“It's amazing what you can accomplish as long as you don't care who gets credit.”

Harry Truman spoke those words, and they quickly became a mantra for competitive teams. Great players want to play with great players. Talented colleagues want to work alongside their equals.

Here’s the catch, though: As a manager, it’s your job to cultivate camaraderie. And you better own your responsibility because without structure and purpose, your most talented workers will happily bounce.

“Although there’s an assumption that stress and pressure push employees to perform more, better, and faster, what cutthroat organizations fail to recognize is the hidden costs incurred.”
—“Proof that Positive Cultures are More Productive,” Harvard Business Review

Should business leaders spend more time asking questions? Hal Gregersen has a firm answer to that: Yes. Gregersen, the executive director of the MIT Leadership Center and a senior lecturer on leadership and innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been studying executives for decades. Time and again, he has noticed, the most successful managers are among the most inquisitive people in business.

I recently wrote an article about innovation during 2018, and in it I made some disparaging remarks about Apple, which may or may not have caused it to lose a tremendous amount of market capitalization. Or perhaps the stock was overvalued, and Apple has become more interested in margin than in innovation. I’ll let you, gentle reader, be the judge.

During the last few decades, studies in neuroscience have shown that you can literally physically rewire your brain. You can change the “default network” you were born with, the one that ensured the survival of our primitive ancestors who lived in a very different world.

“People think that if you collect enormous amounts of data you are bound to get the right answer. You are not bound to get the right answer unless you are enormously smart.”
—Bradley Efron

On Oct. 13, 2018, the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) sponsored a webinar on the status of the AIAG Core Tools Software (AIAG CTS). John Cachat, AIAG project manager for the AIAG CTS project, was the presenter for the webinar. The presentation provided information on why the AIAG was developing the AIAG CTS as well as the current status of the software’s development.

Story update 1/15/2019: Thanks to the sharp eye of Dr. Stan Alekman, who spotted an inconsistent value in figure 2, I discovered an error in the program used to construct the table of critical values for the prediction ratio. I have now corrected that problem and updated the entries in the table in figure 2. If you previously downloaded this column, you might want to download the corrected version below.

One of my favorite things to do when I learn new and interesting information is to apply it to a different area to see if I can gain further insight. Here, I am looking at the principle, “Chekhov’s gun,”  named after the famous Russian author, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), and how it relates to gemba.

A few years ago I wrote about a Facebook exchange between two friends of mine that upset me because one of my friends resorted to name-calling instead of addressing the other friend’s arguments. In retrospect, that was mild. More recently I’ve been shocked by some disturbingly excessive name-calling, in the comment sections of articles I’ve read, that was directed at other commenters. The name-calling is bad enough, but the number of people who find that to be an acceptable method for engaging in debate is appalling.