All Features
Alaina Love
It’s usually a prescient sign that it’s not going to be a great meeting when two women walk into your office and one is trembling while the other is on the verge of tears.
Such was the scene early in my career when I was an HR manager for a large organization. Both women were there to see me…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
There is an enemy in your company, and it’s invisible. You can’t see it because it literally is not there. Yet its impact is massive on every level of the enterprise, from boardroom to marketing to operations to the field staff. And the only way we have even the smallest chance of destroying it is…
Ryan E. Day
During the 1950s, W. Edwards Deming championed quality management philosophies that helped Japan develop into a world-class industrial center. In 1954, Joseph M. Juran was invited to lecture by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers. His visit marked a turning point in Japan’s quality…
Joel Smith
In part one of “Gauging Gage,” I looked at how adequate a sampling of 10 parts is for a gage repeatability and reproducibility (GR&R) study and provided some advice based on the results.
Now I want to turn my attention to the other two factors in the standard gage experiment: three operators…
DNV GL
The internet of things (IoT), robotics, augmented reality, 3D printing... look at megatrends, and despite their unique attributes and myriad differences, you’ll find that they all have one thing in common: time—or more precisely, the fact that there’s always less of it.
No matter how long your…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In last week’s Quality Digest Live: Data for artificial intelligence, data for your quality management system, and Karl Popper meets Taiichi Ohno.
“Why AI Is the New Electricity”
Artificial intelligence will have the same impact on the world that electricty has.
“New ISO 20400 Standard Helps…
Davis Balestracci
Don’t tell me you’re not tempted to look when you spot a magazine cover saying, “How does your state rank in [trendy topic du jour]?” Many of these alleged analyses rank groups on several factors, then compare the groups’ sum totals of their respective ranks to make conclusions.
For example, in…
Miguel Noguerol
The restaurant industry confronts many of the leadership challenges that other industries, corporate leaders, and entrepreneurs face. Chefs and chef-owners play a significant leadership role in their organizations through a variety of operational and social processes. Among these leaders, only an…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
Everyone in manufacturing has heard about the fantastic properties of composite materials, but if you’re not involved in satellite communications (SATCOM), you’ve probably never heard of Eclipse Composites. If you are into SATCOM and particularly SATCOM antennas, you know the…
Mike Richman
It’s easy to sit here aghast at the big, attention-getting customer service missteps that have recently blown up into public relation nightmares for United Airlines and American Airlines. These issues aren’t limited to airlines, however. During the past few years, companies in the automotive, life…
Mark Bartholomew
Ethics lawyers and historians have argued that Donald Trump has blurred the line between his public office and private business interests in an unprecedented fashion. In another sense, it’s part of a much larger social trend.
Commercial entreaties, whether in the form of magazine ads, radio…
Knowledge at Wharton
The world of high-tech innovation can change the destiny of industries seemingly overnight. Now we are on the cusp of a new grand leap, thanks to the democratization of machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that enables computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. This…
Anna Nagurney
The American economy is underpinned by networks. Road networks carry traffic and freight; the internet and telecommunications networks carry our voices and digital information; the electricity grid is a network carrying energy; financial networks transfer money from bank accounts to merchants.…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
This column is primarily about human motivation, particularly being motivated by envy, a subject I’ve wanted to write about for years. It is a negative emotion that has been condemned by all cultures throughout history, yet it is a powerful motivator. Envy can be terribly destructive, and…
Sameer Kadam, Mickey Shah
The importance of quality management cannot be overstated. It enables companies to increase efficiency, lower risks, achieve compliance, and build better and safer products. Yet many quality management teams struggle to communicate the value of their operations to other departments and executive…
Harish Jose
I have been reading a lot these days about Western philosophy. The most recent book, All Life is Problem Solving (Routledge, 2001), is by Karl Popper, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. This is a collection of Popper’s writings. One of the great teachings from Popper is the concept…
Joel Smith
‘You take 10 parts and have three operators measure each two times.”
This standard approach to a gage repeatability and reproducibility (GR&R) experiment is so common, so accepted, so ubiquitous, that few people ever question whether it is effective. Obviously, one could look at whether three…
Patrick Nugent
Sponsored Content
Joe Gibbs Racing, a family business founded by former three-time Super Bowl champion Washington Redskins head coach Joe Gibbs, is one of today’s most successful racing teams. In its 25-year history, it has earned four NASCAR Cup Series championships, five NASCAR XFINITY Series…
Fred Faltin
All of us draw conclusions based on what we see happening around us. Often what we’re observing is a sample from some larger population of events, and we draw inferences based on the sample without even realizing it. If the sample we observe is not a representative one, our resulting judgments can…
Inderjit Arora
Certifications often drive the implementation of a system approach, based on ISO standards. The primary implementation demand is for ISO 9001. Certifications do have initial costs and then recurring costs for surveillance and recertification visits. This is a responsive approach to business…
Nirmalya Kumar
Although many large companies are multinational, most of the top management teams (TMTs) in these companies are not. They tend to be dominated by executives with a connection to the home country of the company. Attention is paid to gender diversity, but cultural diversity is often ignored.
One…
Mike Richman
Oh, the places you’ll go! Our latest episode of QDL from this past Fri., May 5, 2017, truly spanned the wide world of quality. Here’s a recap of the topics and locations we visited together:
“Why Japan’s Rail Workers Can’t Stop Pointing at Things” It’s not your imagination: If you find yourself…
Christopher Martin
In 1996, former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington formed Washington-based video-game development studio Valve Corp. Two years later, they released a PC game called Half-Life to universal critical acclaim; it was a watershed moment in gaming history, and nearly 20 years later the…
Andy Molinsky
If you play tennis, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a “second serve.” In tennis, you have two chances to serve the ball, so on the first you can really put everything into it, with little risk, since you always have that second one to fall back on. The key is how you approach the…
Nick Butch
One of my favorite things about being a condensed matter physicist is how broadly defined the subject is. There are lots of interesting phenomena begging for scientific attention, so it’s never boring. One of my favorite topics lies at the crossroads of magnetism and superconductivity.
Magnets…
