Guest post by Edward Martin Baker.   A version of this post originally appeared on Aileron.org. Years ago, a “friend” who thought he was a mechanic, as did I, offered to improve my car’s performance. He removed parts of the engine, fiddled around with them, and reassembled them. When he finished, I saw some of the […]

Post by Bill Bellows, Deputy Director, The Deming Institute. Sparky Anderson, manager of the Cincinnati Reds during most of the 1970s, spoke on occasion about the big problem he had with his Major League Baseball team.   He claimed that the Reds, also known at the time as “The Big Red Machine,” had so much talent that he […]

Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. This video shows Poorani Jeyaseker’s presentation, The Role of W. Edwards Deming in Today’s IT, at the 2015 Deming Research Seminar. Poorani explains how the management system drives behavior that is not useful to the organization. The business team asks for estimates for […]

In our schools, targets and rankings cause cheating, focus on achievement, and drive in fear and suck the joy out of learning.

Guest post by John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. In his presentation at the 2015 Deming Research Seminar Joseph Schneider discusses his efforts to apply Deming’s ideas within Siemens. Joseph talks about how they worked to use Deming’s ideas even though much of the management system was not within their control (so they had to accept […]

Post by Bill Bellows, Deputy Director, The Deming Institute. “There is not a day I don’t think about what Dr. Deming meant to us. Deming is the core of our management,” proclaimed Shoichiro Toyoda, Toyota’s president between 1982 and 1992 and chairman between 1992 and 1999, at the 1980 Deming Prize Ceremonies in Japan. One year earlier, […]

Guest post by Edward Martin Baker.   A version of this post originally appeared on Aileron.org. In a previous blog, “Leaders can make music,” I used the analogy of the leader as orchestra conductor who follows a score to orchestrate people playing together. The score to which I referred was Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge. Another […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Jim Benson’s presentation at our 2015 International Deming Research Seminar explored how to manage the workload better to improve results. We want to help people become happy so that they will build better products. We fundamentally believe that happy people do exactly that. Companies […]

Guest post by Lori Fry, Principal with Navigator Management Partners, originally featured as a post at https://dignityatworkproject.com/ Follow this link to listen to our first podcast with Lori. “Our growth is hurting our culture.” “We need more structure, but I’m afraid it will kill our culture.” “Our culture is perfect. We don’t have processes and rules. We […]

Guest post by John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Heather Groom’s presentation on Creativity at our Deming in Public Administration seminar. In discussing the roadblocks to creativity she mentioned the imposter syndrome. I have seen imposter syndrome mentioned very frequently recently (the last year or two). I find it […]