Craig Cochran
War heroes are a special category of leaders. They embody bravery, resoluteness, and strength—quintessential attributes of good leaders. This is exactly the sort of leader Shakespeare gives us at the...
Brian Hughes
Part one of “To Root Or Not To Root,”presented a dilemma that many managers face all too often. Regardless of approach, does a problem warrant a full-blown root cause analysis? A scan of the...
Bill Kalmar
One of my favorite movies is a dark gangster movie starring Joe Pesci entitled "8 Heads in A Duffel Bag." Pesci, a mob courier is hired to transport the heads of eight murder victims to a...
Knowledge@SMU
In the world of marketing and branding, sticking out like a sore thumb isn’t necessarily bad, advises brand innovation specialist Chandran Dharmarajan, a co-founder of I-morph, a marketing...
Thomas R. Cutler
Lean theory suggests that the possibilities for quality improvement exist everywhere. Rarely does that concept translate to a damaged corrugated box in a warehouse—but it should. The cost of damaged...
Brian Hughes
Jodi Ullman glanced at her watch: 10:25 a.m. She pushed back from her desk, stood up, and stretched—after first peeking out the door of her office toward the cubical maze to make sure no one was...
Akhilesh Gulati
A physics exam question asked students to describe how they would use a barometer to measure the height of a skyscraper. One student who failed the test contested that his answer was correct. He was...
Bill Kalmar
For the past 35 years or so, I have been a runner. My daily routine consists of a five-mile run followed by a seven-mile bike ride. Over the years, I have competed in numerous 10K (6.2 mile) events...
Thomas Hinton
It was Kermit the Frog who said “It’s not easy being green.” With all due respect to my favorite Muppet, I beg to differ. In fact, it’s never been easier to be green. Kermit would be proud to...
John J. Casey
When I was a boy, my grandmother used to read me nursery rhymes to entertain me and teach me about the world. One has resonated with me for years:
"For want of a nail the shoe was lost
For...
Douglas C. Fair
I travel too much. Invariably, though, it enriches me. I typically return with some unusual experience or a new story with which to regale my colleagues. One day, while sitting in another aluminum...
Thomas R. Cutler
One of the most demanding problems lean manufacturing faces in discrete manufacturing is control of first operations, where raw material may be cut into multiple parts. First operations such as...
jmarzola
A mortgage lender in Kansas implemented a customer relationship management (CRM) solution and experienced a 304 percent return on investment (ROI) over three years. Would a similar investment make...
Mike Thelen
As with any lean implementation in a traditional environment, culture change is the most difficult obstacle to success. A company can hire consultants, develop work teams, and begin lean initiatives...
Akhilesh Gulati
Since one of the pillars of lean thinking is the visual workplace, why hasn’t problem solving in the workplace been taken to the visual level?
Flowcharts are popular visual tools that can show...
Ron Kirscht
Donnelly Custom Manufacturing of Alexandria, Minnesota, a short-run injection molding company, knows that proper training is vital to productivity and quality. Still, using traditional methods,...
Gregory Roth II
In the 1990s the theme seemed to be, “Don’t compete against your competitors, buy them and compete with yourself.” It appeared that every company was merging with another. To their stockholders,...
Akhilesh Gulati
Remember way back when you knew Newton’s Third Law, how to do long division, how to solve quadratic equations, and the difference between mean, mode, and median? As quality professionals, we’ve...
Bill Kalmar
To illustrate how out of place he sometimes felt, comedian George Gobel once remarked, “Have you ever felt that the whole world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?” When it comes to...
knowledge.smu.edu.sg
In the world of marketing and branding, sticking out like a sore thumb isn’t necessarily bad, advised brand innovation specialist Chandran Dharmarajan, a co-founder of I-morph, a marketing...
