systems thinking
By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. There are few managers today that would say their organization doesn’t focus on customers. It is fairly accepted that in order to proposer a business needs to convince customers to pay. But I find most organizations I interact with don’t do a decent job of […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Andrew McKeon spoke at the annual Deming Institute conference this year on: Disruptive Sustainability and Deming. Quality Digest interviewed Andrew in webcast above. Andrew uses the 4 elements of Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge to look at climate change in the webcast and also […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. In, New Principles in Administration for Quality and Efficiency (speech by W. Edward Deming in Manila, Philippines, July 2, 1971) Dr. Deming laid out 19 principles. The full list of principles is included in The Essential Deming, page 176-178. Two I find particularly insightful […]
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Guest Post by Sami Bahri As a way to improve operations, manufacturers reduce inventory levels at all steps in a value stream. Taiichi Ohno, inventor of the “Toyota production System,” said that inventory conceals operational waste the same way water in a lake hides underlying rocks. Ohno advised reducing inventory levels to uncover waste. In […]
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By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Quite often, people are concerned that our industry isn’t the same as some example. And often, this leads to concerns that we can’t use the ideas. Deming’s management system is not prescriptive. There isn’t a recipe for how to implement the ideas in your organization. […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. David Langford quotes Dr. Deming as saying “Change has to start from the top.” As David says in the video he struggled trying to get the top of his organization involved in management improvement. And then he realized: You are the top of your system. Change your thinking, change […]
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Guest post by Dennis Stevens When I show the Kanban board, a tool that is borrowed from Lean, I hear, “Well, software development is an artistic process – you can’t apply manufacturing principles to it.” Or, “I was involved in a Six Sigma (or TQM) project that was devastating – Lean doesn’t translate to software […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Mobility of management, job hopping was one of the practices Dr. Deming included in his list of 7 Deadly Diseases. To understand why we can look at the underpinnings of Deming’s management system. Two of the four elements that comprise the management […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. One of the mistakes people make, who have a very superficial understanding of Deming, is to believe that Dr. Deming’s publications and seminars focused on process improvement. Deming’s ideas on management focused on creating a management system that changed how the entire organization worked. Deming’s ideas on management weren’t […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. People are part of the system; they need help… Many people think of machinery and data processing when I mention system. Few of them know that recruitment, training, supervision, and aids to production workers are part of the system. – W. Edwards Deming on page 366 of Out of […]
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