(Michigan Metrology: Livonia, MI) -- Michigan Metrology, experts in solving problems related to surface texture, wear, finish, and friction, will share their expertise in a two-day course, April 1–2, 2020, in Livonia, Michigan.

“This course is designed for scientists, engineers, and technicians working in medical devices, automotive, aerospace, materials, polymers, and other fields,” says Don Cohen, Ph.D., who will lead the two-day workshop. “In recent years we have seen a great deal of interest in surface metrology and tribology education. This class offers material that will benefit both relative novices and advanced metrology users who want to further their understanding of these essential topics.”

After a patient has a heart attack or stroke, doctors often use risk models to help guide their treatment. These models can calculate a patient’s risk of dying based on factors such as the patient’s age, symptoms, and other characteristics.

While these models are useful in most cases, they do not make accurate predictions for many patients, which can lead doctors to choose ineffective or unnecessarily risky treatments for some patients.

“Every risk model is evaluated on some dataset of patients, and even if it has high accuracy, it is never 100-percent accurate in practice,” says Collin Stultz, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. “There are going to be some patients for which the model will get the wrong answer, and that can be disastrous.”

Stultz and his colleagues from MIT, IBM Research, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School have now developed a method that allows them to determine whether a particular model’s results can be trusted for a given patient. This could help guide doctors to choose better treatments for those patients, the researchers say.

In part one of this series, I said that I want to help my colleagues use their ISO 9001 implementation as a profit center and to turn risk-based thinking into risk avoidance. To do this I will share a set of tools that help evolve quality management into business management.

These tools include:
• Evolving the requirements of ISO 9001's Section 4 from merely defining the context of the organization to working with senior management to create, implement, and make shared vision, mission, and values a cultural imperative
• Redefining Section 5 to include roles and responsibilities for everyone in the organization that are measurable and inextricably tied to the key business success goals and metrics
• Including in Section 6 the tools and culture of risk avoidance
• Evolving Section 7 from support to an outcome-based, risk-and-reward culture
• Expanding the scope of Section 8 into a holistic business management system
• Redefining Section 9 from performance evaluation to an enterprisewide culture of individual and team accountability
• Expanding Section 10 from continual improvement to business excellence

It has been a little more than two years since I last summarized the topics that are keeping CEOs up at night, either thinking about challenges their organizations face, or opportunities and innovations that should be explored. I ended that column by stating that I looked forward to taking another look a few years down the road to see how those challenges and opportunities have changed. Well, we are now down the road.

As in the past, the findings presented below are generally applicable across industry sectors (including government and other nonprofits) and to organizations of all sizes. Also, as in the past, I have combined what I have heard from senior executives, what I have read in blogs and publications of all types, and what I have learned from 11 specific studies. I have identified six areas that are important to CEOs as we enter the next decade. Many of these areas are logical outgrowths of the topics highlighted in the 2017 study, but with new twists and a greater sense of urgency. Agility is the key word, and as the title of this column suggests, CEOs sense a forward-looking need for perpetual reinvention.