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.
I went through our new book Healthcare Kaizen to categorize the different improvement examples in the book… We have, by my count, 124 examples from hospitals and healthcare organizations around the world., not including the fun examples from Chapter 12…
ASQ and others have announced the passing of a quality legend, Dr. Genichi Taguchi, in Japan, at age 88. Dr. Taguchi is known for, among other methods, the Taguchi Loss Function and other statistical quality improvement methods. He was awarded the…
Here are some notes and key points from Day 1 of the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit. There are over 500 people here from North America and around the world (including a group, again, of about 40 from different hospitals and…
After meeting him at a conference a few years back, I consider Patrick Anderson, executive director of Chugatchmiut, to be a good friend in the Lean world. He graciously endorsed Healthcare Kaizen, as he is working hard to create a…
As a very frequent flyer on American Airlines, I’ve learned not to expect much from the company and its employees in terms of customer satisfaction (yet alone anything that would unexpectedly delight a customer). It seems like a company culture…
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…
Listen Like podcast #133, this episode is a Q&A that follows up a webinar I did for my good friends at Gemba Academy recently, on the topic “Using Statistical Process Control (SPC) to Make Better Management Decisions.” You can…
In this month’s “ASQ Influential Voices” series, ASQ President Paul Borawski asked, “How Do You “Sell” Quality?,” particularly to senior execs and CEOs. Paul asks how we convince senior leaders that quality is essential to long term performance. Through my…
Since the webinar I’m doing later today for Gemba Academy (Using SPC to Make Better Management Decisions) allows me to cite the late great Dr. W. Edwards Deming when talking about variation in systems, I thought I’d share this silly…
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…
One of the most powerful thoughts in the book On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry (by John Toussaint MD and Roger Gerard PhD) is the quote; “the ultimate arrogance is to change the way…
