Over the years, I’ve beaten myself up over business breakdowns, lost relationships, and countless other failures. I would only look at what I’d done wrong and where I was at fault. And, of course, this would only make me feel worse.

We establish reliability goals and measure reliability performance. Goals and measures can be related; however, they’re not the same, and neither do they serve the same purpose.

There was a time when manufacturers thought that “hot test”—a test at the end of the assembly line of a fully functional engine—was the only way to ensure that each unit had been assembled to perform as expected.

Summer with its balmy evenings and long talks with good friends, lemonades in hand, is over. Let’s set the groundwork for this new season and get our definitions in place, once again—the difference between visual and lean.