“The Awakening” is a 70-foot sculpture by J. Seward Johnson that depicts a man struggling to free himself from the earth.

 Story update 10/7/2010: We edited the last sentence of the first paragraph to reflect an amendment from the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program.

You can check a person’s vital signs—pulse, respiration, and blood pressure—manually or by attaching sensors to the body.

Editor’s note: This is the first of a series of columns from Larry Williams, author of the soon-to-be-released book Customer Service A to Z.

Editor’s note: Several weeks ago, a young woman by the name of Aly Fields contacted us wanting to learn more about “quality” in general and Six Sigma in particular. A recent college graduate, Aly had taken it upon herself to earn a Six Sigma Yellow Belt. Why? Read her own words below.

I recently experienced the pain associated with coaching a team with poor chemistry. It happened within a kaizen event team, so the pain was finite, being that a kaizen event is a rapid improvement of a limited process area.

(ASTM: West Conshohocken, PA) -- Three-dimensional laser scanning is an emerging technology that holds great promise for capturing dimensionally accurate information about an object or scene by collecting millions of dense measurements quickly.

(Paton Professional: Chico, CA) --  Thousands of aerospace manufacturers and engineers around the world use AS9100 as a guide to making quality parts and a way to comply with governm

Leadership would be easy if it weren’t for those we lead. As any leader or manager knows, getting people to actually want to do the tasks you need them to do can be a challenge.