All News
When my mother looked at the prices of new hats, studied their features, and then went home and tried to remodel her old hat with feathers or lace to look like those fancier models, I saw the value of doing things yourself—for my mother, an attitude perhaps shaped by her own parents and their…
Books and their authors can be very influential. They can initiate widespread awareness of a subject and maintain loyal followings long after the publication of their best works. However, when you read books about lean management, or follow influential lean authors, how confident are you that the…
The United States now ranks not first, not second, not third, but 12th among developed nations in terms of business startup activity. Hungary, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Israel, and Italy all have higher startup rates than does the United States.
Our single most serious economic…
(Tooling U-SME: Dearborn, MI) -- Committed to raising awareness of the importance of human capital to ensure sustainability of manufacturers in the long term, Tooling U-SME, an industry leader in manufacturing training and development, is introducing a new white paper, People Power: Human Capital…
Isaac Asimov’s mystery stories often begin with a guest of the Black Widowers being asked, “How do you justify your existence?” On a darker note, George Bernard Shaw said of the concept of eugenics, “If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you’…
I really can’t make this stuff up.
I wrote a post a couple of years ago titled: “How to Talk to Your Kids About... Quality Improvement,” in which I lamented about Community Hero Day in my daughter’s first-grade class and the need to explain to her why I wasn’t at the “community-hero level” of…
My wife, Carole, and I recently saw And So It Goes, a film with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton. Michael Douglas’ behavior in the movie reminded me of one of Stephen R. Covey’s classic habits in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon & Schuster, anniversary edition 2013). The habit…
I've been presenting at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) annual forum for 21 consecutive years. Maybe the biggest surprise from these two decades has been the awesome power of simply "plotting the dots," i.e., plotting important organizational data in their naturally occurring time…
On the eve (sort of) of the biggest day of the year for the advertising industry (for commercials, anyway... love those Super Bowl commercials), I’d like to share some thoughts about the common disconnect between advertising and the customer experience.
Or, as Robert Stephens, co-founder of Geek…
(MCA: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Motion Control Association (MCA), the global trade group for the motion control industry, has launched a completely redeveloped website. Motion Control Online originally launched in 2006 and has grown to become the leading global website for motion control and related…
Ah, the ubiquitous cell phone. So versatile. So indispensable. So short-lived. We make one billion of them every year because we can’t live without them, yet we cast them aside every 18 months on average. They collect in heaps and shipping containers around the world, their once-coveted designs…
On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall found gold in Sutter’s Creek next to John Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. By 1849, the gold rush was reaching full steam. Some 300,000 gold seekers (called 49ers because of the year in which they travelled) made the journey across the continent or around…
(Edmund Optics: Barrington, NJ) -- Edmund Optics (EO), the premier provider of optical components, introduces its new broadband IR laser mirrors. These mirrors feature high damage thresholds and are ideal for demanding infrared (IR) laser applications, such as those using quantum cascade or CO2…
Think about success: How do you define career success, and how do you know when you’ve attained it? Perhaps there’s a particular salary level you’d like to reach, or maybe achieving success means working in your dream job. But think a little deeper. Say you get that dream job; imagine what would…
Pitch interval (Ip) can be thought of in two ways: as a unit of time representing the (usually) smallest common pitch shared among a range of products, services, or transactions that are being produced, conveyed, performed, or executed by a given resource(s); and as a count of the number of…
Irecently received a letter from my bank asking me to submit certain documents, apparently required by “know your customer” (KYC) regulations. I was a little surprised to receive this letter, for just a few months earlier, I had already submitted these documents in response to a different request…
Mindfulness has become all the rage in personal and professional leadership these days, which is good and bad. Understood and done right, it’s a powerful concept. As with most concepts, however, it’s also often misunderstood, and therefore sometimes maligned and even misapplied. In this way,…
A recent survey conducted by LNS Research revealed that 43 percent of manufacturing professionals don’t understand the Internet of Things (IoT). Although this may be cause for some concern, it’s not entirely surprising. There is something important lurking behind the fact that although most have…
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Organizations and individuals are invited to help support the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program by becoming Baldrige sponsors. Sponsors support a range of products and services, including the 27th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore on April 12–15…
The folks at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) released their sometimes optimistic, but always enlightening guidance wish list and overall priorities for 2015. Let’s take a look.
CDER director Janet Woodcock recently said these are her agencies “front burner” priorities: •…
(Alliance Sensors Group: Moorestown, NJ) -- H. G. Schaevitz LLC, Alliance Sensors Group (ASG) has expanded its sensor product offering by adding a line of LR-19 Series inductive linear position sensors, which are contactless devices designed for factory automation and a variety of industrial or…
The title of this article is a search term that recently hit The Lean Thinker site. It’s an interesting question—and interesting that it gets asked.
“Kaizen” is now an English word—it’s in the OED—and defined as such: “Noun. A Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working…
Leading a balanced life is a critical aspect of performing well as a leader. There are two types of balance. We always think about work/life balance in terms of “how much time do I spend away from the office?” You probably spend more hours at the office than you do away from it with your friends…
There are many tools available for investigating quality problems. One useful and easy-to-use set of statistical tools is John W. Tukey’s exploratory data analysis (EDA), which quality engineers can use for generating hypotheses. Tukey’s EDA provides many different methods for looking at data, and…
Have you encountered the following situation? A company has no time for quality, and therefore has more and more business problems. So they spend even more time fire-fighting, and as a result has even less time for quality, and so on.
I call this the quality paradox.
Figure 1: The vicious cycle…
