Guest post by John Hunter, founder of the CuriousCat.com. I like to share interesting articles (and other resources) that provide examples of organizations applying Deming’s ideas in practice. Here is another of those articles: How Intermountain Trimmed Health Care Costs Through Robust Quality Improvement Efforts by Brent James and Lucy Savitz (2011). Since 1988, Intermountain […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. David Langford’s presentation at our 2015 annual conference was titled: Education – Implementation Intentions and Automatization. David included a clip from one of my favorite shows, Utopia (called Dreamland in USA) with a vivid example of a performance appraisal experience. David also discusses the problems created by using extrinsic […]

By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Software code review is the practice of reviewing the software code written by colleagues on your software development team. Like many practices the form it takes can vary quite a bit. W. Edwards Deming stated in Out of the Crisis: Cease dependence on inspection to […]

By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. In The Improvement Guide, the authors add 3 questions to the PDSA cycle: What are we trying to accomplish? How will we know that a change is an improvement? What change can we make that will result in improvement? As I stated in my previous […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). This video shows Myron Tribus interviewing Homer Sarasohn in 1988. This post is fairly tangential to the normal scope of this blog but I find it interesting. Largely it is about efforts to rebuild the Japanese economy after the devastation of World […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Listen to the Deming Institute Podcast with Tim Higgins, Quality Engineer for NASA and President of the In2:InThinking Network (download podcast). Also see our recent post on Tim’s presentation at our last annual conference: Curiosity, Learning, Knowledge, and Improvement with Tim Higgins. When I read The New Economics lightbulbs […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. We have a tendency to focus on special causes even when poor results are due to common causes within the system. To improve results that are due to the system trying to determine the specific problem with any bad result and fix that problem is an inefficient strategy. But […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Cliff and Jane Norman (Profound Knowledge Products, Inc.) presented a session at our 2016 annual conference titled: Applying Deming’s Philosophy and Theory to Create the Foundation for a Learning Organization. Cliff, quoting Brian Joiner in the presentation: It takes one kind of brains to […]

Guest post by Mark Graban About ten years ago, somebody sent me a PDF file of Dr. Deming’s “Some Notes on Management in a Hospital.” I felt like somebody had shared a bootleg tape of my favorite band, as I wasn’t sure the article had ever been formally published anywhere. Since I wasn’t sure if […]

By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Far too often, companies promote employees into management positions and expect them to fulfill the obligations of their new position without helping prepare them to meet their new responsibilities. People who excelled at doing their non-supervisory job often have little education or experience to succeed […]