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...

Sep 2020

Mary Jenkins: Statistical Approach to HR Systems

Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Mary Jenkins gave this presentation on Statistical Approach to HR Systems at the Ohio Quality and Productivity Forum in 1992. In the presentation Mary provides a view of the organization as a system and the existing and possible systems to manage personnel. She...

Jul 2020

I Have Published an Update to Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability

I have published some edits and additional content for my book – Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. One of the things I really like about how I have published the book (with Leanpub) is that anyone that has previously purchased the book gets these, and all future, updates for free. So if you have purchased […]

Jun 2020

Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog in 2019

These posts were the most popular posts on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog in 2019 (as measured by page views recorded by my analytics application). 14 posts are repeats from the 2018 top 20 list. Of the new top 20 posts 3 were published in 2010, 1 in 2008 and 2 in 2019. The […]

Jan 2020

Management Improvement System Flavors

ASQ has asked their Influential Voices to explore the question “Is Agile the new Lean?” I have participated with the program since 2012: see my past blog posts as part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. No Agile is not the new Lean. On this blog, in 2008, I wrote about Future Directions for Agile […]

Sep 2019

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 […]

Aug 2019

How to Successfully Lead Change Efforts?

ASQ has asked their Influential Voices to explore the question “How can an individual become a successful Change Leader?” I have participated with the program since 2012: see my past blog posts as part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. In order to lead efforts to improve the management of an organization understanding how people […]

Jun 2019

Factfulness – The Importance of Critical Thinking

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 […]

Jun 2019

Design the Management System with an Appreciation of Confirmation Bias

To create strong organizations we must create management systems using an appreciation of psychology. We must understand that people have tendencies that must be addressed by designing a management system built to take advantage of the strength those people bring and mitigate the risks the weaknesses (such as confirmation bias) that those people also...

Feb 2019

My Willing Worker Award

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 […]

Jan 2019