Continual Improvement
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 […]
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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 […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. The Birth of Lean is an valuable book from the Lean Enterprise Institute. It collects the thoughts of those leading and working with the Toyota Production System in the early days: Taiichi Ohno, Eiji Toyoda, Michikazu Tanaka, Kikuo Suzumura and others. The book doesn’t talk about Dr. Deming directly […]
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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(or lean manufacturing or the other flavors of management with some process focus) they often fear it means following outdated processes that are ineffective.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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Improvement of Quality and Productivity, to be successful in any company, must be a learning process, year by year, top management leading the whole company. W. Edwards Deming page 139, Out of the Crisis Understanding the importance of learning is often one sign of the maturity of the improvement […]
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Guest post by John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. In Fourth Generation Management (I highly recommend this book, by the way), Brian Joiner provided an excellent summary of the options to get better “results” (as measured by the data used). The options are to: distort the system distort the data improve the system Obviously we hope […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). From The Practice of Management by Peter Drucker, The Demands of the Enterprise on the Worker (page 268): The enterprise must expect of the worker not the passive acceptance of a physical chore, but the active assumption of responsibility for the enterprise’s […]
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