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 followed by one with faculty and staff of the business school, followed by an evening lecture open to the general public.

IMTS is almost here, so we previewed the show, considered an important industry-academia partnership within manufacturing, and asked serious questions about the nature of motivation. Let’s take a look:

 IMTS Preview

This week’s show contained a range of fun and interesting content from some of our favorite corners of the world of quality. Here’s what we covered:

 “More Unidentified Museum Objects”

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a wealth of crazy old artifacts from measurement days of yore, and every once in awhile they dust them off to see if anyone knows what they are. We hazarded a few guesses.

During the past decade, advances in understanding of cancer biology have led to the development of targeted treatments that are more effective than the chemotherapies of the past century. These therapies are demonstrating response rates large in magnitude or response durations prolonged in early trials, or both. Patient demand to enter these trials has increased, and so have calls to expedite the drug development and approval processes, all while maintaining high standards for safety and efficacy.

T

he federal government just made it a lot easier to form an employee-owned business.

When it comes to manufacturing, details are crucial. Every part of your product design is meticulously strategized, and quality control is integrated through the entire manufacturing process to guarantee the final product is exactly how it was intended. When the details are so vital, you don’t want to take any chances with your data. By integrating a document management system into your processes, the quality control process can be streamlined in a number of ways.

A novel encryption method devised by MIT researchers secures data used in online neural networks, without dramatically slowing their runtimes. This approach holds promise for using cloud-based neural networks for medical-image analysis and other applications that use sensitive data.

Technological innovations on all fronts are evolving quickly and are developed, manufactured, and sold worldwide in aerospace, medical device, communications, automotive, and many other industry segments. It’s hard to keep up with these breakthroughs because they are growing exponentially. But despite all the technological innovations, one critical issue has persisted since the first industrial revolution during the mid-1800s: the engineering, manufacturing, and quality “interpretation” by companies’ suppliers, whether internal or external.

Alan Colquitt is a student of the ways people act in the workplace. In a corporate career that spanned more than 30 years, the industrial-organizational psychologist advised senior managers and human resources departments about how to manage talent—always striving to “fight the good fight,” he says, and applying scientific rigor to his job.

Retention is challenging for many organizations, especially in today’s tight labor market, where 63 percent of full-time employees say it is “somewhat likely” or “very likely” that they could find as good a job as the one they have now.

Retention can also be complicated. Pay and promotions alone can’t keep your best people. And your top performers likely come from different generations and demographic backgrounds.