Using Data to Improve – Quality is a Journey to Excellence

Posted on November 3, 2026 by John Hunter

Quality is a Journey to Excellence is a 2 day management seminar that Bill Hunter (my father) recorded in 1985 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The embedded clip shows the fourth section of a the seminar on using data to improve.

meetings can go very smoothly and directly to solutions and get a lot of things done if somebody just brings the data. And if there is no data the only basis on which you can have a discussion is everybody’s opinions and prejudges and ideas and theories and hypothesis and hunches and all that. And they may be very valuable and some people may have very good ones but it is very difficult to convince other people your hunch is better than theirs or your opinion is better than someone else’s. Who tends to win tends to be the people with the higher rank or people who shout the loudest or things like that.

It is just incredible what can happen is someone brings some data and says look are biggest problem is not that and is not that and and its not this one either that we all thought was really the big one but its this one.

These links provide more details on ideas he discussed in the seminar:

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Quality is a Journey to Excellence – Improving the System

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Curiouscat

Quality is a Journey to Excellence is a 2 day management seminar that Bill Hunter (my father) recorded in 1985 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The embedded clip shows the third section of a the seminar on improving the system.

Deming has this pithy way of putting a lot of the problems along those lines and what he says is: “Lets play American industry and we’ll make toast. I’ll burn and you scrape.”

These links provide more details on ideas he discussed in the seminar:

Related: Design Your Organization to Serve Customers Well – Quality is a Journey to Excellence (part one)

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In Praise of Data-Driven Management (AKA “Why You Should be Skeptical of HiPPO’s”)

Posted on July 7, 2025 by Curiouscat

Guest post by Justin Hunter, originally published 18 August 2009.

image of a hippo with the text HiPPO: Highest Paid Person's Opinion

Jeff Fry recently linked to a fantastic webcast in Controlled Experiments To Test For Bugs In Our Mental Models. I would highly recommend it to anyone without any reservations. Ron Kohavi, of Microsoft Research does a superb job of using interesting real-world examples to explain the benefits of conducting small experiments with web site content and the advantages of making data-driven decisions.

I firmly believe that the power of applied statistics-based experiments to improve products is dramatically under-appreciated by businesses (and, for that matter, business schools), as well as the software development and software testing communities. Google, Toyota, and Amazon.com come to mind as notable exceptions to this generalization; they “get it”. Most firms though still operate, to their detriment, with their heads in the sand and place too much reliance on untested guesswork, even for fundamentally important decisions that would be relatively easy to double-check, refine, and optimize through small applied statistics-based experiments that Kohavi advocates. Few people who understand how to properly conduct such experiments are as articulate and concise as Kohavi. Admittedly, I could be accused of being biased as: (a) I am the son of a prominent applied statistician who passionately promoted broader adoption of such methods by industry and (b) I am the founder of a software testing tools company that uses applied statistics-based methods and algorithms to make our tool work.

Here is a short summary of Kohavi’s presentation: Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web: Listen to Your Customers not to the HiPPO

1:00 Amazon: in 2000, Greg Linden wanted to add recommendations in shopping carts during the check out process. The “HiPPO” (meaning the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) was against it thinking that such recommendations would confuse and/or distract people. Amazon, a company with a good culture of experimentation, decided to run a small experiment anyway, “just to get the data” – It was wildly successful and is in widespread use today at Amazon and other firms.

3:00 Dr. Footcare example: Including a coupon code above the total price to be paid had a dramatic impact on abandonment rates.

4:00 “Was this answer useful?” Dramatic differences in user response rates occur when Y/N is replaced with 5 Stars and whether an empty text box is initially shown with either (or whether it is triggered only after a user clicks to give their initial response)

6:00 Sewing machines: experimenting with a sales promotion strategy led to extremely counter-intuitive pricing choice

7:00 “We are really, really bad at understanding what is going to work with customers…”

7:30 “Data trumps intuition” {especially on novel ideas}. Get valuable data through quick, cheap experimentation. “The less the data, the stronger the opinions.”

