systems thinking

Clayton Christensen on Innovation and Macro Economics

By John Hunter / June 24, 2013 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Clayton Christen takes look at the macro-economic impacts of innovation in this lecture at Oxford University. He discusses disruption innovation (creating new markets for complex expensive products: for example, from mainframe computer to personal computer to smart phone), sustaining innovation and efficiency […]

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How Did We Do on the Test?

By John Hunter / June 10, 2013 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Bill Bellows asks the question “How did we do on the test?” not “How did you do on the test?” Seeing that the student is partially responsible for their learning but that the teacher and the learning system provided by the school are inputs that will set the student […]

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The Aim for Any Organization Should be for Everybody to Gain: Customers, Employees, Stockholders…

By John Hunter / June 6, 2013 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain – stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment – over the long term. W. Edwards Deming describing the purpose of an organization in The New Economics, page 51 When you […]

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Effective Communication is Explicit

By John Hunter / May 20, 2013 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Incomplete communication often creates problems. You often don’t have to ask why 5 times to figure out the weaknesses in communication that lead to trouble. Over and over again, most organizations find problems were created, or grew, because someone that could have […]

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Distorting the System, Distorting the Data or Improving the System

By John Hunter / May 13, 2013 / 0 Comments

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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Deming’s 14 Points for Management

By John Hunter / April 15, 2013 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Dr. Deming included the 14 points for management in Out of the Crisis. The 14 points provide some specific obligations that managers adopting a Deming management system must follow. Over time Dr. Deming realized these points were not as effective at communicating […]

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Hallmark Building Supplies: Applying Deming as a Business Strategy

By John Hunter / April 11, 2013 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Louie Paynter discussed Hallmark Building Supplies’ experience in applying Deming’s management system as a business strategy at the 2012 annual W. Edwards Deming Institute conference. Louie gives great credit to Hallmark Building Supplies’ success (in applying Dr. Deming’s ideas and improving results for the business) to working with Cliff […]

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Asking Questions to Initiate New Thinking

By John Hunter / April 1, 2013 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. We are posting several short videos to provide everyone an opportunity to hear directly from Dr. Deming. It is remarkable how well the ideas he spoke of have aged even while the world has been changing rapidly. This video offers several questions that challenge us to think more deeply […]

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Brian Joiner Podcast on Management, Sustainability and the Health Care System

By John Hunter / March 25, 2013 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Joe Dager has posted another Business 901 podcast with a leading Deming management authority, this time with Brian Joiner, author of Fourth Generation Management, co-author of the Team Handbook and long time colleague of Dr. Deming. Early in Brian’s career he shared an office […]

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Podcast with Clare Crawford-Mason Discussing Dr. Deming’s Ideas on Management

By John Hunter / March 12, 2013 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Mark Graban interviewed Clare Crawford-Mason for his Lean Blog podcast. Clare produced If Japan Can… Why Can’t We?, Deming Library video series and Good News… How Hospitals Heal Themselves. She discussed quite a few important ideas including: The value of cooperation (that […]

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