By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). This podcast (download) features Dick Steele, Founder and Chairman of Peaker Services and member of The Deming Institute Board of Trustees. Dick discusses his company’s transformation and their continuing application of the Deming philosophy. Peaker Services remanufactures locomotive engines and designs electrical […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Quote by W. Edwards Deming at a February 1993 Deming Four Day seminar in Phoenix, Arizona (via the notes of Mike Stoecklein). So what was Dr. Deming trying to convey with this quote? It wasn’t an attempt to get people to give up trying because failure was certain. It […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. W. Edwards Deming included this example of businesses cooperating with competitors in The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education: My automobile, sitting in front of my house, would not start. I called Bill at the Exxon station not far away. When the man from […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. In this podcast (download) David Langford becomes the first repeat guest. David is the CEO and founder of Langford International and a Deming Institute Advisory Board member. David continues discussing his thoughts on using Deming’s ideas to improve education. By looking at education as a system and examining what […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Dr. Deming didn’t directly address executive pay as far as I know. Executives were paid well and without much detrimental impact on companies historically. In the 1980s many CEOs started treating corporate treasuries as personal bank accounts and problems exploded. Peter Drucker […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. As I use the term here, the job of a leader is to accomplish transformation of his organization. He possesses knowledge, personality, and persuasive power. W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics, page 116 This is a wonderful, succinct quote on the sources of influence […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Keith Sparkjoy, Cofounder and Culture Coach of Pluralsight discusses his “awakening” on their journey to keep Pluralsight’s healthy culture as they rapidly expanded (download the podcast). Keith started by reading Out of the Crisis and thought it would be tough to use that book as a tool to convince […]

By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Out of the Crisis included a couple pages (245-7) that Dr. Deming asked my father to write on the efforts to apply Deming’s management ideas at the City of Madison (the first effort to do so in the public sector as far as I know). […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Monta Akin, Assistant Superintendent for Leander Independent School District in Leander, Texas joined Tripp Babbitt to record the latest podcast for the Deming Institute. Monta shares the compelling story of Leander Independent School District’s transformation to a Deming based management system. It […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. There are many different ways to start applying W. Edwards Deming’s ideas on management. There isn’t a cookbook on what should be done first. This is helpful in that you can avoid trying things that would be very difficult given the current state of your management system. However, it […]