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MIT Management Executive Education
Our first and second articles in this series have focused primarily on Bob Pozen’s tips for improving your productivity as an individual. Below, we suggest approaches to improving productivity within an organization through the proactive management of relationships at work.
Managing your team
“To…
Russell Harley
The following may seem difficult to believe, but it can be true. Among the definitions of the word “efficient,” we find the following: “achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.” Although this is great for busy executives and companies, it is terrible for projects,…
Dan Nelson
Editor's note: This is part one of a serios about customer-centric quality management systems. Read part two here.
A document review is supposed to be conducted as part of stage one of the ISO certification process. For the uninitiated looking into certification—maybe you—that statement often…
Eston Martz
Remember The Little Engine That Could, the children’s story about self-confidence in the face of huge challenges? In it, a train engine keeps telling itself, “I think I can” while carrying a very heavy load up a big mountain. Next thing you know, the little engine has done it, but until that…
Mike Roberts
As a research company, LNS Research is in the perfect position to see what is really going on behind the scenes in the manufacturing industry. On one side of the coin, we’re interviewing and surveying quality and manufacturing executives to understand their foremost challenges; on the other side,…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Value stream analysis is an effective way to identify improvement opportunities within a product or service family's value stream, envision a leaner future state, and develop an actionable value stream improvement plan to achieve the future state. It's bread-and-butter stuff for the lean…
Annette Franz
That’s probably a silly question, but I don’t feel silly reminding anyone of the answer.
Last month, I took a different angle to this question and asked, “What’s the Cost of Listening to Customers?” In that column, I mentioned that if we don’t understand who our customers are, what jobs they are…
Matthew Littlefield
You know that old saying “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”? Unfortunately, that is the thought process many executives adopt around quality management. It is not necessarily that their quality management systems are broken, per se, but the challenge of having disconnected quality systems and data…
Ryan E. Day
It was just an email invitation to a public relations event in the Mission District of San Francisco, but it started a long string of adjectives like: brief, cryptic, amusing, exciting, breathtaking, scary, and… well, stinky.
All those adjectives collided last week to provide an almost surreal…
Davis Balestracci
Do you still insist on asking, “Which chart do I use for which situation?”
I’ve seen many flowcharts in books to help you answer this question. They’re all some variation of this:
I find them far too confusing for the average user and have never taught this in my work. Besides, you get no credit…
Janet Woodcock
In recent years, there have been important advances to ensure that therapies for serious conditions are approved and available to patients as soon as sufficient data can show that the therapies’ benefits outweigh their risks. Despite the progress, there is much more work to be done. Many…
Dave K. Banerjea
In most industries, maintenance and calibration management departments are separate operations that rarely, if ever cross paths. However, in some industries, such as pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing, maintenance and calibrations are often performed on the same assets. As a result,…
Stacey Jarrett Wagner
In college I learned about chaos theory, sometimes called the butterfly effect, in which small differences in an initial condition result in divergent outcomes in dynamic systems. In layman’s terms, my fellow students and I were fond of saying that when a butterfly flutters its wings over your…
BDO USA
The manufacturing industry is poised for growth in 2014. Still, the second annual BDO USA LLP analysis of risk factors listed in the most recent 10-K filings of the largest 100 publicly traded U.S. manufacturers found that they will contend with a number of challenges as they work to capitalize on…
MIT Management Executive Education
We’ve all been there—staring down the week’s to-do list with the best of intentions, only to find, at the end of the week, that we didn’t accomplish everything that was required of us. Our tasks get carried over into the following week, and before we know it, we’re caught in the paradox of being…
Donald J. Wheeler
One thing burned into the brains of those who survive a statistics class is that you have to specify an alpha-level before you do anything statistical. And when it comes to statistical inference, they are correct. But just what does the alpha-level represent? What does it mean in practice? Read on…
Robert Fangmeyer
What does healthcare in the United States need? Well, according to a report released May 29, 2014, by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), U.S. healthcare organizations need “systems engineering.”
In their letter to President Obama, PCAST co-chairs John Holdren…
Jens R. Woinowski
I recently stumbled upon the book by S.J. Scott, Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less (Archangel Ink, 2014). The concept is very simple, but powerful. Instead of a classical review, this is an “in a nutshell” version.
The idea of habit stacking is this: 1. You can…
Mike Richman
The foundations of the quality industry go back decades, centuries, even millennia. In that course of time, men and women of various backgrounds and nationalities contributed wisdom distilled from their hard-earned experiences to help develop the tools and techniques that help good organizations…
MIT Management Executive Education
What stands between you and the more productive version of you—the person who meets personal and professional goals on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis?
Robert Pozen provides concrete answers to this question in his new course, Maximizing Your Personal Productivity, offered July 15–16, 2014, by…
Sonal Sinha
While public U.S. companies were preparing to meet their first conflict minerals reporting deadline, their European counterparts were taking their first steps toward implementing a conflict minerals law.
On March 5, 2014, the European Commission proposed a draft regulation to stop the sale and…
Carly Barry
It’s all too easy to make mistakes involving statistics. Powerful statistical software can remove a lot of the difficulty surrounding statistical calculation, reducing the risk of mathematical errors, but correctly interpreting the results of an analysis can be even more challenging.
No one knows…
Miriam Boudreaux
I frequently get asked questions from clients and readers about how to handle the everyday maintenance of a useful and compliant ISO 9001 quality management system (QMS). I thought I’d address a couple of those questions that I feel many people can relate to.
Numbering schemes: would a document…
David Fenn
For those who have already heard of Disney’s creative strategy, you may not be aware that the romantic notion of it coming directly from Walt Disney himself is actually untrue. The first mention of the dreamer, the realist, and the critic was taken from an interview with two of Disney’s original…
Bruce Hamilton
Aconversation with a lean friend reminded me of a story that I shared four years ago. It dealt with the consequences of crazy measures and how lack of management oversight will allow these measures to persist indefinitely. Absentee decision makers passing down absurd directives... sound familiar…
