Lead To Succeed (pdf document) by Stephen S. Prevette:

* Succeed as a quality professional by branding yourself and providing a service or product your manager and organization deem worth paying for.
* Lead your manager “your customers” by providing the data they need in a form they can understand.

This is a great article on how to apply quality (Deming, Statistical Process Control, Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing) ideas and move forward professionally; even when those ideas are not always shared by the organization.

Of course, I like to see my beliefs cast in a positive light. I believe far too often we look for the newest ideas and miss all the great ideas that have been known for decades but are not practiced widely. The key to success is applying good ideas well - not just applying new ideas.

Success is not as easy as we might hope. Just discovering the ideas of Deming or Toyota or Ackoff is not enough. The great ideas don’t, by themselves, convince managers to try a new way of managing. There is a great deal of education needed for most organizations to get to the point where they realize they could improve by applying “old” ideas such as: control charts, lean thinking, spc, not tampering…

More articles by Stephen Prevette.