Content By John Hunter

John Hunter’s picture

Quality Improvement vs. Instant Pudding
By: John Hunter 07/22/2019

I am amazed how difficult it is to convince organizations to adopt quality improvement practices. I look at organizations that I interact with and easily see systemic failures due to faults that can be corrected by adopting management improvement strategies that are decades old. Yet executives resist improving. The desire to retain the comforting embrace of existing practices is amazingly strong.

What usually sells to executives are ideas that require little change in thinking or practice but promise to eliminate current problems. What W. Edwards Deming called “instant pudding” solutions sell well. They are what executives have historically “bought,” and they don’t work. I can’t actually understand how people continue to be sold such magic solutions, but they do.

John Hunter’s picture

How to Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement
By: John Hunter 11/24/2015

I have discussed steps to take to build a culture of continuous improvement in numerous posts on my Curious Cat Management Improvement blog. What it boils down to is building a system that supports that culture. Your culture is the result, not your aim.

David Heinemeier Hansson put it well recently in his essay, “CEO’s Are the Last to Know”: “But the bottom line is that culture is what culture does. Culture isn’t what you intend it to be. It’s not what you hope or aspire for it to be. It’s what you do.”

To create a culture that enhances your effort to continuously improve, you must create systems that move things in that direction. Part of that system will be the continuous assessment of how your organization is falling short of your desired culture. This requires honest assessment of the current state, and it requires those in leadership to design systems to get a clear picture on what is really happening in their organizations.

John Hunter’s picture

An Interview With Masaaki Imai
By: John Hunter 11/30/2012

Masaaki Imai is a consultant, author, and founder of the Kaizen Institute. The second edition of his book, Gemba Kaizen (McGraw-Hill Professional, 2012), was published in May. He agreed to an interview with The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog.

The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog (TDI): Did you work with W. Edwards Deming?

Masaaki Imai: I never had the privilege of meeting Dr. Deming. I can say that Deming’s teachings were great revelations to Japanese management, which built many kaizen practices in Japan based on his principles.

TDI: Deming saw mobility of top management as a disease of Western management. The turnover creates a focus on short-term results while deemphasizing long-term thinking and often results in executives that have little experience with the organization they are suppose to help lead.