Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Statement on the purpose of a corporation from the Business Roundtable, August 2019: …we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders… Delivering value to our customers… Investing in our employees… Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers… Supporting the communities in […]
Guest post by John Hunter. John and his father worked with Peter Scholtes for many years (Out of the Crisis included a report on Bill Hunter and Peter’s efforts to help improve the City of Madison government). Peter Scholtes shared his thoughts on Leading Quality: Some Practical Approaches to the Managers New Job at the […]
Guest post by John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). The W. Edwards Deming Institute® web site includes several articles exploring organizations that are applying Deming’s ideas. One of those articles looks at the efforts at New York Label & Box. Steven Haedrich, President New York Label & Box: Essentially, […]
Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability To succeed over the long term organizations must seek not to satisfy customers but to delight customers. Employees need to understand how customers actually use their product or service. And then they need to use this knowledge to continually improve the value delivered […]
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 […]
Guest post by John Hunter. This webcast shows Bob Browne’s presentation, Profound Knowledge of the Real Thing, at the 2012 Annual Deming Conference. Bob is the former CEO of the Great Plains Coca Cola Bottling Company. Among other things, this presentation is a good option for those seeking an example that provides historical business results […]
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 most people do and then somehow hoping that quality and time […]
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 with their new responsibilities. Managing a software development team is […]
In Clayton Christensen’s new book, Competing Against Luck, the authors delve into the importance of gaining a deep understanding of what your customers desire. The book lays out a Theory of Jobs to be Done in a very compelling way. To me this is a great example of extending Deming’s ideas with a great deal […]
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 quarterly profit figure than determine progress without such a clear measure […]