Tue, 09/10/2013 - 10:49
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is supporting strikes by fast-food workers who want $15 an hour. According to Workers’ World, “Most earn the federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25 or close to it. They are demanding that McDonald’s,…
Tue, 07/16/2013 - 09:28
Few quality professionals would want to hear somebody call their quality policies propaganda, but they are exactly that by definition. “Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of communication designed to affect the minds, emotions, and…
Wed, 07/03/2013 - 14:59
Renaissance engineer and artist Leonardo da Vinci is well known as the intellectual father of the modern tank, submarine, and helicopter. He reputedly introduced a deliberate design flaw into his tank’s locomotion system because he never wanted…
Mon, 05/06/2013 - 12:55
Henry Ford’s My Life and Work is the bible of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, which is an excellent example of hiding something in plain view. The people in Huxley's story essentially worship Henry Ford, with the sign of the T (Model T)…
Mon, 04/22/2013 - 11:44
An article in the April 2013 edition of Quality Progress titled “Back to Work” reports that Yahoo! now requires employees who previously telecommuted to report to a Yahoo! office, or even relocate so they will be able to do so.
“To become the…
Wed, 03/06/2013 - 09:46
Automobiles were once high-maintenance luxuries that only the wealthy could afford. Renewable energy, such as that from photovoltaic sources, also is a luxury among whose sole redeeming qualities are its uninterruptable nature—at least during the…
Thu, 01/24/2013 - 15:49
It is a basic principle that muda (waste) often hides in plain view, and it persists because people become used to living with it or working around it. Bricklaying, one of the world’s oldest trades, is a classic example.
Frank Gilbreth, a pioneer…
Thu, 12/13/2012 - 16:14
Henry Ford would have fired for incompetence any manager who tried to move jobs offshore for cheap labor. He believed—and more important, proved—that intelligent management can make most jobs sufficiently value-adding to justify high wages for…
Wed, 12/05/2012 - 10:21
The New York metropolitan area took longer than other regions to recover from Hurricane Sandy, due largely to the logistical difficulty of getting things into and out of cities in general. Problems included, for example, gasoline rationing because…
Thu, 09/20/2012 - 11:57
The traditional control charts for nonconformances (np and p) and defects (c and u) date back to the 1920s, and they rely on the normal approximation to the binomial and Poisson distributions, respectively. This approximation works best when the…