Quality and Innovation

Blog: https://qualityandinnovation.com/
Profile: https://qualityandinnovation.com/author/nicoleradziwill/
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When Your Ideas are Met With Resistance

Has anyone ever opposed your ideas? Punctuated your plans? (This could be something you’ve experienced at work, or just in the regular course of life.) Has anyone encouraged you (subtly or not so subtly) to remain entrenched in the status quo? To not “rock the boat”? Yeah, me too. Usually, when people question my ideas,…
Training in the Sharing Economy

Paul Borawski’s August question to the ASQ Influential Voices is personal: Are you continuously improving yourself through training? The subtext of this question is, of course, to explore the extent to which companies are currently supporting – and encouraging – training about quality-related topics, tools, and techniques as a form of personal development. Budgets have…
Making Quality Standards a Collaborative Game

Hello again! I haven’t written in a while – suffice it to say, productivity cannot be achieved without sound mind, heart, and body. I’ll write more about that theme during the upcoming year, because I’ve decided to make personal health my top priority for a while – and explore the ripple effects. I spent a lot…
Google Docs to Markdown Converter: A Gateway Drug to Getting Your Books on LeanPub

Following in the footsteps of fellow ASQ Influential Voice John Hunter (who published Management Matters on LeanPub) — I’ve had the intention for the past couple years to write my next book using LeanPub too. There’s only one problem: LeanPub requires that you prepare and format your book in Markdown. I know Markdown is not…
Peripheral Visioning

Somehow, some way, over the course of too many years growing up staring into a computer screen — my eyesight became much-less-than-perfect. Only I didn’t know it. I thought everyone lived in a slightly hazy, cloudy world, where all the colors naturally blended into postmodern mosaics of distant trees and mountains. It was never a…
Quality vs. Innovation: How Much Structure Do You Need? A SAD Lesson

One of the things I think about a lot is how to balance the structures provided by quality systems and standards, with the divergent thinking and creativity that’s necessary for innovation and continuous transformation. I’m not the only one thinking about this, it seems! Just this week, Steve Denning published a great article in Forbes entitled “The Management…
Authenticity, Radical Self-Expression, and Pull Innovation

John Hagel (@jhagel) is probably my best source of inspired news right now. It’s almost like he’s in my head daily… thinking about the various aspects of institutional innovation, and how to create environments that are ripe for learning, and unexpected bounty, and the liberation of the human spirit through what we used to call…