Risk assessment and continual process verification (CPV) are fundamental regulatory requirements for pharmaceutical companies to ensure drug safety, efficacy, and quality.

Pay. It’s the topic we love to avoid. We don’t discuss it with friends or family. It’s verboten at cocktail parties. Heck, we discuss cancer, religion, and abortion at dinner parties more easily than we talk about our paychecks.

Investors and business leaders are always on the lookout for the next big thing, the paradigm shift that will upend industries and change the world. The hope is to get in early and ride the wave—or at least avoid getting flattened by it.

Throughout history, leaders have been seduced by success, leading them down a path of hubris. This ancient Greek term, literally translating to “excess,” describes a state of exaggerated self-belief and arrogance.

In less than two months we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the control chart, a tool most often associated with statistical process control (SPC). Considering SPC from our modern perspective made us ask, “Is SPC still relevant?”

This year I have committed to being a more curious gardener: to be willing to grow some things I haven’t grown before and see what happens. I decided to try growing one of my favorite fruits—papaya!

Everyone knows customer service is increasingly automated and impersonal—that’s a “dog bites man” story. It’s not news because it happens all the time. When a man bites a dog, that’s news.

When presented with a collection of data from operations or production, many will start their analysis by computing descriptive statistics and fitting a probability model to the data. But before you do this, there’s an easy test that you need to perform.

‘She wanted to return a cake that was almost gone. How bad could it have been? Normally, if something is spoiled or not up to standards, it’s returned almost intact. This thing was a pile of crumbs.