Guest post by David Kerridge (originally posted to the Deming Electronic Network):

This is part of a series in which I recall striking or thought-provoking things that W. Edwards Deming said, but did not put into his books.

I remember taking a manager to his first Deming 4-day seminar. Afterwards my friend said to me “I was very impressed with that man. He said ‘I don’t know.’”

Something in our culture makes us ashamed to admit ignorance. We expect quick, slick answers, whether from politicians, managers, or consultants.

Deming said “I don’t know” more often than anyone I have ever known. Sometimes you heard the answer about two years later, in his seminar.

I also remember him saying “I have learned more in the last six months than in the previous ten years.”

Maybe one quotation explains the other.

Related: Dr. Deming quotes - Instant Pudding - Deming on being Destroyed by Best Efforts - Where to Start Improvement

The Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve in Ohio is quite a nice short hike. Photos by John Hunter. If anyone knows what the green beetle is please add a comment.

I visited the preserve last year. Other sites from the trip include: Rocky Gap State Park, Maryland and Coopers Rock State Forest, West Virginia.

More photos: Rocky Mountain National Park - Mount Rainier National Park - Capital Crescent Trail (Washington DC) - travel photo directory

This is the 1,000th post to the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Here are some highlights:

• Post number 2: Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data - “We use data to act as a proxy for some results of the system. Often people forget that the desired end result is not for the number to be improved but for the situation to be improved.”
• Most viewed post: Eliminate Slogans - management by slogan is not an effective management strategy

Information Technology: Toyota IT Overview - “customizing the code, to its business processes, and not the other way around.”

• Manufacturing: Top 10 Manufacturing Countries - Manufacturing Jobs Data by Country
• Health Care: Going Lean in Health Care - USA Healthcare System Costs 16% of GDP ($2.0 trillion or $6,697 per person in 2005) - Drug Prices in the USA - Change Health Care
• The Purpose of an Organization quoting Dr. Deming: “The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain - stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment - over the long term.”
• Process Improvement: Better and Different - Process Improvement and Innovation Go Together - PDSA Cycle: “One slow turn is much less effective then using it as intended to quickly test and adapt and test and adapt…”
• What to do: Write it Down - Visible Data - Lean Thinking and Management - Use Books to Ignite Improvement - Management is Prediction - Standardized Work Instructions - Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame - Design of experiments - Performance without Appraisal - Bring Me Problems Even if you Don’t have the Solutions - Stop Demotivating Me! - Don’t Empower - Respect for People - Most Meetings are Muda - Managing the Supplier Relationship
• Commentary: Obscene CEO Pay - Management Excellence - Management Advice Failures - Data Can’t Lie - New Rules for Management? No! - Be Careful What You Measure - Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay
• Why blog? The Importance of Management Improvement - Bad Management Results in Layoffs

The Deming Institute is sponsoring, How to Create Unethical, Ineffective Organizations That Go Out of Business, 12-14 May, 2008 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Kelly Allan and I will be presenting the seminar. Please let me know if you sign up.

Related: Deming on Management - Curious Cat Management Improvement Calendar - Deming Seminar and Conference - Deming Companies

See more photos of my visit last year to Coopers Rock State Forest in West Virginia. The day before I visited Rocky Gap State Park in Maryland. Photos by John Hunter.

Related: Nature Recreation Declining - Mason Neck State Park, Virginia - Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

Once again I have created a group on the ESPN NCAA Basketball Tournament Challenge for curiouscat college basketball fans. To participate, go to the curiouscat ESPN group and make your picks.

This year we also have a second challenge, using sportsline, that rewards picking upsets. So those that enjoy the tournament please join the fun. The password for this one is cat

Go Badgers and Go Davidson,

ValuMetrix Services provides some really nice lean six sigma case studies. Simple short but still with enough detail to actually provide some sense of what is going on.

While on the topic of online case studies let me plug the Curious Cat management improvement library. I think it is one of the more valuable resources for management improvement offered on the Curious Cat sites. Library shelves: health care articles, lean manufacturing articles, six sigma articles, newly added articles…

via: Daily Kaizen

Related: Curious Cat Management Search - Management Consulting, what does the web site show? - Lean Management Case Study

I have posted some photos from my walk last year on the Capital Crescent Trail in Washington DC.

The Capital Crescent Trail goes along the Potomac River in Washington DC (on the C&O towpath). I hiked first along the Arlington, Virginia side of the Potomac (starting at the north end of the Teddy Roosevelt Island Parking lot) then crossing over at Chain Bridge and heading back down the Capital Crescent trail and over the Key Bridge to and making a loop hike out of it.

More photos: Egypt Photo Essay - Boston (Museum of Fine Arts, Science Museum, Boston Commons…) - Glacier National Park - Great Falls National Park - Olympic National Park Photos

I have mentioned Kiva before: Microfinancing Entrepreneurs (on our Curious Cat Economics and Investing blog). In addition to being a good cause Kiva really shows some great management strategies. The use of Information Technology to connect people directly is a wonderful example of using IT effectively (understanding psychology).