8:00 Overall Evaluation Criteria: “OEC” What will you measure? What are you trying to optimize? (Optimizing for the “customer lifetime value”)

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Posted in Data, Design of Experiments, IT, Management, Psychology, Quality tools, Software Development, Statistics | Tagged , , , ,

Curious Cat Management Improvement Institute

Posted on September 24, 2024 by Curiouscat

I have established the Curious Cat Management Improvement Institute as a non profit that will serve as an online resource to help those that want to improve the practice of management.

Curious Cat Management Improvement Institute is dedicated to furthering the education, professional growth and development of current and future managers and the practice of management in organizations.

That is quite a vast aim. We do think we can provide a useful service by connecting those interested in improving the practice of management with resources that will help them do so successfully.

We are building a web site to share resources (books, articles, webcasts, blogs…) on many management improvement topics (including: respect for people, systems thinking and data. I will be spending a fair amount of time the next few months adding to those pages.

image of the screen of the CCMII website topic page for "respect for people."

Please let me know if you have comments, questions or suggestions for how to make the Curious Cat Management Improvement Institute useful to those trying to improve the practice of management. We believe there is a great deal of desire to improve how our organizations are managed. But decade after decade pass and the progress in how we manage organizations is very disappointing.

We believe we can help improve how we manage organizations. It is certainly a large task. But it is a worthwhile task and I believe an achievable one if we can think clearly and continually improve as we strive to improve the practice of management over the long term.

Posted in curiouscat.com, Management | Tagged , ,

Design Your Organization to Serve Customers Well

Posted on June 26, 2024 by John Hunter

Quality is a Journey to Excellence is a 2 day management seminar that Bill Hunter (my father) recorded in 1985 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The embedded clip shows the second section of a the seminar discussing customers and how to organize your systems to serve customers well. See part one of the seminar, and the full seminar.

Some aspects of managing an organization well are quite challenging. But some aspects really are not and yet we still often fail to do even those aspects well. Bill’s suggestion to ask the customer what they want is one such area which offers an easy path to significant improvement. Though even such a simple concept is a bit challenging to adopt if the management culture doesn’t have an understanding of the organization as a system.

In the first part of this part of the seminar Bill talks about the value of talking to those in your organization that take what you produce (a product or service) and use that in their work as your organization continues to work to deliver to the “end users” (final customers). This seems so simple and unlikely to provide value but it is surprising how often what one part of the organization believes are the most important aspects of their output to others is not actually accurate.

Bill discusses how focusing on improving quality is the best way to reduce costs and increase productivity. Improving processes to reduce waste reduces costs and increases value to the customer. With costs decreasing prices can be lowered, providing more value (better products and services) to customers at a lower price. That leads to increasing sales which provides more work for more employees (see the Deming Chain Reaction).

Bill also talked about new jobs to do to work in a new way:

  • Look for what could be improved. Then work on improving how the organization functions.
  • Continual improvement of processes.

The focus is on continual never ending improvement. This is a much different mindset than focusing on what is most broken right now and how can we put in place some band-aid to allow things to keep working as they have but stop the visible issue as quickly as possible.

Both human (how to work effectively together, how to get people communicating, respect for people) and technical (problem solving tools, statistical methods, scientific approach) skills are needed to create a continual improvement culture.

Bill Hunter, in the seminar:

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Quality is a Journey to Excellence

Posted on May 7, 2024 by John Hunter

I recently uncovered this 2 day management seminar that Bill Hunter (my father) recorded in 1985 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The embedded clip shows the first section of a the seminar.

There is a bit of presentation that is outdated (mainly about general economic conditions and specific business conditions from the 1980s). If you don’t have the patience to sit through that (I find it useful but I can understand some people won’t want to listen to that part) just skip to about 21 minutes in and you will get great ideas of improving the management of our organizations today. You may even want to skip to about 36 minutes into the video if your attention span is less open to taking in a bit of background material.

In the section of the talk included here Bill discusses:

  • Bigger Picture (economic conditions and history)
  • Introducing Deming (as a person)
  • Quality Improvement as Driver

US companies seem to be like a train. Up at the front there is the engine and that is where the motor is and this is what pulls the train along. The big bosses tell everyone what to do and then everybody does it…

In Japan, we like to run things differently. The engine is not just up in front and we all follow. We want to have all the employees have their own motors, start their own engines and that is much more powerful.

