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Author Archives: John Hunter
Using Data to Improve – Quality is a Journey to Excellence
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Data, Deming, Management, Quality tools, Statistics, webcast
Tagged Data, organization as a system, respect for people, Statistics, webcast, William Hunter
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Design Your Organization to Serve Customers Well
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Management, webcast
Tagged Bill Hunter, Customer focus, Deming, management, productivity, quality, webcast
2 Comments
Quality is a Journey to Excellence
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 There is a bit of presentation that is outdated (mainly about general economic conditions and specific business conditions from the 1980s).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 … Continue reading
Posted in Deming, Management, Respect, Systems thinking, webcast
Tagged Bill Hunter, Data, Deming, Innovation, management, respect for people, Systems thinking
3 Comments
Remembering Brian Joiner
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. 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 … Continue reading
Posted in Data, Management, Statistics, Systems thinking
Tagged blame, Brian Joiner, Data, Deming, John Hunter, Madison, management, Systems thinking
1 Comment
Expand the View of the System to Find Ways to Improve Results
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 … Continue reading
Annual Performance Evaluations are a Poor Management Practice
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Career, Deming, Performance Appraisal, Systems thinking
Tagged Career, Deming, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, theory of knowledge
John Hunter Online
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 … Continue reading
Posted in curiouscat.com
Tagged blogs, John Hunter
Interview of Bill Hunter: Statistical Variability and Interactions
Interview of Bill Hunter on Statistical Variability and Interactions by Peter Scholtes, 1986: In this interview Bill Hunter describes how results are made up of the impact and interactions of many variables. Many of those variables we don’t know about or account for. What we normally do is try to figure out the most important variables for processes and then experiment with those variables to find the best options given what we are trying to achieve. Often the description of … Continue reading
Posted in Data, Management, Statistics, webcast
Tagged Bill Hunter, experiments, interview, learning, Peter Scholtes, Statistics, variation, webcast
Profound Podcast with John Hunter, Part Two
John Willis interviewed me for his Profound podcast series, this posts is about part two of the interview (listen to part two of the podcast, John Hunter – Curious Cat). See my post on part one of the interview. John Hunter presenting at Deming Institute management seminar in Hong Kong This post provides links to more information on what we discussed in the podcast. Hopefully these links allow you to explore ideas that were mentioned in the podcast that you … Continue reading
Posted in Deming, Management, Psychology, Respect
Tagged Bill Hunter, Deming, interview, John Hunter, Joy in Work, podcast, Psychology, respect for people
Profound Podcast: John Hunter – Curious Cat
John Willis interviewed me for his Profound podcast series (listen to part one of the podcast, John Hunter – Curious Cat) John Hunter, Hurricane Ridge Trail, Olympic National Park This post provides links to more information on what we discussed in the podcast. Hopefully these links allow you to explore ideas that were mentioned in the podcast and that you would like to learn more about. Bill Hunter (my father): Quality In The Community One City’s Experience (Madison) – Quality … Continue reading
Posted in Deming, Design of Experiments, Management
Tagged Data, Deming, John Hunter, podcast
Interview of Bill Hunter, Brian Joiner and Peter Scholtes on Better Management Practices
Interview with Bill Hunter, Brian Joiner and Peter Scholtes (listen to the interview) on a Public Affair, National Public Radio about improving management practices in the USA. The interview is over 30 years old now but the better management ideas are as true today as they were then. Sadly we have not improved management practices based on these ideas very much. There have been improvements in how many organizations are managed but those improvements are so slow that fundamental problems … Continue reading
Learning from Customers
Don’t make it hard for customers to be heard. Provide training and tools to employees to document customers voices. Train employees to learn as much as possible from customers. Value the time employees spend listening to customers and learning from them. Most customers won’t speak up, those that do speak up provide valuable insight. Don’t waste what they offer. Create a management system focused on continual improvement that is engaged in seeking out customer feedback and continually improving the value … Continue reading
Posted in Customer focus, Management
Tagged critical thinking, culture, Customer focus, customer service, Data, feedback, learning
1 Comment
Most Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog in 2020
These posts were the most popular posts on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog in 2020 (as measured by page views recorded by my analytics application). I wrote very few posts for this blog last year. The historical Curious Cat management RSS feed provides a feed of all the past posts about management (I also provide other Curious Cat RSS feeds). This year 15 posts are repeats from the 2019 top 20 list. Of the new top 20 posts 3 … Continue reading
Posted in curiouscat.com, Popular
Tagged blogs, Popular
Interview of Bill Hunter: Improving Quality and Productivity in Organizations
Interview of William G. Hunter on Improving Quality and Productivity in Organizations by Peter Scholtes. Bill taught a course at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Improving Quality and Productivity in Organizations, which was co-sponsored by the business school, statistics department and industrial engineering department. There were a few undergraduate students, more graduate students and even more students who were working full time (many of whom only took this course – they were not pursuing a degree at the university). … Continue reading
Posted in Management, Psychology, Respect, Systems thinking
Tagged Bill Hunter, Education, learning, Madison, Peter Scholtes, Psychology, respect for people, webcast
2 Comments
I Have Published an Update to Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability
I have published some edits and additional content for my book – Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. One of the things I really like about how I have published the book (with Leanpub) is that anyone that has previously purchased the book gets these, and all future, updates for free. So if you have purchased it, go get your free update. If you haven’t purchased it, please consider buying a copy. Another nice feature of Leanpub publishing is that I … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged Management Matters
Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog in 2019
These posts were the most popular posts on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog in 2019 (as measured by page views recorded by my analytics application). 14 posts are repeats from the 2018 top 20 list. Of the new top 20 posts 3 were published in 2010, 1 in 2008 and 2 in 2019. The long term value of good blog content is overlooked by many people. I hope you continue to enjoy this blog, both the new content and … Continue reading