Posted on July 10, 2005  Comments (0)

The Art of Lean, by Michael Rovito, The Sunday Challenger, Kentucky

Posted on July 9, 2005  Comments (0)

re: Six Sigma Training for the G-8?

Interestingly Prime minstrel Blair recently showed an understanding of systems thinking (specifically how targets can result in worse performance, when targets result in distortion of the system rather than improvement). In the targets in health care case the easy “politics of the warm fuzzy feeling” would be to declare victory in setting targets. In that case PM Blair realized that while the data might look better the actual results might not necessarily be better (when the system is distorted or the data is distorted).

Measures are a proxy for the actual situation and far too often people forget the proxy nature of data in process improvement.

I would agree the target of a .7% of GDP as a aid goal is an activity/input measure. It is like measuring the amount of dollars spent on polio vaccination. Often (though to a lesser extent today than 10 years ago) the amount of money being spent is used as the measure of how much is being done (instead of a measure of outcomes). The best measure for the polio example, is the reduction, or elimination of polio in the population. The amount of money being spent is a measure that tells you something; but an outcome/result measure of polio within the population, is what should be used to measure success. At the same time, without the commitment of funds by the government to the vaccination program (and, in fact, research and development before that) the resulting reduction in polio would not have been achieved.
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Posted on July 8, 2005  Comments (4)

Topic: Management Improvement

Toyota Home – Applying the Toyota Production System to Home Building from Evolving Excellence

From Toyota’s web site:

I often find myself wishing I could deal with Toyota instead of whatever company I am getting poor results from. The Evolving Excellence post mentions “Lean Construction is not really new.” Not only that, queuing theory, lean thinking (in general), customer focus and process improvement are not unformed concepts that need a great deal of work before they can be applied in the real world.
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Posted on July 4, 2005  Comments (0)

Top 25: Influential Business Leaders

Lists such as this don’t have much value. However, I do think they have a little value in getting people to think about some important innovations in business. But honestly, I wouldn’t be writing about it except that they lists Dr. W. Edwards Deming in this list, along with the likes of Gates, Grove, Welch, Dell, Walton and Bezos. I hope that encourages some people to take a look at Deming’s ideas or perhaps encourages some to discuss Deming’s ideas. For more on Deming’s ideas see the Curious Cat Deming Web. I am glad they recognized his contributions, I think things will be better if Deming’s ideas are kept alive and mentions, such as this list, keep his ideas alive to the general public.

Posted on July 4, 2005  Comments (0)

BBC radio has an online podcast of a discussion of W. Edwards Deming‘s ideas. As far as I can tell the program is available for downloading just for the next couple days (I am exploring if we can find a way to make the program available online permanently – if anyone has experience working with BBC and has some helpful info please let me know).

The program is “In Business” on BBC 4. Peter Day moderates the discussion with guests:

Norman Speirs
European Director, Management Wisdom

Hazel Cannon
Leader of the Deming Forum

Jane Seddon
Process Management International

Debbie Ray
Good Samaritan Hospital Dayton, Ohio

Myron Tribus
former professor MIT and Dartmouth Universities in America

David Wormald
Managing Director, Raflatac

Nick Baxter
Chief Executive and Founder of Cornerstone International

I definitely encourage those interested in Deming’s ideas to listen to the podcast. The discussion provides a good overview of the basic concepts (exploring why Deming’s ideas are not “that Quality stuff that we did years ago”), a short history of Deming ideas and the state of affairs now. It is not an advanced tutorial for those who have been working with these ideas and now what to know how to solve specific issues they have run across. For those interested in applying Deming’s ideas, as always, I suggest: The Leadership Handbook, Fourth Generation Management and the Improvement Guide (for more see: books to start with and the

Posted on July 4, 2005  Comments (0)

I just returned from several weeks visiting National Parks in the Northwest USA: Olympic, Mount Saint Helens, North Cascades, Glacier and Mount Rainer. I will post photos of the parks to the Curious Cat Travels section as I have time. The photo above, is me at Olympic National Park.

A CNN.com article, from yesterday, discusses the use of National parks and comments on camping declining at the parks. I have always preferred to hike around during the day and then eat good food, sleep in a warm bed and take a warm shower. So maybe I am ahead of the trend the article argues is taking place. I found the most interesting part of the article to be:

One of the surprising things about my recent trip was the lack of foreigners. Often, of past visits (Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountains, etc.) close to half the people I see hiking seem to be foreigners . This time I would estimate less than 10%. My guess is this is just an anomaly of the time and places I visited but it was interesting.