All Features
Patrick Runkel
If you’re not a statistician, looking through statistical output can sometimes make you feel a like you’ve wandered into Alice in Wonderland. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantastical world where strange and mysterious phantasms appear out of nowhere. For example, consider the T and P in your t…
Arun Hariharan
Recently, I paid for a magazine subscription with a check. A few days later, a person from the magazine’s office phoned me to say that my check had been returned unpaid by my bank. I wondered what the reason could be, as I had enough money in my account.
When I phoned my bank, the bank rep…
Donald J. Wheeler
Whenever the original data pile up against a barrier or a boundary value, the histogram tends to be skewed and non-normal in shape. Last month in part one we found that this doesn’t appreciably affect the performance of process behavior charts for location. This month we look at how skewed data…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Does your vision sound something like this? “Our vision is to provide aggressive strategic marketing with quality products and services at competitive prices to provide the best value for consumers.”
Bad news. You have a blah, blah, blah vision. Do yourself and everyone on your team a favor: Take…
There was a time when connectivity was oriented to location, with stationary computers communicating with one another across the Internet. With the advent of smart phones, the Internet tied people, not places, together as users accessed the Internet on the move. Now, the next great shift is…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
At roughly 7 a.m. every Monday through Friday, I fire up my Lenovo T520 laptop and wait for email, chat, Google Drive, Google Hangout, Skype, remote desktop, an FTP program, two different browsers, and depending where I’m at, my voice over IP applications to load. It may have an Intel 2.5 GHz…
Thomas R. Cutler
This is the last in a series about how lean manufacturing has affected the people and the companywide culture at Hytrol Conveyors, a designer and manufacturer of advanced conveyor systems. As described in part 1 and part 2, dozens of interviews were conducted with a wide range of employees at the…
Barbara A. Cleary
When my mother looked at the prices of new hats, studied their features, and then went home and tried to remodel her old hat with feathers or lace to look like those fancier models, I saw the value of doing things yourself—for my mother, an attitude perhaps shaped by her own parents and their…
Bob Emiliani
Books and their authors can be very influential. They can initiate widespread awareness of a subject and maintain loyal followings long after the publication of their best works. However, when you read books about lean management, or follow influential lean authors, how confident are you that the…
Jim Clifton
The United States now ranks not first, not second, not third, but 12th among developed nations in terms of business startup activity. Hungary, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Israel, and Italy all have higher startup rates than does the United States.
Our single most serious economic…
William A. Levinson
Isaac Asimov’s mystery stories often begin with a guest of the Black Widowers being asked, “How do you justify your existence?” On a darker note, George Bernard Shaw said of the concept of eugenics, “If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you’…
Dawn Keller
I really can’t make this stuff up.
I wrote a post a couple of years ago titled: “How to Talk to Your Kids About... Quality Improvement,” in which I lamented about Community Hero Day in my daughter’s first-grade class and the need to explain to her why I wasn’t at the “community-hero level” of…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
My wife, Carole, and I recently saw And So It Goes, a film with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton. Michael Douglas’ behavior in the movie reminded me of one of Stephen R. Covey’s classic habits in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon & Schuster, anniversary edition 2013). The habit…
Davis Balestracci
I've been presenting at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) annual forum for 21 consecutive years. Maybe the biggest surprise from these two decades has been the awesome power of simply "plotting the dots," i.e., plotting important organizational data in their naturally occurring time…
Annette Franz
On the eve (sort of) of the biggest day of the year for the advertising industry (for commercials, anyway... love those Super Bowl commercials), I’d like to share some thoughts about the common disconnect between advertising and the customer experience.
Or, as Robert Stephens, co-founder of Geek…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Ah, the ubiquitous cell phone. So versatile. So indispensable. So short-lived. We make one billion of them every year because we can’t live without them, yet we cast them aside every 18 months on average. They collect in heaps and shipping containers around the world, their once-coveted designs…
Jack Dunigan
On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall found gold in Sutter’s Creek next to John Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. By 1849, the gold rush was reaching full steam. Some 300,000 gold seekers (called 49ers because of the year in which they travelled) made the journey across the continent or around…
Michelle LaBrosse
Think about success: How do you define career success, and how do you know when you’ve attained it? Perhaps there’s a particular salary level you’d like to reach, or maybe achieving success means working in your dream job. But think a little deeper. Say you get that dream job; imagine what would…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Pitch interval (Ip) can be thought of in two ways: as a unit of time representing the (usually) smallest common pitch shared among a range of products, services, or transactions that are being produced, conveyed, performed, or executed by a given resource(s); and as a count of the number of…
Arun Hariharan
Irecently received a letter from my bank asking me to submit certain documents, apparently required by “know your customer” (KYC) regulations. I was a little surprised to receive this letter, for just a few months earlier, I had already submitted these documents in response to a different request…
Kevin Meyer
Mindfulness has become all the rage in personal and professional leadership these days, which is good and bad. Understood and done right, it’s a powerful concept. As with most concepts, however, it’s also often misunderstood, and therefore sometimes maligned and even misapplied. In this way,…
Rob Harrison
A recent survey conducted by LNS Research revealed that 43 percent of manufacturing professionals don’t understand the Internet of Things (IoT). Although this may be cause for some concern, it’s not entirely surprising. There is something important lurking behind the fact that although most have…
Michael Causey
The folks at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) released their sometimes optimistic, but always enlightening guidance wish list and overall priorities for 2015. Let’s take a look.
CDER director Janet Woodcock recently said these are her agencies “front burner” priorities: •…
Mark Rosenthal
The title of this article is a search term that recently hit The Lean Thinker site. It’s an interesting question—and interesting that it gets asked.
“Kaizen” is now an English word—it’s in the OED—and defined as such: “Noun. A Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working…
Mike Figliuolo
Leading a balanced life is a critical aspect of performing well as a leader. There are two types of balance. We always think about work/life balance in terms of “how much time do I spend away from the office?” You probably spend more hours at the office than you do away from it with your friends…
