In the foreword of Mark Graban’s book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More (Constancy Inc., 2018), renowned statistician, Donald J. Wheeler, writes about Graban: “He has created a guide for using and understanding the data that surround us every day.

‘How is it that in the middle of a relatively small town of about 125,000 people in Minnesota, you’ve got the No. 1-rated healthcare system probably in the world?”

Do you know the one thing you can do to light the fire of motivation, energy, creativity, and self-propelled action in your employees?

The discovery of gold in Northern California lit off a tidal wave of prospectors, who came by the thousands to find their share of wealth. A very small number actually made any money prospecting for gold.

But lots of people did very, very well during the gold rush... and they never dug one tunnel, never sloshed one pan in a stream, never staked one claim. They only picked up a shovel to sell it.

In February 1990, W. Edwards Deming traveled to Western Connecticut State University (WCSU) in Danbury, Connecticut, to deliver three lectures: an afternoon session with students, immediately followed by one with faculty and staff of the business school, followed by an evening lecture open to the general public.

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.

A novel encryption method devised by MIT researchers secures data used in online neural networks, without dramatically slowing their runtimes. This approach holds promise for using cloud-based neural networks for medical-image analysis and other applications that use sensitive data.

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.

MIT researchers have developed novel photography optics that capture images based on the timing of reflecting light inside the optics, instead of the traditional approach that relies on the arrangement of optical components. These new principles, the researchers say, open doors to new capabilities for time- or depth-sensitive cameras, which are not possible with conventional photography optics.