Kiva lets you loan money directly to an entrepreneur of your choice. Kiva provides loans through partners (operating in the countries) to the entrepreneurs. Those partners do charge the entrepreneurs interest (to fund the operations of the lending partner). Kiva pays the principle back to you but does not pay interest. And if the entrepreneur defaults then you do not get your capital paid back (in other words you lose the money you loaned). I plan to just recycle repaid loans to other entrepreneurs.

I have just placed an additional $150 in loans to 6 business entrepreneurs (in Honduras, Indonesia[2 loans], Tajikistan, Uganda and Ukraine), along with a $100 donation to Kiva (adding to my previous Kiva loans of $350). Since our last post the Oprah Winfrey Show, President Clinton’s newly released book Giving and others have sung the praises of Kiva and made it a challenge to find entrepreneurs of Kiva to lend to (Kiva is working on building their capacity - to keep up with the demand. That seems to have been partially fixed (for awhile the supply of the entrepreneurs was completely exhausted) in last few weeks (though still they limit you to no more than $25 per entrepreneur - in order to allow the large numbers of people that want to lend to at least have the chance to loan something).

If you lend through Kiva, add a comment with a link to your Kiva page and I will add you to our list of Curious Cat Kivans.

Related: Kiva: Microfinance Loans - helping people succeed economically - Thinking About the Future

I started looking at quality management resources online in 1995 (maybe 1994). At the time I was on the board of the Public Sector Network - what would become the American Society of Quality (ASQ) government division. When we started working with ASQ it took something like 2 months from the time I wrote an article until people received it. Now in 1995, the internet (outside of universities) was in its infancy. I was writing a column on the resources online for quality management - these consisted of bulletin boards (that you used your modem to call directly) and “gopher” and “ftp” sites and email lists a very few web sites. Ftp and gopher are internet protocols (as is the hypertext transfer protocol - http - we all use for the web now). Well things changed frequently back then and by the time my article would be published phone numbers wouldn’t work, addresses would be out of date, etc..

So I figured I should post my article online so people could just go there and see the updated phone numbers, addresses, etc.. That wasn’t so easy to do back then. But several of us at a W. Edwards Deming Institute conference decided to create a Deming Electronic Network (DEN). And one of those people was Del Kimbler who worked at Clemson and had access to a web site where he agreed to host the DEN. So I asked about posting the Online Quality Resource Guide there and he agreed.

Del is retiring from Clemson and so we are moving some of the material off Clemson to curiouscat.com. As part of that I ran across this November 1995 edition of the Online Quality Resource Guide. There really was a small number of good online resources for managers back then. We forget how lucky we are today. The first article I can find (right now anyway) is from the Spring of 1995. It listed a total of 2 web sites in addition to a BBS and several email lists. Clemson was listed as a gopher site and web site.

We have recently moved the Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site and Community Quality Electronic Network to curiouscat.com. Some history on PSCI and CQEN.

Related: John Hunter history - Using Quality to Develop an Internet Resource by John Hunter (1999) - Management Improvement History

If organizations just adopt management improvement practices I firmly believe customer service, financial performance and employee satisfaction could be improved. This was a big part of the reason I started to use the internet to share management improvement ideas back in 1996 (plus I find management improvement interesting).

On the note of making a difference in people’s lives. I have had far more people tell me how my father (Bill Hunter) made a huge difference in their lives (far more than ever tell me anything like that). Now there is the sensible explanation, that he actually had a big impact on people’s lives (but you also have to figure most of those people never saw me so the chance for them to say anything didn’t exist…). I believe far more people told me (after he died) than ever told him, which says something about psychology in the USA, I think. But I don’t really know what people told him - so I could be wrong about that.

Anyway the point of this is that many people have told me their life was significantly changed by working with him on management improvement initiatives (mechanics talking about how he changed the workplace they had been in for years, people who saw that they could contribute more and changed careers, managers that realized how much damage they had done but now were on the right track…). There was obviously a great deal of emotion for many people. And it was largely about applying concepts like Deming’s management system, Toyota Management practices, statistics (yes even that)… and his ability to talk to everyone and make them comfortable (tons of people mentioned this - that this university professor would ask me questions and talk to me like a person, not talk down to me and be interested in my answers and…). As I continue through life I realize that this management improvement stuff really can matter if done right.

I have grown to enjoy maintaining the management improvement resources and other Curious Cat web sites but this is the reason I started and continued these efforts over the years. Today there is a great amount of useful management information online - but for years the pickings were quite slim.

Photo is of Dad and me a few years ago. Related: Quality in the Community: Madison, WI - Statistics for Experimenters - Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin - Managing Our Way to Economic Success: Two Untapped Resources - Invest in new management methods not a failing company

Photos from my trip to New York City last year are now online. Photos include: The Cloisters (part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art - though located far uptown) art and architecture of medieval Europe, the remodeled Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller Center, Empire State Building and Flatiron Building.

