W. Edwards Deming’s ideas about leadership, systems, variation, and psychology continue to shape how organizations pursue quality and improvement. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections exploring Deming’s teachings—and how they apply to Lean, healthcare, management, and continuous improvement today. Many of these posts challenge common misinterpretations of Deming’s work, emphasizing that quality cannot be delegated and that improvement starts with leadership.
tl;dr: This post features a rare 1990 video of Steve Jobs describing continuous improvement in ways that closely echo Lean and Kaizen principles. He challenges “we’ve always done it this way,” stresses that people are smart and should own improvement,…
Following up my post about not blaming a bartender, here’s another look at learning to cast aside our old habit of blaming individuals… this time, baseball related. Modern organizations (in healthcare and business) tend to blame an individual when something…
Following up on yesterday’s post that talked about “the old GM” putting cost ahead of quality, I sometimes get flashbacks to my days working for General Motors. I once slammed a greasy connecting rod down on my manager’s desk at GM.…
I’m happy to be a participating author on “The Lean Edge” blog/site that’s hosted by Michael Ballé author of The Gold Mine and other books. Their most recent question has many responses and I’ll try to help organize them for you here. Question: As CEO…
The price paid for most management consulting work is based on either a daily rate or some variation of a flat-rate fee based on what is being delivered. Enterprise software pricing is also often fixed. In both cases, the client…
I wrote an article for LinkedIn yesterday about the recent GM ignition problem controversy and recall. I commented mainly on the video put out by new CEO Mary Barra (which I encourage you to watch). As a former GM employee,…
It’s easy for an organization to say they are “doing Lean” or they have “started a Lean transformation.” They might hire a consultant or put out a press release. Maybe there’s an optimistic (but premature) news article about how the…
Out there in the Lean and quality improvement communities, you sometimes hear some silly things. Sometimes, I want to attach the “Lean As Mistakenly Explained” (or L.A.M.E.) label to what’s said when it really seems off the mark from what…
When I recently did a Healthcare Kaizen workshop near Detroit, I invited an old friend of mine to attend as a guest. Marisa Smith, an entrepreneur and business owner in Ann Arbor, saw the connections between my Kaizen work and a…
I read this valid complaint from somebody on a LinkedIn group…. it led to a “facepalm” that I managed to catch on camera: I interviewed with a medium sized company for a quality Manager position a while back. They were convinced…
I was able to tour the NUMMI factory in 2005, which I really enjoyed (see my series of blog posts here). NUMMI was, of course, a joint venture between Toyota and GM (as John Shook talked about recently at the…
Thanks everybody for reading my blog in 2013! I appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to read and participate in the discussion and I h0pe you’ll continue visiting the site in 2014… in what will be my…
