Employees take their cues from management. Do top managers still view financial performance as the sole indicator of success, despite mouthing platitudes about dazzled customers and fulfilled employees? Is there a point when reductions are done excessively in the name of squeezing out a few more percentage points of profit, moving companies from their “ideal […]

Organizational change would be so easy if it weren’t for all the people. “I suffer simultaneously from amnesia and déjà vu. I have the feeling that I keep forgetting the same thing over and over again.”—Steven Wright (surreal comedian) It all seems so logical, doesn’t it? Focus on processes, improve your organizational decision making through […]

Statistics in the real world aren’t quite as tidy as those in a text book. Analytic statistical methods are in very strong contrast with what is normally taught in most statistics textbooks, which describe the problem as one of “accepting” or “rejecting” hypotheses. In the real world of quality improvement, we must look for repeatability […]

I discovered a wonderful unpublished paper by David and Sarah Kerridge several years ago. Its influence on my thinking has been nothing short of profound. As statistical methods get more and more embedded in everyday organizational quality improvements, I feel that now is the time to get us “back to basics”—but a set of basics that is woefully misunderstood, if taught at all. Professor Kerridge is an academic at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and I consider him one of the leading Deming thinkers in the world today.

It is believed that the fate of many companies could be altered for the better if workers were more motivated. So, when things go wrong, why is the knee-jerk reaction to blame the workers for their poor attitudes and lack of work ethic?