 71-year-old retired Lutheran...
Alison Hawke
Historically, quality in a process was something that was done at the end of the line. You inspected your widget once it was made, and if it had flaws, you fixed it or threw it out.
As in many...
Mike Richman
I recently sat down with Doug Fair, the chief operating officer of InfinityQS, for a discussion about the uses (and sometimes, the misuses) of industrial statistical analysis. Ours was a lengthy...
Jeanita Pritchett
Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) career outreach programs play a pivotal role in shaping the capabilities and makeup of the future workforce. Generally speaking, “STEM outreach”...
Stanford News Service
Team leaders often focus on product details. Founders obsess over fonts. Sales managers fixate on tough-to-wrangle customers and shop owners on the minutia of shelf displays. Yet, all too often,...
Mike Richman
IMTS was a blast, but it was great to be back home in lovely Northern California this week. On this episode of QDL, we covered the skills that workers need and the innovations that organizations want...
Bill Kalmar
One of our greatest inventions was the TV remote. Before this clever invention, we had to rise from our cushy chair and walk to the TV to change the channel or adjust the volume. With the TV remote,...
Gary Marchionini
As millions of people came online iduring the late 1990s, they needed help figuring out what each web page was about, and how to find what they were looking for. Web indexes and search engines sprang...
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
In the foreword of Mark Graban’s book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More (Constancy Inc., 2018), renowned statistician, Donald J. Wheeler, writes about Graban: “He has...
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...
Bita Kash
Can you imagine a future where the question, “Did you bring a copy of your test results?” becomes entirely unnecessary? That could happen, but the methods that most healthcare providers use to...
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
We’re almost done with another great IMTS, and we had a ball seeing old friends and meeting new ones while bringing you all the action right here on QDL. In this, our final episode from Chicago, we...
Knowledge at Wharton
‘How is it that in the middle of a relatively small town of about 125,000 people in Minnesota, you’ve got the No. 1-rated healthcare system probably in the world?”
The question was put to Jeffrey...
Grant Ramaley
The Dental Trade Alliance learned from its members in February 2018 that the Canadian Health Ministry (“Health Canada”) had contacted the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) and the British Standards...
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...
Jack Dunigan
Do you know the one thing you can do to light the fire of motivation, energy, creativity, and self-propelled action in your employees?
The discovery of gold in Northern California lit off a tidal...
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
We arrived in Chicago over the weekend to luxuriously appointed accommodations and much fanfare (that’s how it is when you’re the cast and crew of the No. 1 talk show in the quality industry). In our...
Donald J. Wheeler
In “Data Snooping Part 1” (Quality Digest, Aug. 6, 2018) we discovered the basis for the first caveat of data snooping. Here we discover three additional caveats of data snooping.
Last month we...
Bill Bellows
In February 1990, W. Edwards Deming traveled to Western Connecticut State University (WCSU) in Danbury, Connecticut, to deliver three lectures: an afternoon session with students, immediately...
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...
