Making the most of its position as an important seaport, Venice’s remarkable economic development during the Middle Ages relied on network effects, contractual innovation, and coordination among the players involved in long-distance trade. Companies today still exploit these mechanisms to succeed in underserved markets.

In times of organizational crisis, some companies are able to right the ship, while others sink under the pressure.

Every company is in business to take risks.

Every action or failure to take action by that company naturally has some form of risk inherent in the process. To survive, a company needs to identify opportunities and take them when beneficial, but the amount of risk must be understood. Whether it’s determining to pursue new markets and make new investments or discontinuing those pursuits, risk is built into the nature of business.

The July 17, 2017, episode of QDL focused on some of the nitty-gritty of quality improvement, from the value of personal certifications to the opportunities of disruptive innovation, and to the fundamentals of risk management to the challenges of customer service. In case you missed it, here’s a closer look at last week’s show:

Operations and safety don’t always speak the same language, not because operations isn’t committed to keeping people safe at work or safety isn’t concerned with meeting operational goals, but rather because each area has its own methods, processes, and measures. This communication gap can increase when ergonomics is added to the mix.

Recently a segment on my favorite morning news program stopped me in my tracks. The young and attractive hosts (why are they always so young and attractive?) were demonstrating new appliances, among them a smart refrigerator. The fridge was equipped with all kinds of high-tech features including touchscreen displays, a camera inside that allows you to see the contents, and wi-fi connectivity. You can see inside your fridge while grocery shopping, how convenient! But I must ask, how secure is it?

Is your governmental hospital exempt under Section 501(c)3? If you have a 403(b) plan, the answer is yes, but even if you don’t, you need to check.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is ramping up compliance audits of governmental hospitals that are exempt under 501(c)3 (dual status). The circumstances leading up to now are important because the implications can be difficult to understand.

The dynamic of risk management and compliance seems to be experiencing a shift toward risk management in operations, and learning to pay attention to detail in order to leverage it.

The biggest question often asked is, “I’m aware my company needs to pay great attention to the detail of risk, but I don’t know where to start, or even how to put it into practice.”

For a long time, medieval medicine has been dismissed as irrelevant. This time period is popularly referred to as the “Dark Ages,” which erroneously suggests that it was unenlightened by science or reason. However, some medievalists and scientists are now looking back to history for clues to inform the search for new antibiotics.

‘We’ve always done it that way” explains why many suboptimal and even obsolete methods are taken for granted. The range chart for statistical process control (SPC) is, for example, somewhat inferior to the sample standard deviation chart, and it is almost certainly a holdover from when all calculations had to be done manually.