By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. When people first learn of standard work within the Deming context (or lean manufacturing or the other flavors of management with some process focus) they often fear it means following outdated processes that are ineffective. I believe this is because, if they have experience with standards, that experience was […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Randy Harward spoke at the 2013 Deming Institute annual conference on applying Deming management methods and sustainability and Patagonia. It was better because designers and developers went from being just people who bought things, and marketed them, to people who had to understand and […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Randy Harward spoke at the 2013 Deming Institute annual conference on applying Deming management methods and sustainability and Patagonia. I was hired to take care of this huge volume of returns coming back from customers, we had so many quality problems. I was managing customer service and all the […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Randy Harward spoke at the 2013 Deming Institute annual conference on applying Deming management methods at Western Mountaineering and Patagonia. Western Mountaineering was facing a cash flow crisis when Randy Harward took over and he strongly considered closing down. Given the problems the “only […]

Guest post by Tim Higgins In discussions about goals, I typically find attempts to create two distinct categories of goals. I see the words “arbitrary goals.” Arbitrary numerical goals are believed to be bad, problematic. Some numerical goals the non-arbitrary type are believed to be useful, good, even necessary. I could find no evidence Deming […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Support of top management is not sufficient. It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to — that is, what they must do. These obligations can not be delegated. Support is not […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Plot data over time In this segment of Ian Bradbury’s talk at the 2013 W. Edwards Deming Institute conference he discusses variation and using the control chart to aid improvement efforts. This last point went outside the control limits so it is a signal […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. In this segment of Ian Bradbury’s talk at the 2013 W. Edwards Deming Institute conference he looks at how your view of the system effects what solutions seem reasonable. If you only view part of the system the solutions you come to can often have negative consequences. And often […]

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. The Lean Enterprise Institute has published webcasts of discussions with James Womack, Dan Jones and John Shook exploring reflections on 25 years of lean which I think are quite good. This excerpt looks at learning from other communities of interest and ideas used by […]

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. This webcast continues Ian Bradbury’s Deming 101 presentation looking at the Theory of Knowledge and the PDSA Learning Cycle. Commenting on Deming’s presentation of the PDSA (plan-do-study-act) cycle in 1951 Ian says It is articulated as a learning cycle. A learning cycle in which you are trying to build […]