One would hope the model of designing business to treat employees with respect and enable everyone to think and act based on their knowledge and function would be widespread 40 years after this presentation. While I do think some businesses have learned to be less driven by a few bosses telling everyone how things must be done, overall USA businesses still fail to use the brains and drive all of their employees possess. See: Managing Our Way to Economic Success by William Hunter.

Business and Labor—from Adversaries to Allies by Donald Scobel was published in 1982 (I believe this is the article Bill referred to in the talk, though I could be wrong about that). In response to the article Russell Schrader, field representative AFL-CIO, wrote:

The present system in the US has not provided for any meaningful contribution from the workers themselves to improve the methods of production and the quality of work life. They have no opportunity to exercise their judgement, imagination, creativity or versatility in ways that could contribute to their productivity and sense of dignity. It is no surprise that they undergo frustration and discouragement, feelings certainly not apt to contribute to their efficiency. The solution to our productivity problem is the necessity for management and labor to recognize the intrinsic value of the human being.

In a response to that quote, Donald Scobel wrote:

In the last 4 years while researching the article, I have heard employees say over and over again in their own vernacular: “I want to contribute more than the organization will let me.”

Links to items mentioned in the presentation: text of the 1950 Dr. Deming talk in Japan – My First Trip to Japan by Peter Scholtes – “Building a Quality Movement,” with E. Chacko, August, 1972, Quality Progress (Bill mentioned talking to Deming about building a country-wide quality effort before bill spent a year and half as a professor in Singapore)

When the Japanese talk about quality control a better translation into English would be excellence. It is a much more all encompassing idea than what we think of as quality control.
…
When the Japanese talk about quality, it means not only the quality of the product, the quality of the processes producing the product, the quality of the designs that go into processes and the product, quality people, quality systems, quality everything. Quality service, just quality through and through everywhere. What they are really talking about is a new way to manage and run organizations.

Ishikawa talks about it as a thought revolution for managers. And that is what a lot of visitors to Japan have just missed.

Bill ends this portion of the presentation by saying “Quality is a journey, not a destination.”

Related : Interview of Bill Hunter, Brian Joiner and Peter Scholtes on Better Management Practices – Deming and innovation – What is Total Quality Control the Japanese Way by Kaoru Ishikawa – Bill Hunter and the Quality Movement (by George Box)

Posted in Deming, Management, Respect, Systems thinking, webcast | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Remembering Brian Joiner

Posted on October 16, 2023 by John Hunter

I knew Brian Joiner as a child growing up in Madison, Wisconsin. He and my father worked together and our families spent time together. As I grew I interacted with Brian in my professional life and that relationship made my life better.

photo of Brian Joiner

Brian Joiner, 1984 by Bill Hunter

We often saw things similarly. We could see things that we thought should improved and liked to focus on actually making improvements. Doing that is quite a bit more difficult than just pointing out all the problems that exist (in management and in society in general).

Brian was one of the people that best captured the desire and ability to make positive change, in my experience. Sometimes that means making compromises that will lead to actual improvements. I really enjoyed talking about ideas with him. He and Peter Scholtes were very similar to my father in their desire to improve people’s lives and the willingness to do the work to realize those improvements. It is very difficult to do.

His book, Fourth Generation Management, is one of the top handful of books I most recommend for those interested in improving the practice of management in their organization.

I have posted about Brian previously on this blog including:

image of quote - "There are three ways to get better figures... Improve the system... Distort the system... Distort the figures"

My life is much richer for having known Brian. Many people’s lives are better due to the work Brian did during his lifetime. And more people’s lives will be better as his ideas, in Forth Generation Management and elsewhere, are applied in the future.

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Expand the View of the System to Find Ways to Improve Results

Posted on January 10, 2023 by John Hunter

Here is an example of improvement made possible by expanding the view of the system (and viewing the results from the perspective of the customer instead of just looking at internal process measures).

