systems thinking

Customer Focus with a Deming Perspective

By John Hunter / November 13, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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Using Deming’s Management Ideas to Explore Sustainability

By John Hunter / October 28, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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The consumer is the most important point on the production-line

By John Hunter / September 16, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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Fewer Patients-In-Process and Less Safety Scheduling; Incoming Supplies are Secondary

By Guest Post / August 22, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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Do We Need to Find Management Ideas from Our Industry?

By John Hunter / August 15, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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Change has to Start from the Top – Webcast with David Langford

By John Hunter / July 22, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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What’s Deming Got to Do With Agile Software Development and Kanban

By Guest Post / July 18, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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Mobility of Management

By John Hunter / July 15, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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Don’t Limit Improvements to Low Level Process Improvement

By John Hunter / July 11, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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People are Part of the Management System

By John Hunter / July 1, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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