process thinking

The Birth of Lean

By John Hunter / September 22, 2014 / 0 Comments

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 […]

Read More

Each Person Doing What They Are Told Isn’t Enough

By John Hunter / August 25, 2014 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to the management. […]

Read More

What Would Deserve a Raise Within the Deming Management Context?

By John Hunter / August 21, 2014 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Response to a question on the Deming Institute LinkedIn group: let’s say Dr. Deming wanted to sit down with his boss to negotiate a compensation increase. What grounds would he use to justify the request? I believe he would explain how the value he brought to the system was […]

Read More

A Blog Following the Management of Finishing Technology Using Deming’s Ideas

By John Hunter / August 14, 2014 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Fred Warmbier, owner of Finishing Technology (based outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA), and Kelly Allan are writing a blog on the New York Times exploring how Deming’s management ideas are put into practice at Finishing Technology. A comment Fred posted to the blog (The New York Times choses to […]

Read More

Applying Deming’s Management Ideas at the Maine State Prison

By John Hunter / April 17, 2014 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Jon Parker learned about Deming’s management ideas while serving in the United States Navy. The Navy had a huge effort to use Deming’s ideas (under the Total Quality Leadership) in order to improve performance, especially during the 1980’s and 1990’s. After leaving the Navy Jon went to work at […]

Read More

Management of USA Apparel Operations is a Huge Barrier to Production in the USA

By John Hunter / February 3, 2014 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Randy Harward spoke at the 2013 Deming Institute annual conference about his experience with applying Deming’s management ideas at Patagonia. Low energy costs in the USA are a significant factor driving companies to consider moving apparel production to the USA. Energy costs […]

Read More

Standard Work Instructions are Continually Improved; They are not a Barrier to Improvement

By John Hunter / January 28, 2014 / 0 Comments

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 […]

Read More
Scroll to Top
Scroll to Top