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Tag Archives: Bill Hunter
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 There is a bit of presentation that is outdated (mainly about general economic conditions and specific business conditions from the 1980s).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
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
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
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
Bill Hunter and the Quality Movement
Watch this presentation by George Box at the 1st Annual Hunter Conference on Quality: Bill Hunter and the Quality Movement. In the presentation George discusses interesting student design of experiments projects; read more on those efforts in 101 Ways to Design an Experiment, or Some Ideas About Teaching Design of Experiments. To read more about the quality management efforts in Madison, Wisconsin see: Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin and Quality In … Continue reading
Posted in Management
Tagged Bill Hunter, George Box, Madison, management webcast, quality, respect for people
1 Comment
Applying Improvement Concepts and Tools to Your Daily Life
This month the ASQ Influential Voices is taking a bit different approach. This month we are looking at applying quality tools in our personal life based on the post from other influential voice, Sunil Kaushik: How Lean Helped Me Travel To Egypt With Just $500. Sunil is on a nomadic trip around the world to learn and enjoy the experience while also helping others applying lean thinking. I just returned from my own nomadic adventure. I have experience applying quality … Continue reading
Posted in Quality tools, Travel photos
Tagged ASQ Influential Voices, Bill Hunter, Quality tools, Travel photos
2 Comments
Is Quality Ambitious Enough?
This month Bill Troy, ASQ CEO, asked ASQ Influential Voices bloggers to explore the question – Is Quality Ambitious Enough? Bill Troy suggests a vision for ASQ of To improve the function and value of goods and services worldwide, and to facilitate the development of new products and services that improve the quality of life. He also discusses the ideas of W. Edwards Deming and the value he found in attending 6 4-day Deming seminars. I find the aim Deming … Continue reading
Posted in Career, Management, Respect
Tagged aim, ASQ Influential Voices, Bill Hunter, respect for people, system thinking
2 Comments
Stu Hunter Discussing Bill Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters and EVOP
In this clip, Stu Hunter talks about Bill Hunter (my father, and no relation to Stu Hunter), Statistics for Experimenters and EVolutionary OPerations (EVOP). Stu mentions Bill Hunter’s work with the City of Madison, which started with the First Street Garage (Out of the Crisis included a short write up on this effort by Dad, which, I believe, was the first application of Deming’s ideas in the public sector). There was also a great deal of work done with the … Continue reading
Posted in Data, Statistics
Tagged Bill Hunter, Design of Experiments, evop, George Box, Madison, Public Sector, Six sigma, Statistics, Statistics for Experimenters, webcasts
1 Comment
Stated Versus Revealed Preference
My father provided me a good example of the flawed thinking of relying on stated preference when I was growing up. Stated preference is, as you might deduce, the preferences voiced by customers when you ask. This is certainly useful but people’s stated preference often do not match there actions. And for a business, actions that lead to customers are more important than claims potential customers make about what will make them customers. His example was that if you ask … Continue reading
Posted in Customer focus, Popular, Psychology
Tagged Bill Hunter, Customer focus, food, Popular, Psychology, Quality tools, Statistics, theory of knowledge
8 Comments
Touring Factories on Vacation When I Was Young
Growing up, occasionally, a family vacation would include a factory tour related to my Dad’s work. He was providing some management or engineering consulting and took the opportunity to check in on progress and visit the gemba. Here is a photo from one of those tours (in Nigeria, I think). My brother and Mom are visible in the photo. The tours (which were not a very common occurrence) were quite enjoyable and interesting. Though I really didn’t like how noisy … Continue reading
Posted in Lean thinking, Manufacturing
Tagged Bill Hunter, gemba, John Hunter, Manufacturing, visual management
2 Comments
Positivity and Joy in Work
After my father died, for years (at least 10), people I never had met before would emotionally share what a positive influence he had on their lives. He did great stuff helping organizations improve. But the majority of people were not telling me how much he helped the organization improve [there were also a bunch of engineers and statisticians 🙂 that were more impressed with his insights and expertise]. But most people talked about was how much happier they were … Continue reading
Posted in Career, Deming, Management, Psychology, quote, Respect
Tagged Bill Hunter, Career, Deming, John Hunter, Joy in Work, management, Psychology, quote, respect for people
8 Comments
Managing Our Way to Economic Success
From Managing Our Way to Economic Success, Two Untapped Resources by William G. Hunter, my father. Written in 1986, but still plenty relevant. We have made some good progress, but there is much more to do: we have barely started adopting these ideas systemically. there are two enormously valuable untapped resources in many companies: potential information and employee creativity. The two are connected. One of the best ways to generate potential information to turn it into kinetic information that can … Continue reading
Highlights from Recent George Box Speech
The JMP blog has posted some highlights from George Box’s presentation at Discovery 2009 [the broken link was removed] Infusing his entire presentation with humor and fascinating tales of his memories, Box focused on sequential design of experiments. He attributed much of what he knows about DOE [design of experiments] to Ronald A. Fisher. Box explained that Fisher couldn’t find the things he was looking for in his data, “and he was right. Even if he had had the fastest … Continue reading
Posted in Data, Design of Experiments, Six sigma, Statistics
Tagged Bill Hunter, Data, Design of Experiments, Fun, George Box, John Hunter, Madison, Six sigma, Statistics
6 Comments

The Aim Should be the Best Life – Not Work v. Life Balance
My father had the most job satisfaction of anyone I have known. He had no separation between work and life. We toured factories on vacation. I visited Davidson College in North Carolina because he was consulting with a client in Charlotte before we went up to Duke and North Carolina for visits and asked the CEO what school I should visit. His grad students would call the house frequently. Many of his best friends were colleagues. That is how I … Continue reading →