By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Here is a list of the 11 most popular posts on this blog last year (as measured by views counted by our analytics applications). We published our first blog post on October 1st 2012. W. Edwards Deming Called for the Elimination of The Annual Performance Appraisal (2012) We Need […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). In this podcast Bob Mason and Clare Crawford-Mason discuss meeting W. Edwards Deming and creating the NBC white paper – “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” They also discuss the decades of pursuing and promoting Deming’s management ideas, including their work co-creating […]

Guest Post by Jack Hillerich More than 50 years ago, I started working in our family business, Hillerich & Bradsby Co., maker of the Louisville Slugger® baseball bat. It was the early 1960’s and I had just graduated from Vanderbilt University. I was 21. When my father passed away in 1969, I was suddenly promoted […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. On the Use of Theory is an article W. Edwards Deming published in 1956. It is one of many of his papers we have posted on our web site. Though 58 years old the ideas in the article are very useful today and yet many organizations still have not […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Here are a few of the photos taken by Judy Cahill at The W. Edwards Deming Institute Conference this year. See many more photos in The W. Edwards Deming Institute photo albums.

Guest post by Michael Ballé (repost from his Gemba Coach column on Lean.org) Dear Gemba Coach, For product development you need creative (maybe even chaotic) people. Are those people suited to follow such a structured method as lean? Like trying to achieve one-piece-flow in product development? Thank you. What an interesting question! As a writer […]

By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Minimal Viable Product is an important concept. The idea is to learn from customers (users) using the product/service as soon as possible. Having customers direct experience available as soon as possible allows those designing and creating the product to learn as early as possible from […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Paula Marshall, the CEO of the Bama Companies, discusses her adoption of Deming principles at Bama Companies. In the podcast she discusses going to see a Dr. Deming 4 day seminar in 1990 and then working with him for 3 years on bringing new […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. We want to chose the best strategy. However, as the image by Randal Monroe (xkcd comic) shows we need to consider the whole system. It isn’t helpful to spend more effort to chose between two options than the difference between them offers. However we can be drawn into such […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Much of Dr. Deming’s work is housed and available at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The Library of Congress made a formal request for Dr. Deming’s professional papers soon after his death. They were donated by The W. Edwards Deming […]