Category Archives: Statistics

2007 William G. Hunter Award

Posted on October 19, 2007 by John Hunter

T.N. Goh received ASQ Statistics Division’s 2007 William G. Hunter Award. He sent me this email: You may not realize that I first met Bill 38 year ago, when he was in Singapore helping us set up the first school … Continue reading →

Posted in Design of Experiments, Management, Statistics | 1 Comment

Seven Fatal Flaws of Performance Measurement

Posted on September 25, 2007 by John Hunter

The Seven Fatal Flaws of Performance Measurement by Joseph F. Castellano, Saul Young, and Harper A. Roehm Performance measurement systems are used to establish specific goals, align employee behavior, and increase accountability. Organizations often use these systems to set targets … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Performance Appraisal, Statistics, Systems thinking | Comments Off on Seven Fatal Flaws of Performance Measurement

Search Share Data – Checking the ACSI

Posted on September 20, 2007 by John Hunter

Last month, in a long post criticizing the ACSI I took issue with, among other things, the implications being drawn from an ACSI rating. The ACSI rating of Yahoo was higher than that of Google (though statistically insignificantly so). Anyway, … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Google, Statistics | 4 Comments

The Importance of Management Improvement

Posted on August 23, 2007 by John Hunter

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, curiouscat.com, Deming, Management, Psychology, Respect, Statistics | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments

Mistakes in Experimental Design and Interpretation

Posted on June 19, 2007 by John Hunter

Mistakes in Experimental Design and Interpretation Humans are very good at detecting patterns, but rather poor at detecting randomness. We expect random incidents of cancer to be spread homogeneously, when in fact true randomness results in random clusters, not homogeneity. … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Design of Experiments, Management, Psychology, Science, Statistics | 2 Comments

Jeffrey Pfeffer on Evidence-Based Practices

Posted on March 11, 2007 by John Hunter

Jeffrey Pfeffer Testifies to Congress About Evidence-Based Practices [the broken link was removed]: In this short statement, I want to make five points as succinctly as possible, providing references for background and documentation for my arguments. First, organizations in both … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Data, Management, Performance Appraisal, Public Sector, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged , | Comments Off on Jeffrey Pfeffer on Evidence-Based Practices

Performance Measures and Statistics Course

Posted on January 20, 2007 by John Hunter

Performance Measures and Statistics Course [the broken link was removed] – free course materials from a 2 day training course by Steven Prevette. Topics include: Dr. Deming’s red bead experiment, operational definitions, selecting performance targets, SPC, theory of variation, case … Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Statistics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Quality Technology and Innovation

Posted on September 2, 2006 by John Hunter

The Future of Quality Technology: From a Manufacturing to a Knowledge Economy and From Defects to Innovations [sadly the link to ASQ fails, sigh, http://www.asqstatdiv.org/documents/newsletters/Winter06StatDiv.pdf] by Soren Bisgaard: we need to be good at both breakthrough and incremental innovation. Not … Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, Management, Manufacturing, Statistics | 2 Comments

The Exciting Life of Industrial Statisticians

Posted on July 13, 2006 by John Hunter

Never a Dull Day: The Life of an Industrial Statistician by Gerry Hahn. Gerry Hahn was one of the great applied statisticians of the last 50 years, working at GE for over 45 years. Six sigma has many variants, he … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Data, Management, Statistics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Understanding Data

Posted on May 9, 2006 by John Hunter

Topic: Management Improvement Statistics Abuse and Me by Jay Mathews: the Simpson’s Paradox numbers. The national average for the SAT went up only 4 points between 1981 and 2005, but the average for whites went up 10 points, for blacks … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Education, Management, Statistics | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments