Tag: Deming

W. Edwards Deming: Leadership, Quality, and Continuous Improvement

W. Edwards Deming’s ideas about leadership, systems, variation, and psychology continue to shape how organizations pursue quality and improvement. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections exploring Deming’s teachings—and how they apply to Lean, healthcare, management, and continuous improvement today. Many of these posts challenge common misinterpretations of Deming’s work, emphasizing that quality cannot be delegated and that improvement starts with leadership.

My Comments on #Lean Healthcare in These Challenging Times

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Thanks to Dodge Communications for interviewing me for their blog: "Improving healthcare--there's no instant pudding." I was, of course, citing the late great Dr. W....

Steve Jobs on Continuous Improvement: Rare 1990 Video Shows Early Lean...

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tl;dr: This post features a rare 1990 video of Steve Jobs describing continuous improvement in ways that closely echo Lean and Kaizen principles. He...

Learning Not to Blame: Baseball Edition

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Following up my post about not blaming a bartender, here's another look at learning to cast aside our old habit of blaming individuals... this...

The Day I Thought I’d Get Fired from “The Old GM”...

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Following up on yesterday's post that talked about "the old GM" putting cost ahead of quality, I sometimes I get flashbacks to my days working...

How Do You Make Time for Improvement? Here are Nine Takes...

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I'm happy to be a participating author on "The Lean Edge" blog/site that's hosted by Michael Ballé author of The Gold Mine and other books. Their most recent question...

Should Lean Consultants Be Paid a Percentage of Cost Savings?

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The price paid for most management consulting work is based on either a daily rate or some variation of a flat-rate fee based on...

Did GM Forget that the Customer Should Come First? And Who...

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I wrote an article for LinkedIn yesterday about the recent GM ignition problem controversy and recall. I commented mainly on the video put out...

Is it Lean’s Fault or the Old Management System’s?

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It's easy for an organization to say they are "doing Lean" or they have "started a Lean transformation." They might hire a consultant or...

The Truth About Data and PDSA/PDCA from a Toyota Publication

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Out there in the Lean and quality improvement communities, you sometimes hear some silly things. Sometimes, I want to attach the "Lean As...

Parallels (and Differences) Between the Book “Traction” and Kaizen

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When I recently did a Healthcare Kaizen workshop near Detroit, I invited an old friend of mine to attend as a guest. Marisa Smith, an...

A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing – 5S & Lean

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I read this valid complaint from somebody on a LinkedIn group.... it led to a "facepalm" that I managed to catch on camera: I interviewed with...

Videos Look Inside the Tesla (former NUMMI) Factory – Will They...

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I was able to tour the NUMMI factory in 2005, which I really enjoyed (see my series of blog posts here). NUMMI was, of...
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