Related: New York City Photo Essays - Paris Travel Photos - Pacific Northwest photos - Curious Cat Travel Photos

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We are adding the option to place direct ads on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. If you would like to place text ads - or small image ads - related to management topics please contact us.

For more information see: placing an ad on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog.

I posted this to our science and engineering blog last week: Awesome Cat Cam. It doesn’t really have anything to do with management: I suppose I could make a case for creativity… but basically it is just really cool (it also illustrates some good product design and testing points). CatCam by Juergen Perthold - this great project involved taking a digital camera and some additional equipment to create a camera that his cat wore around his neck which took pictures every 3 minutes. The pictures are great. The cat got photos of several other cats and seemed to like spending time under cars. You can now order your own CatCam.

Sometimes I have some challenging ideas, or crazy like some other people would say. This time I thought about our cat who is the whole day out, returning sometimes hungry sometimes not, sometimes with traces of fights, sometimes he stay also the night out. When he finally returns, I wonder where he was and what he did during his day. This brought me to the idea to equip the cat with a camera. The plan was to put a little camera around his neck which takes every few minutes a picture. After he is returning, the camera would show his day.
…
For the second try I used the plastic package of a child toy (Kinderueberraschung), put a stone in it for loading it with some weight and attached it again to the cat collar. This time the part returned - dirty and scratched outside, water inside. What the hell is the cat doing !? This raised the requirements for the camera protective housing a lot
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Big moment no. 1: attach the collar with the camera to the cat. The reaction was not very happy but finally accepted. Reality check passed

Related: The Cat and a Black Bear - Automatic Cat Feeder - The sub-$1,000 UAV Project

After I presented the Deming Seminar in Boston last year a spent a few extra days in to enjoy the city. See photos from my Boston visit including: Boston Fine Arts Museum, Boston Science Museum and Boston Common.

Related: Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky - New York City Photos - Glacier National Park photos
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The Deming Institute is sponsoring, How to Create Unethical, Ineffective Organizations That Go Out of Business, 23-25 April, 2007 in Lansing, Michigan. I will be co-presenting the seminar. Let me know if you sign up.

Related: Curious Cat Management Improvement Calendar - Deming Seminar and Conference - Deming Institute Conference

Once again I have created a group on the ESPN NCAA Basketball Tournament Challenge for curiouscat basketball fans. To participate, go to the curiouscat ESPN group and make your picks.

Go Badgers and Go Davidson,

The Curious Cat Management Improvement site includes a wide array of resources for management professionals (and has been growing and improving, I hope, since 1996). Our calendar now includes several interesting opportunities including Performance Measures and Statistics Workshop in Richland, Washington, USA by Stephen Prevette. This workshop looks interesting. We have mentioned the presenter in previous posts.

Our management improvement job board currently lists jobs including: Six Sigma/Technical Specialist, Supply Chain Project Manager (Google), Quality Control Specialist (Toyota) and Quality Engineer. The service is free, both to those posting and those responding to jobs. If you are looking to fill a management improvement position or for a position please give it a try.

In addition to the blog we also offer an links to hundreds of articles on management topics we have selected, a dictionary of management terms, annotated directory to management resources and recommened management books.

Please let us know what you like and what we could improve.

I have been tagged by Mark Graban of the lean blog: “Tag” - 5 Things You Don’t Know About Me.

• I spent a year in Singapore and another in Nigeria while I was growing up.
• Dad, Bill Hunter, was a professor (related to the item above), who co-authored Statistics for Experimenters and applied Deming’s ideas in the Public Sector for the first time. Out of the Crisis pages 245-247 include a write up on that effort with the First Street Garage. Peter Scholtes, at the time worked for the City of Madison, and played a big part in the effort. He went on to write the Team Handbook and The Leader’s Handbook.
• I was on the Wisconsin Badger Basketball camp championship teams in 7th and 8th grade. The second year we played the championship game on the regular Badger Basketball home court. The Badger’s are a bit better now then they were then.
• I have flown on “Air Force One.” Not technically, since it the president was not aboard, but while working for the White House Military Office I flew on the plane on a couple test flights. It is officially “Air Force One” only when the President is flying.
• I spent many Thanksgivings beating John Dower, my father (and other of the family members of both) at Oh Hell. Some might claim I remember more victories today than took place at the time.

John Hunter. The small person is me, the bigger one is Dad.

I tag: Kathleen Fasanella, Mike Wroblewski, Peter Abilla, Karen Wilhelm and John Dowd.

More on Madison’s Quality efforts: Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin - Quality in the Community: One City’s Experience

Photos of Mason Neck State Park, Virginia
National park photos: Grand Canyon, Great Falls, Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton…
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