I was working to improve the processing time for court orders of child support (in the retirement system for the USA federal government). The time to process the court orders was taking far too long (longer than legally allowed). The first process improvements took place in the office (there were many easy ways to improve the process). In a few months things we finally starting to be under control and it was obvious the results were still far from acceptable. Looking at the whole process the time delay due to our office had been nearly entirely eliminated.

However the total time was still far too long. That time was not under our control, so how could it be our problem? Just because you do not control a portion of the process does not mean you cannot influence those results. By using a system that was already in place (but was used very rarely) to have the mail go directly to us rather than to a central mail processing location I was able to improve the process by more as any internal improvements.

Madison County courthouse in London, Ohio.

Madison County courthouse in London, Ohio (Wikimedia image).

The delay from getting mail forwarded to our location from the central mailing location was many weeks long. I was able to have the orders for child support sent directly to us. Thus I was able to greatly improve the results with an improvement that was seen as not part of our system (the mail system delay before we received the orders). There are often ways to make improvements that are (or seem) outside of your area of responsibility and control.

By expanding the system view and looking at the results of the entire system it is often possible to find improvements that are not possible by only looking at “your” system. These changes can sometimes be more challenging to accomplish as they may require convincing others to make changes.

Related: Quality of the Entire Customer Experience – The Importance of Critical Thinking and Challenging Assumptions – Actionable Metrics – Good Project Management Practices

Posted in Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking | Tagged , , ,

Annual Performance Evaluations are a Poor Management Practice

Posted on December 6, 2022 by John Hunter

Sports provides visible examples of the futility of accurate performance appraisal. We have athletes who thousands of people devote a huge amount of time to dissecting their strengths and weaknesses and those evaluations are constantly shown to be wrong. Teams are constantly paying free agents tens of millions that completely flop. Others hire someone no-one else wanted for the league minimum and they become a big contributor.

Yes, it isn’t hard to figure out Stephen Curry is a far better basketball player than some bench warmer. But trying to value some non-world-class-superstar is extremely difficult. Yet we have many people that think they can provide a great assessment of exactly what rating their people deserve. If someone is really able to judge people that well they should move into the front office of a sports team because they would pay a huge amount for such talent.

photo of mural of kids and animals

Mural at the Smith Samlanh Education Center in Phnon Phen, Cambodia

When you understand the challenges with evaluating a complex system it isn’t hard to know that evaluating individuals is not easy. Much of the evidence of individual “performance” is so dependent on impacts within the system that are totally out of even the individual’s influence. Yet it is easy to find numbers within a complex system that can be used to argue for or against an individual’s performance.

The contributions any individual brings to an organization is largely dependent on the system in place (see: 94% Belongs to the System).

Related: Expand Your Circle of Influence – Righter Performance Appraisal – Performance without Appraisal

Posted in Career, Deming, Performance Appraisal, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , ,

John Hunter Online

Posted on September 14, 2022 by John Hunter

Years ago I would publish multiple blog posts here every month. More recently I have posted several blog posts a year. For those interested I have several options to receive more frequent updates.

Feeds of my previous management blog posts allow you to subscribe and receive daily updates on management improvement ideas. So even though I am not posting many new posts here anymore you have several options to get you more frequent management improvement content delivered to you. The feeds also allow you to choose to see items on additional topics (investing, engineering, travel, etc.).

photo of John Hunter at Zion National Park

John Hunter at Zion National Park, Utah, USA. One of the things I have been doing while not writing blog posts here is hiking in national parks (including Zion National Park earlier this year).

RSS feed options:

[updated to add link to my Mastodon profile]

Some people like to use Twitter as a pseudo RSS feed (getting tweets with links to interesting blog posts and articles). If that is what you would like to do I have two options: @aJohnHunter and @curiouscat_com. [I removed the links here to encourage using Mastodon which is where I am active now. I am leaving the details for Twitter; over time I expect Twitter will drop many of the poor policy changes they have made and return to offering a usable service. We will see if Twitter does actually address the many recent failings over the next few years. In any event RSS provides great value without the drawbacks on any social network service.]

See where else I can be found online: John Hunter online. Each of the blogs I author also allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds for their specific content.

I also have 2 YouTube channels that you may enjoy: Curious Cat Management and Curious Cat Travel.

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