Tag Archives: Data

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 … Continue reading →

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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. 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 … Continue reading →

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

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 There is a bit of presentation that is outdated (mainly about general economic conditions and specific business conditions from the 1980s).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 … Continue reading →

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. 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 →

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Profound Podcast: John Hunter – Curious Cat

Posted on February 18, 2022 by John Hunter

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 →

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Interview of Bill Hunter, Brian Joiner and Peter Scholtes on Better Management Practices

Posted on October 26, 2021 by John Hunter

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 →

Posted in Data, Deming, Management, Process improvement, Public Sector, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Learning from Customers

Posted on March 2, 2021 by John Hunter

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 , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Factfulness – The Importance of Critical Thinking

Posted on June 4, 2019 by John Hunter

Factfulness by Hans Roling (of TED talks and Gapminder charts fame) is an exceptionally good book. It provides great insight into how to think more effectively and how to understand the reality of the world we live in (versus the large distortions so common in most people’s view of the world). Today the people living in rich countries around the North Atlantic, who represent 11 percent of the world population, make up 60 percent of the Level 4* consumer market. … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Data, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

My Willing Worker Award

Posted on January 22, 2019 by John Hunter

Here is an image of the employee of the quarter award I received from Bill Scherkenbach. I have received other awards and I don’t think those awards were given with any more understanding of the contributions to results due to the management systems in those cases than was shown when giving me this award. Even knowing how little impact I could make on the results I was still happy to receive this award: psychology is not always (often? ever?) sensible. … Continue reading →

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Poorly Stratified Data Leads to Mistakes in Analysis

Posted on April 18, 2018 by John Hunter

Stratification can help provide insight into the nature of the real world situation. Determining what is a sensible conclusion to draw and what is not is aided by an understanding of statistics and expert knowledge of the situation the data is drawn from. Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Don’t Expect Short Quotes to Tell the Whole Story

Posted on July 25, 2017 by John Hunter

When people try to use a short quote as an accurate encapsulation of a management concept they will often be disappointed. It is obvious that Dr. Deming believed that organizations failed to use data effectively to improve. He proposed that organizations needed to change and use data effectively in order to thrive over the long term. He believed that greatly increasing the use of data in decision making would be useful. He also believed there were specific problems with how … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, quote, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

The Importance of Critical Thinking and Challenging Assumptions

Posted on July 12, 2017 by John Hunter

There are many factors that are important to effectively practice the management improvement ideas that I have discussed in this blog for over a decade. One of the most important is a culture that encourages critical thinking as well as challenging claims, decisions and assumptions. I discussed this idea some in: Customers Are Often Irrational. There is a difference between saying people wish to have their desires met and people act in the manner to maximize the benefits they wish … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, Process improvement, Psychology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Technological Innovation and Management

Posted on June 7, 2017 by John Hunter

Technological innovation brings great opportunity for improving results and our quality of life. But transforming potential benefits into real results comes with many challenges. ASQ has asked their Influential Voices to explore the idea of the fourth industrial revolution: “this new era is founded on the practical use of technological innovations like artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, and the Internet of Things (IoT).” For many years GMs huge investment in robotics in the 1980s ($billions) has been an example of … Continue reading →

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Podcast: Building Organizational Capability

Posted on December 7, 2016 by John Hunter

The Software Process and Measurement Cast 420 features an interview with me, by Thomas Cagley, on Building Organizational Capability (download podcast). John Hunter in the podcast: Changing how organizations are managed makes a huge difference in people’s lives, not all the time and I understand most of the time it doesn’t. But when this is done well people can go from dreading going to work to enjoying going to work, not every single day – but most days, and it … Continue reading →

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Understanding Design of Experiments (DoE) in Protein Purification

Posted on August 4, 2016 by John Hunter

This webcast, from GE Life Sciences, seeks to provide an understanding Design of Experiments (DoE) using an example of protein purification. It begins with a good overview of the reason why multi-factorial experiments must be used while changing multiple factors at the same time in order to see interactions between factors. These interactions are completely missed by one-factor-at-a-time experiments. While it is a good introduction it might be a bit confusing if you are not familiar with multi-factorial designed experiments. … Continue reading →

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Unintended Consequences

Posted on June 29, 2016 by John Hunter

Using data to understand your processes and improve them is very useful. But using data often results in unintended consequences. If you don’t have a good understanding on the pressures collecting data will bring to bear on the system you can create pressure for results that damage the delivery of value to customers. In this example there are requirements to take action if certain conditions are present. In this case, if the airplane is pushed back from the gate for … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment