Last year I discussed the problems of transforming data prior to analysis (see my August 2009 column, “Do You Have Leptokurtophobia?,” my September 2009 column, “

People can make plenty of mistakes when launching a lean enterprise transformation. Interestingly, many of these mistakes are similar if not identical to those made by entrepreneurs when starting a business.

Sometimes it’s interesting to watch trends develop from the relatively safe perch of business media. A press release from Aveta Business Institute last week drew my attention because it wasn’t doing what 99.9 percent of all press releases do: selling something.

As my quest for knowledge and understanding of the real world continues, I decided to meet with an old professor of mine.

Throughout the last couple of articles, I have explained and illustrated that understanding the random sampling distribution (RSD) of a statistic is key to understanding the entire basis of inferential statistics.

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.

In my August column, “How to Turn Capability Indexes Into Dollars,” and my September column, “The

Systems thinking requires a massive change in the way organizations design and manage work. Old thinking must be flushed out so that new and better thinking can replace it.

I attended a talk in 2006 given by a world leader in quality that contained a bar graph summary ranking 21 U.S. counties from best to worst (see figure 1).