Who Owns the Process? A process owner is appointed by management to ensure that a major cross-functional process is both effective and efficient. This is a key concept that must be understood for any process improvement strategy to work. Conventional functional management, where leaders are assigned to departments or functions, has worked well for a [...]

Thirteen Fundamental Truths Over my career I have documented a list of 13 fundamental truths that applied to all organizations. I ran across these statements recently when I was looking for some comments made by a past IBM president that I wanted to use in a new book I am writing. As I thought back [...]

Are Quality Methodologies All Smoke and Mirrors? Part Three In the first post of this three-part series, I reviewed an interview that was conducted in 1988 with F. James McDonald, president of General Motors. In this interview he explained what GM was doing to improve quality and customer satisfaction. Typical activities that GM was involved [...]
Harrington's Seven Basic Performance Improvement Principle The older I get, the more I realize that the basic things that we believe in and live by do not change. The world keeps moving faster and faster. We need to run and work harder just to keep up. We get sidetracked by many new ways to use [...]