Toyota’s legendary lean processes didn’t come out of nowhere. They were forged by the fire of urgency in post-World War II Japan when resources were scarce. Toyota innovated—and continued to innovate.

One of my clients, a wireless business-to-business (B2B) telecom company, was experiencing a significant problem in their call center. They were absolutely inundated with calls—most of them problems.

In 2008, the University of North Carolina (UNC) Health Care System faced a challenge: Length of stay per patient at this major nonprofit health system and academic medical center was longer than it needed to be.

In the past couple of articles, we have been having fun together testing whether a measurement device is usable for the crazy purpose of determining if we are actually making product in or out of specification.

What is known as “point mentality” is a knee-jerk response to what appears to be a problem.

Editor's note: At the time this interview was published by Gemba Research LLC, Toyota hadn't announced a fix to the sticky accelerator issue that caused the company to recall approximately 2.3 million select vehicles. On Feb.

In my column of Jan. 7, “The Right and Wrong Ways of Computing Limits,” I looked at the problems in computing limits for average charts.

The purpose of this article is to give you an appreciation of the Quincunx as an educational tool for teaching some of the theory behind the tools and concepts of so-called modern quality management.

In the early 1970s I was a young teenager who was completely caught up in the Zeitgeist. I admired the long-haired rebels and radicals who were engaged in protesting the establishment and developing the counter-culture.