(Academy Leadership Publishing: King of Prussia, PA) -- When news headlines trumpet story after story about fiscal mismanagement, unchecked greed, massive bankruptcies, and rampant downsizing, it’s hard to believe there’s any good news about the business world.

Customer satisfaction data resulting in various quality indexes abound. The airline industry is particularly watched.

Some time ago, while consulting for a huge call center, I took a group of customer service agents for a little gemba walk and a quick activity to demonstrate a few lean fundamentals.

After every major natural disaster that disrupts global supply chains, there are voices that cry out “A-ha!

I just read an article that appeared on Quality Digest Daily, “The Quality Crisis in America,” by David C. Crosby.

The most stunning accomplishment of Toyota during the last 50 years is its turnaround from making “junk” to virtually redefining quality in the auto industry. Toyota was influenced to the core by W. Edwards Deming and quality is evident everywhere in the company.

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I’ve now been continuously thinking about lean for 30 years, since the fall of 1979 when my bosses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) asked me to explore how a few Japanese companies had developed a striking advantage in designing and making motor ve

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It’s better to measure things when we can; that’s been well-established in the quality literature over the years. The use of go/no-go gauges will always provide much less information for improvement than measuring the pieces themselves.