Tag Archives: Data

A Theory of a System for Educators and Managers

Excerpts from The Deming Library Volume XXI, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Russell Ackoff and David Langford demonstrate that educators can begin a quality transformation by developing an understanding of the properties and powers of systems-oriented thinking. You can order … Continue reading

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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 … Continue reading

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How to Manage What You Can’t Measure

In Out of the Crisis, page 121, Dr. Deming wrote: the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable (Lloyd S. Nelson, director of statistical methods for the Nashua corporation), but successful management must nevertheless take … Continue reading

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Actionable Metrics

Metrics are valuable when they are actionable. Think about what will be done if certain results are shown by the data. If you can’t think of actions you would take, it may be that metric is not worth tracking. Metrics … Continue reading

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Problems With Student Evaluations as Measures of Teacher Performance

Dr. Deming was, among other things a professor. He found the evaluation of professors by students an unimportant (and often counterproductive measure) – used in some places for awards and performance appraisal. He said for such a measure to be … Continue reading

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Taxes per Person by Country

I think that the idea that data lies is false, and that such a notion is commonly held a sign of lazy intellect. You can present data in different ways to focus on different aspects of a system. And you … Continue reading

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Prophet Unheard: Dr. W. Edwards Deming – 1992

[embedded webcast links removed because they have been removed from YouTube. To see video with W. Edwards Deming see the Deming Institute YouTube channel.] This is an interesting video on Deming and American management (by the BBC in 1992): Prophet … Continue reading

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The Biggest Manufacturing Countries in 2008 with Historical Data

Once again the USA was the leading country in manufacturing for 2008. And once again China grew their manufacturing output amazingly. In a change with recent trends Japan grew output significantly. Of course, the 2009 data is going to show … Continue reading

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Making Better Decisions

I think the most important thing you can do to make better decisions is to learn from the decisions you make. It sounds easy, but very few people do so effectively. The best strategy to learn from decisions is to: … Continue reading

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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 … Continue reading

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