Failure Is the Highway to Success: Getting It Right
Many times, regardless of how well we plan, some things just fail. Maybe it’s a webinar or a meeting presentation that was well prepared for, but suffered technical difficulty; maybe a savings plan losing nearly half of its value in today’s recession. These challenging situations define our days, but our responses to them determine our future…
The Manual Pareto Chart
When was the last time you created a Pareto chart manually? For those of you not familiar with a “Pareto ” chart, it is simply a bar chart that organizes the categories from highest-to-lowest in frequency of occurrence. Pareto charts are useful when “issues” outnumber the resources available to solve them; obviously, you would want to put the resources on the…
Histograms – 101: See the Quality…
An important aspect of total quality is the identification and control of all the sources of variation so that processes produce essentially the same result again and again. At a glance, a histogram is a tool that allows you to understand a variation that exists in a process. Although the histogram is essentially a bar chart,…
Absinthe, the “Green Fairy”, and Operational Excellence
XONITEK-US and XONITEK-UK recently hosted an Operational Excellence Summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. If you have ever been to Amsterdam, you will know there are distinct cultural differences which are quite obvious if you are from New York – even from a pre-Giuliani New York. From each place I visit, I’ve always liked to acquire artifacts…
A Primer on the Global Carbon Markets
In December 1997, members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiated the Kyoto Protocol that established emissions reductions for the developed and developing nations that ratified the Protocol. The Protocol went into force in February 2005 after Russia ratified it in November 2004. The U.S. did not ratify the Protocol because it set no emission limits for China or India. The Kyoto Protocol covers…
Urban Nomads: Freedom to Roam
Whenever I think of the multitude of phone companies today, I remember that once upon a time, there was ONE phone company. Yes, one – “Ma Bell”. On the AT&T website, they proudly post this fact: “For much of its history, AT&T and its Bell System functioned as a legally sanctioned, regulated monopoly.” While on paper this makes a degree of…