systems thinking
By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). That quote is from The New Economics, published in 1993. Still today many companies would benefit greatly from adopting this thinking. So often companies fail to focus on the needs of customers. So often companies focus on the short term to the […]
Read More
By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Ian Bradbury presented on Exploring Measurement at our 2016 annual conference. As usual his presentation is packed with great information. I strongly recommend watching (also see links to more presentations by him below). At the very beginning of his talk, Ian says Stuff happens a […]
Read More
By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Dr. Deming discusses the interdependence of business in: Managing the Organization as a System. For example, in a bowling team each one plays his one solos, on the other hand in an orchestra it is all interdependence. They work together as a system. I’d say that the degree of […]
Read More
By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Kentaro Toyama‘s presentation at the 2016 Annual Deming Institute Conference – Geek Heresy: Technology’s Law of Amplification From the website for Kentaro’s book, Geek Heresy “Toyama’s research reminds us that there are few one-size-fits-all solutions. If technology is going to improve the lives of the world’s poorest, it must […]
Read More
By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. At Air Force One, the word team means something Over the past few years, Air Force One CEO Greg Guy did away with commission pay for all sales associates and general managers. “The performance has been great and I would never consider going back,” […]
Read More
By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. In this presentation Dan Jones discusses what we (with an understanding of Deming’s ideas) can see as an aspect of the Deming chain reaction: Focusing on quality and then time the consequence is that we lower costs. Rather than focusing initially on costs as […]
Read More
Guest post by John Hunter, founder of the CuriousCat.com. I like to share interesting articles (and other resources) that provide examples of organizations applying Deming’s ideas in practice. Here is another of those articles: How Intermountain Trimmed Health Care Costs Through Robust Quality Improvement Efforts by Brent James and Lucy Savitz (2011). Since 1988, Intermountain […]
Read More
By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Software code review is the practice of reviewing the software code written by colleagues on your software development team. Like many practices the form it takes can vary quite a bit. W. Edwards Deming stated in Out of the Crisis: Cease dependence on inspection to […]
Read More
By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Far too often, companies promote employees into management positions and expect them to fulfill the obligations of their new position without helping prepare them to meet their new responsibilities. People who excelled at doing their non-supervisory job often have little education or experience to succeed […]
Read More
By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. One of Dr. Deming’s 7 deadly diseases is: Emphasis on short-term profits: short-term thinking It is easy to focus on short term goals and use a somewhat simple short term figure to measure success. But just because it is easier to look at the […]
Read More