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Quality and Innovation

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  • How to Achieve Transparency: One Approach

    Point 1: Transparency in business and in government means that you know what’s going on (or can find out). You have access to information about the organization’s processes and results, it is clearly presented, and it is understandable. It is difficult, if not impossible, to understand accountability when transparency does not exist. In the emerging…

  • What Cupcakes Can Teach Us About Quality

    After being introduced to Cappellino’s in Charlottesville this past week, I have been thinking a lot about cupcakes. I have actually been thinking about cupcakes for a couple weeks, since the time that my friends Ron (@rduplain) and John (@superninjarobot) went out for “beer and cupcakes”. I thought they were either joking, or that this…

  • Disorganization and Changing Your Mind are Both Expensive

    Ron DuPlain forwarded me an interesting post from November 2008 (via @duanegran, I believe) called How much do websites cost? It’s a great comprehensive overview of the different kinds of web sites that can be built – the spectrum of customization, interactivity, and intent that dictate whether a web site will cost $200 or $2…

  • Baldrige-Based Health Care Reform?

    Today’s Washington Post has an article by Minnesota senator Tim Pawlenty on the effective design of national health care reform, entitled “To Fix Health Care, Follow the States”. He argues that the federal government should model its initiatives after successful state-based systems that link outcomes to value: In Minnesota, our state employee health-care plan has…

  • Lean Thinking and Health Care Reform

    Today’s Op-Ed section in the Washington Post has a piece by Philip K. Howard called “Health Reform’s Taboo Topic”. The problem? Health-care reform is bogged down because none of the bills before Congress deals with the staggering waste of the current system, estimated to be $700 billion to $1 trillion annually. The waste flows from…

  • Quality and the Great Contraction

    From the July 6, 2009 issue of Business Week: “A new world order is dawning – one in which the West is no longer dominant, capitalism (at least the American version) is out of favor, and protectionism is on the rise… the era of laissez-faire economics is over, and statism, once discredited, is making a…

  • Achieving Quality when Something is Always Broken

    In the quality profession, we are accustomed to thinking about product and component quality in terms of compliance (whether specifications are met), performance (e.g. whether requirements for reliability or availability are met), or other factors (like whether we are controlling for variation effectively, or “being lean” which is realized in the costs to users and…