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- No Blame Thinking by Mike Wroblewski – “It’s not who’s wrong, it’s what’s wrong. It’s not who’s right, it’s what’s right. All other thinking leads to hiding the truth, distorting the information and covering up the problem”
- Three Sigma Bubble? Nonsense! by Marc Hersch – “Grantham’s argument is fallacious. The assumption underlying the use of three-sigma limits is that the system being characterized is in a state of control.” [investors and economic planners consistently fail to understand the volatility of markets – John, see Misuse of Statistics – Mania in Financial Markets]
- Lean Jobs: Current Salary Trends by Ralph Bernstein – “Salaries for people in dedicated lean positions in manufacturing haven’t changed much in the last couple of years, and salaries in manufacturing generally are down since last year”
- Management by Objectives – Why? by Gilad Langer – “You can set goals and metrics for a process, but that will eventually backfire with people.”
- How to Hold the Daily Scrum by Peter Stevens – “The Daily Scrum should be held at the same location and the same time every day, ideally in the team space in front of the team’s big visible task board.”
- Should Cross-trained Workers be Paid More? by Jon Miller – “In lean companies cross training is a prerequisite to advancement to supervisory and leadership positions, as the team leaders, group leaders and even area managers are responsible for training, filling in for absent workers and being intimately familiar with the processes they manage and possible problems within them.”
- What is your ideal organization? by Bob Sutton – “I give the students the final exam question on the first day of class, and it is due the last day. It is, ‘Design the ideal organization. Use course concepts to defend your answer.'”
- 5 Questions – Meet Kathleen Fasanella – “With lean, it’s employees who are truly investing in their employers and they feel it, the owners feel it. It becomes a genuine group effort.”
- “Stop the Line” in a Hospital by Mark Graban – “It’s great to see that hospitals are starting to adopt this quality philosophy — empowering healthcare workers to “stop the line” or stop the process to make sure an error is not going to occur.”
- Quality management in Nigeria – a first hand observation by Shaun Sayers – “I was in Lagos all last week on business, which was very successful as it happened, but implementing quality management in the developing world presents a number of challenges on several fronts.”
- Are Americans woking harder and getting paid more? by Karen Wilhelm – “Although these measures relate output to hours at work of all persons engaged in a sector, they do not measure the specific contribution of labor, capital, or any other factor of production. Rather, they reflect the joint effects of many influences”
- USA Spent $2.2 Trillion or $7,421 Per Person on Health Care in 2007 by John Hunter – “This brings health care spending to 16.2% of GDP (which is yet another, in a string of record high percentages of GDP spent on health care). In 2003 the total health care spending was 15.3 of GDP.”
