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MIT Management Executive Education
One of the most common mistakes new entrepreneurs make is trying to be everything to everyone in the hopes of increasing their market share. In the beginning, many entrepreneurs take an “act now, plan later” approach to get a jump on the competition. This can be a recipe for failure.
But the…
Harry Hertz
The words used in the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence have been selected by design, i.e., in general there is a deliberate intent behind the words used and the order in which they are presented. Although that intent is clear to the Criteria’s authors, it’s not always obvious to users…
John Ayers
Let’s assume you work for a small company that wants to grow the business by soliciting subcontracts from a major prime contractor. What unknown risks might be in store for your company in pursuing this path? Here are some of those risks, along with a personal example and eight suggestions for…
Jim Frost
Ihave written a number of blog posts about regression analysis, and I think it would be helpful to collect them in this post to create a regression tutorial. I’ll supplement my own posts with some from my colleagues.
This tutorial covers many aspects of regression analysis, including choosing the…
Jens R. Woinowski
In my line of business, the term “best practices” is common. It’s an abbreviation for the sum of all experiences people have had, condensed into how-to instructions, design or behavior patterns, lessons-learned documents, and so on, all collected to a “best practices” document. In my mind, the…
Gorur N. Sridhar
Single minute exchange of dies, or SMED as it’s commonly known, is defined as “the time elapsed between when the last good piece of product A comes off and the first good piece of product B starts.” SMED is probably one of the most important lean manufacturing tools, if not the most important, for…
Gallup
Too many companies continue to rely on rigid, archaic management models. Recent analysis from Gallup shows that six elements can help drive a company’s transformation to a high-performance culture.
Business growth in the Arab Gulf offers a good example. In recent years, the Corporation Council…
Matthew Barsalou
The famous baseball player and sometimes philosopher Yogi Berra is credited with saying, “The future ain’t what it used to be,” and he really got that prediction right. Things are nothing like I imagined they would be 25 years ago. Maybe in my teen years I watched too much Beyond 2000 and read too…
Michael Causey
It’s a growing trend in these United States: paying extra for conveniences such as bypassing the riffraff in airport security lines, or whizzing past mere mortal motorists on pristine, pay-for express lanes.
Where I live in the Washington, D.C. area, the new express road program in Northern…
Dan Nelson
Nobody likes to be told they’re doing something wrong. But if you were doing something wrong due to a misunderstanding, and it was actually hindering your operations while adding unnecessary cost, wouldn’t you want to know?
For example, let’s assume that you are using a tool consistently with…
Umberto Tunesi
I was just thinking about the often-observed contradictions among quality assurance, quality control, and production. My production experience was as a laboratory technician with two German companies, one of which had an Italian subsidiary. The differences were striking. Although in both German…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
The Japanese term, heijunka, also known as level-loading, production leveling, or production smoothing, facilitates system stability by addressing workload unevenness (mura) by leveling both volume and mix over time (see figure 1).
Heijunka also serves as a pacing mechanism for operations, often…
Tom Kadala
If you were sitting at a Las Vegas gambling table with a 3-percent chance of winning big, would you continue to play or fold? Guessing your likely response, let’s compare this example with launching a startup company. Statistics show that 97 percent of startups fail after their fifth year of…
Mary McAtee
I have been pondering about how we can sometimes ignore or misread data that are screaming to tell us something important. There is a phenomenon referred to as “groupthink” that occurs when a group of otherwise reasonable people ignore empirical data and experience in favor of convincing each…
Peter Theobald
Now that the holiday season is upon us, my mind turns to gift buying, parties, overindulgence, and of course, Santa Claus and his North Pole operations. We know that Santa does an incredible job of delivering scores of gifts to good children all over the world. But is he doing this in an ISO QMS-…
Gerry Cronin
At GBMP’s recent Northeast Shingo Prize Conference in Hyannis, Massachusetts, the Center for Comparative Medicine (CCM) displayed adaptations of lean to biomedical research in its Community of Lean Lounge. Conference attendees were drawn in by the wacky display of dangerous animals and props, but…
Jim Verzino
Failed projects, even if they are not directly your fault, can be detrimental to your career.
A client recently told me a story of big problems in the company’s new product rollout. Customer expectations and logistics were two big issues, among others. Although the quality assurance director didn’…
William A. Levinson
Colonel Paul Linebarger, one of the world’s foremost authorities on psychological warfare, had this to say about propaganda: “Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of communication designed to affect the minds, emotions, and action of a given group for a specific purpose.”
Although…
Matthew E. May
My friend and colleague Bruce Rosenstein is a prolific writer and editor. He’s managing editor of Leader to Leader, author of the wonderful Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life (Berrett-Koehler, 2009), and wrote for USA TODAY for more than…
Bill Kalmar
I
witnessed something the other day that was extraordinary and confirmed that, despite some troubling times, we remain a society of thoughtful, caring people.
It was early morning, and I had just entered a local Panera Bread Company for my daily latte fix. There were several people in line,…
Ryan E. Day
Is it Scrum or kanban? Yes, er, no. Well, it depends. Sometimes the road to process development takes a few unexpected turns.
In general terms, Scrum is a process framework for managing complex product development and typically associated with code development, while kanban, a pull-based…
Stratasys Inc.
3D printing innovation comes in many forms, but one of the most gratifying is to see how it is solving problems in the medical field. From producing perfect replicas of organs and bones for surgical guides to manufacturing one-of-a-kind medical devices, the prognosis for 3D printing in medicine is…
MIT News
X-rays transformed medicine a century ago by providing a noninvasive way to detect internal structures in the body. Still, they have limitations: They can’t image the body’s soft tissues, except with the use of contrast-enhancing agents that must be swallowed or injected, and their resolution is…
Kevin Meyer
Thanks to Twitter, again, I recently came across one of the most insightful articles I’ve read in a long time—on a safety blog, no less. Steven Shorrock takes on the concept of “human error” and adds considerably more perspective to this oft-used term.
“In the aftermath of the [Spain rail]…
Mike Roberts
Join Matt Littlefield, president and principal analyst of LNS Research, and Mark Bienkowski, supplier quality process and audit manager of GE Healthcare, Thurs., Dec. 19, 2013, at 11 a.m. Pacific for a Quality Digest webcast, “Building the Foundation of Enterprise Quality Management Throughout the…
