Defects can cause a lot of pain to your customer. They can also cause a lot of pain inside your body.

Arecent call with an old colleague from Europe got me wondering about a question that few are conscious of: Who is the customer of your quality document? Oh boy, did we have an interesting discussion about quality systems.

As Napoleon once said, a picture is worth a thousand words. This isn’t just a trite cliché. Visual thinking is an invaluable skill, if not a leadership art.

When I was a boy, I heard a story about a hot-dog stand owner, who would put on a clown costume, then stand on the sidewalk every day and wave motorists into his business. He was so successful he was able to send his son to college.

A recent article in The Washington Post,

If your company is ISO-certified or thinking about becoming so, you may already know that meeting customer requirements and achieving customer satisfaction is paramount to the certification.

The time observation form, also known as a process study form, is a basic and often-used tool for lean practitioners. Note that here we are talking about applying the continuous time-observation method and not the work-sampling method.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion km) from our sun.