Customer Focus

Jobs to be Done

By John Hunter / January 19, 2017 / 0 Comments

“While many in the business world associate the word ‘theory’ with something purely academic or abstract, nothing could be further from the truth. Theories that explain causality are among the most important and practical tools business leaders can have.” – Clayton Christensen

Read More

Some Notes on Management in a Hospital by W. Edwards Deming

By John Hunter / July 28, 2016 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). We used to publish a newsletter. In the Fall 2006 Deming Interaction we published an excerpt from an article by Dr. Deming: Some Notes on Management in a Hospital [the link that we broke has been removed] (published in 1990 in the […]

Read More

Product and Service Innovation is Driven by Customer Focused Organizations

By John Hunter / June 13, 2016 / 0 Comments

Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. At the core of W. Edwards Deming’s philosophy is a focus on delighting customers, allowing everyone to contribute what they have to offer and continually improving. In order to bring about great results certain knowledge and strategies are useful. So things like learning […]

Read More

Deming’s Stage 0: By What Method?

By John Hunter / December 3, 2015 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Ron Moen’s presentation at The W. Edwards Deming Institute 2014 conference – Deming’s Stage 0: By What Method? Ron talks about W. Edwards Deming teaching a 2 week course on consumer research in Japan in 1951: that course included a section titled “the art of questioning and interviewing.” Dr. […]

Read More

Quality Beginnings: Deming and Madison, Wisconsin

By Guest Post / March 20, 2015 / 3 Comments

This post in an excerpt from The Quality Leadership Workbook for Police by Chief David Couper and Captain Sabine Lobitz. While the intense focus on quality movement in the 1980s did not become the dominant way to run an organization like many of us thought it would, it still became one of society’s major influences. […]

Read More

Creativity Inc. – Using Deming’s Ideas at Pixar

By John Hunter / March 9, 2015 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Ed Catmull co-founded Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter. In Ed’s book, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, he discusses how important Deming’s ideas were to his efforts to help make Pixar what it is today. As we struggled to […]

Read More

Quality Comes to City Hall

By John Hunter / January 26, 2015 / 0 Comments

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). […]

Read More

Minimal Viable Product

By John Hunter / November 17, 2014 / 0 Comments

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 […]

Read More

Bob Browne Discusses His Experience Applying Deming’s Ideas as a CEO

By John Hunter / October 6, 2014 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Bob Browne is the former CEO of the Great Plains Coca Cola Bottling Company and soon to be author of a new book, The Sys-Tao Way, that outlines his application of the Deming Philosophy. In the most recent Deming Institute podcast, Bob […]

Read More

Process Thinking at Patagonia

By John Hunter / January 20, 2014 / 0 Comments

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 […]

Read More
Scroll to Top
Scroll to Top