In this 2012 conversation, Mike Stoecklein reflects on nearly a decade of learning directly from Dr. W. Edwards Deming — attending and helping with the famous four-day seminars, exchanging letters, and watching Deming consult with clients. Mike also tells the…
In this month’s ASQ blog post, their CEO Paul Borawski writes a new post “The Intersection of Quality and Social Responsibility,” where he defines Social Responsibility succinctly as “Doing well by doing good.” One reason I have always been attracted…
Saw this in the most recent Fast Company: Is Your Manager A Creativity Killer? If the manager is something like a case study from the book The No A**hole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t,…
Dr. W. Edwards Deming famously said that managers can’t hope to motivate employees, as they can only hope to not demotivate them. I wrote about this in my post “If management stopped demotivating their employees…” Deming had a chart that…
I wish I had shared this story when the video was still available (not sure why the TV station pulled it down) — in this link: “Freeman cheers staff ideas to improve hospital.” Freeman Health System, in Missouri, saved more…
It was a very pleasant surprise that ASQ chose Ari Weizweig, a founder and CEO of Zingerman’s Deli (and other businesses) in Ann Arbor, to be the opening keynote speaker at the recent ASQ Lean & Six Sigma Conference in…
As I was cleaning out a pile of stuff in my office, I found an unread issue of Inc. magazine from June 2011. One of their “Best Small Company Workplaces” was Hopkins Printing in Columbus, Ohio: “Survival of the Smartest:…
This is free app that’s brought to you by a coalition of lean bloggers. Learn more about it or download it directly from the iTunes Store or the Android Marketplace. A number of us combined efforts to provide this as a…
Thanks to Andrew Bishop for posting a link to this article the other day. The New York Times had an article on Sunday titled, “Do Happier People Work Harder?” I think the answer, clearly, is yes. The outlook from a…
As a kid, I always enjoyed writing and, at one point, dreamed of being a baseball beat writer, like the father of one my best friends from elementary school who got to travel and cover the Detroit Tigers. I was…
The articles from the July/August 2011 issue of Inc. Magazine aren’t online yet, but there are two things I wanted to go ahead and blog about. One article had a very “Like Lean” attitude about employee motivation and the other…
TL;DR: W. Edwards Deming taught that organizations don’t need to motivate people–they need to stop demotivating them. Practices like rankings, merit pay, numerical targets without methods, and competition between people crush intrinsic motivation, dignity, and joy in learning over time.…