Category: personal

Sackler family sweetens deal to $6billion

I will not be happy with this story until every member of the Sackler family who was involved in the decision-making at Perdue is in jail and the family has lost every dollar they made. But I am heartened to see the failure of their failed bankruptcy ploy leading to the addition of another 1.5 billion in settlement.

Sackler family members to contribute up to $6 billion in latest agreement to resolve opioid claims

For the regulatory state to function there needs to be teeth, and quite frankly we do not see the teeth nearly enough.

Harvard Business Review – Whitewashing business executives is their core business

In the latest edition of “Executive utilizes Harvard Business Review to whitewash their activities” we have Hubert Joly, CEO of Best Buy, who informs us that we should all

  • Making meaningful purpose a genuine priority of business operations
  • The “human magic” of empowered and self-directed employees
  • Admitting you don’t have all the answers is a sign of strong leadership.

Let’s see how Best Buy puts those practices in place.

It is hard to take the editors of HBR seriously when they discuss what a good company culture looks like when they whitewash corporate leaders with this sort of track record.

Probably Best Buy paid a lot of money for the reputation bump just before Christmas.

Story is critical, or why tabletop roleplaying made me the quality professional I am today

I’ve written before on how storytelling is a critical skill. The ability to take data, take the events of the past and transform it into a coherent narrative is central to the quality profession, and frankly just about every other job out there.

This week I got one of my favorite compliments. We were working to take a series of events and shape it into a coherent narrative to explain what had happened, why we could be confident of the results, and how we had improved over time. And one of my co-workers had commented on how much they were learning from this process, and another responded that of course I was good at this because I was a gamer. And I was just tickled pink.

I make no secret of my hobby. My Twitter feed, for example, is one part geek, one part quality, one part politics. Search for me in google (and who doesn’t google search their coworkers?) and you’ll see gaming stuff on the front page. And in this day of working from home, my background is a bookshelf crammed full of games.

And I do think I am, to a large amount, the quality professional I am today because of that gaming background. There are many paths within quality, and this is part of mine.

Some of the things I’ve learned as a gamer include:

  • Storytelling skills
  • Communication skills
  • Organization skills
  • The ability to “think on your feet”
  • Humor
  • Patience
  • Creativity
  • Fairness
  • Knowledge of rules and how they work together in a system.
  • How to use visual aids, pictures et all
  • Paying attention to everyone, giving everyone a chance to be heroic
  • Conflict resolution skills

Which as a list definitely feels like the core of the profession.

So, fellow gamers in quality, next time we actually meet face-to-face at a conference, let’s find a little time to meet each other at the table.

ASQ Webinar August 4, 2021

I am speaking with the ASQ’s Human Developlement and Leadership Division on August 4th at 3 pm eastern on “Trust & Adaptability: Servant Leadership Lessons from Joining an Organization During a Pandemic” exploring from what Steven M. R. Covey wrote in Ken Blanchard and Renee’s Broadwell’s book Servant Leadership in Action that the key outcome for a servant leader is trust. Trust and servant leadership are both built on intent. The Trust built will allow your organization to be more adaptable. Adaptability builds resilience and allows innovation and transformation.

This talk will mostly focus on my continual learnings as I’ve worked, and usually struggled, to build trust during this pandemic in an environment where I’ve never met most of my co-workers.

Registration Link is https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5744331842761271563

Time to Move Away from Animal Testing

Outspoken watchdog group White Coat Waste Project recently released an analysis of nearly 200 new drug applications submitted to the FDA between 2000 and 2020 to describe the impact of animal modeling.

There is litle reason for these tests, and frankly I think we’d all be thrilled to no longer need them. The outdated regulations that drive to mandatory animal testing should be ended.

In the report, the organization took special aim at the use of beagles. Around 11,000 puppies and dogs were used to satisfy the FDA’s testing requirement during that 20-year period. And my puppy definitely does not approve. Just thinking of all that wasteful testing puts him to sleep.