data

Mind the Choice: Continuous Improvement or Continuous Problem Solving

By Bill Bellows / July 24, 2017 / 0 Comments

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 […]

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Red Beads and Profound Knowledge: Deming and Quality of Education

By John Hunter / April 20, 2017 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Sharon Lohr presented the 2014 American Statistical Association (ASA) Deming Lecture – Red Beads and Profound Knowledge: Deming and Quality of Education (slides with notes and references). Dr. Lohr earned her doctorate in statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she learned about Deming’s […]

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Exploring Measurement, Presentation by Ian Bradbury

By John Hunter / April 6, 2017 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Ian Bradbury presented on Exploring Measurement at our 2016 annual conference. As usual his presentation is packed with great information. I strongly recommend watching (also see links to more presentations by him below). At the very beginning of his talk, Ian says Stuff happens a […]

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Kevin Murphy’s Presentation: Application and Lessons of Deming’s Perspective on Leadership

By John Hunter / March 16, 2017 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Kevin Murphy’s presentation at the 14th In2:InThinking Annual Forum Weekend Conference: Application and Lessons of Deming’s Perspective on Leadership: [Vimeo plays the video automatically – which is obviously an extremely bad Ux practice. Even using their code to disable autoplay of the video doesn’t […]

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Application of Statistical Methods in 1940

By John Hunter / March 13, 2017 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Dave Nave found an interesting forward from a set of 1985 standards on Control Charts. It describes how those standards were created as part of the World War II war effort, with Dr. Deming on the committee. Subsequently the standards were transfer […]

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Stratify Data to Hone in on Special Causes of Problems

By John Hunter / February 6, 2017 / 0 Comments

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 […]

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Eric Budd Presentation on Data and Operational Definitions

By John Hunter / January 23, 2017 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Eric Budd’s presentation at the 2016 Annual Deming Institute Conference: An Exercise in Operational Definition. The exercise Eric uses in the presentation shows how much variation can show up in data – just from how the data is collected. And in this […]

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Deadly Disease of Management: Emphasis on Short-term Profits

By John Hunter / January 9, 2017 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. One of Dr. Deming’s 7 deadly diseases is: Emphasis on short-term profits: short-term thinking It is easy to focus on short term goals and use a somewhat simple short term figure to measure success. But just because it is easier to look at the […]

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Applying Understanding of Variation to Large Datasets

By John Hunter / November 10, 2016 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Understanding Variation by Thomas Nolan, Rocco J. Perla and Lloyd Provost. There have been large changes in the use of data since the publication of Understanding Variation, by Thomas Nolan and Lloyd Provost. The new article discusses how to use an understanding of variation when working with large datasets […]

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Deming Lecture by Dr. Jeff Wu on Quality Improvement from Autos to Nanotechnology

By John Hunter / October 24, 2016 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Deming Lecture at the 2012 ASA Joint – Quality Improvement: From Autos and Chips to Nano and Bio” by Jeff Wu, Georgia Institute of Technology. One of the points Dr. Wu mentioned is Shewhart called common causes, chance causes, and special causes, […]

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