A Brief History of Quality, Part 1 – “Time has no divisions to mark its passage…”
Bill Bellows looks at “step changes” and how they relate to quality.
systems thinking
Break the Cycle
Bill Bellows discusses using the Deming approach to turn things around – whether prompted by a crisis or an essential effort in an organization’s continued success.
Change Management – Post Change Evaluation and Action
Change is difficult in most organizations. Most often the process should start by using the PDSA cycle.
Book Review – The Tyranny of Metrics
Guest post by Michael Godfried: planner and policy analyst in Washington State and Bill Bellows, Deputy Director, The Deming Institute Jerry Z. Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics (2018) is a book that I believe Dr. Deming would have surely appreciated. This well-researched book gives an ever timely overview of the history and drivers behind the misuse of metrics …
Aim as a System
Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. TJ Gokcen,CEO of Acquate, shared a presentation at our 2015 International Deming Research Seminar on Aim as a System. In the presentation TJ says that one of management’s responsibilities is to coordinate communication between the interconnected components of a system. Ensuring that feedback …
Transformation of the Individual and the Organization
Guest post by John Hunter. This webcast shows David Langford’s presentation, When Grading Bites the Dust, at the 2012 Annual Deming Conference. A previous post (Change has to Start from the Top) includes a clip from another talk he gave at the 2012 conference and it is a valuable companion to the video included here. …
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Profits, Pragmatism, and the Possibilities of Possessing “Other Eyes”
Post by Bill Bellows There is little evidence that we give a hoot about profit. W. Edwards Deming On July 22, 2014, Apple announced financial results for its fiscal third quarter, reporting a revenue of $37.4 billion and a quarterly net profit of $7.7 billion. From sales of iPhones to iPads to computers, Apple executives …
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Instant Karma! and Instant Pudding!
Post by Bill Bellows, Deputy Director, The Deming Institute The first step is transformation of the individual. The individual, transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life, to events, to numbers, to interactions between people. W. Edwards Deming In January 1970, John Lennon returned to the UK from a holiday in Denmark, inspired by a series …
Transformation Paradox
This guest post is an excerpt from Ed Baker’s book (pages 31-32), The Symphony of Profound Knowledge, which was created in partnership with Aileron.org. Managers in business, school administrators, and teachers may believe that they have to grade, rate, and rank, to manage by numbers and use other traditional methods because these are necessary to do their …
More reflections on additivity, including hole reinforcement circles and golf balls
Post by Bill Bellows, Deputy Director, The Deming Institute. “The efforts of the various divisions in a company, each given a job, are not additive. Their efforts are interdependent.” W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics In a continuation from a previous blog on what to think when things do not add up…, consider the machinist whose …
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