This week’s show contained a range of fun and interesting content from some of our favorite corners of the world of quality. Here’s what we covered:

 “More Unidentified Museum Objects”

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a wealth of crazy old artifacts from measurement days of yore, and every once in awhile they dust them off to see if anyone knows what they are. We hazarded a few guesses.

T

he federal government just made it a lot easier to form an employee-owned business.

When it comes to manufacturing, details are crucial. Every part of your product design is meticulously strategized, and quality control is integrated through the entire manufacturing process to guarantee the final product is exactly how it was intended. When the details are so vital, you don’t want to take any chances with your data. By integrating a document management system into your processes, the quality control process can be streamlined in a number of ways.

Alan Colquitt is a student of the ways people act in the workplace. In a corporate career that spanned more than 30 years, the industrial-organizational psychologist advised senior managers and human resources departments about how to manage talent—always striving to “fight the good fight,” he says, and applying scientific rigor to his job.

Retention is challenging for many organizations, especially in today’s tight labor market, where 63 percent of full-time employees say it is “somewhat likely” or “very likely” that they could find as good a job as the one they have now.

Retention can also be complicated. Pay and promotions alone can’t keep your best people. And your top performers likely come from different generations and demographic backgrounds.

Is your organization built on a culture of trust?

Look around you; there are plenty of clues as to whether trust abounds. How quickly are decisions made? How many people do you copy (or worse, bcc) on emails? Do executives check in on the “troops” even when on vacation?

Given that 82 percent of workers don’t trust their boss, trust is a scarce resource in many organizations.

ISO 9001:2015, clause 6.1 requires an organization to identify its risks and take actions to address identified risks. It is very tempting to start with a huge list of potential risks for the organization, but is the organization focusing on the actual risks that have an effect on its operations? To perform an effective risk assessment, an organization must first identify the uncertainty in its processes.

Lead generation is a major preoccupation of the typical B2B marketing department. Indeed, most B2B marketers report that leads—with an emphasis on quality leads—are their primary goal. So, let’s review the top prospecting tools and techniques that are working for B2B marketers today. And if you have any that I’ve missed, please chime in.

As a consumer, it’s nearly impossible to get away from videos, advertising or otherwise. To give you a numeric sense of our collective obsession with online moving images: Since last year, YouTube has started registering more than a billion hours of video viewing every single day.

During a TED talk, Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, talks about “How to turn a group of strangers into a team.” Although long-standing teams are able to perform, our workplaces today require ad-hoc collaboration between diverse groups. The question is: What kind of leadership, and what kind of structure, contribute to working together on the problem?