A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
Marcus Aurelius
Quality Management Frameworks
Besides previously discussed Quality Management Systems (QMS), there are also Quality Management Frameworks (QMF) which aim to provide guidance. Companies can use these frameworks to benchmark the performance of their QMS, and can use the guidance of QMF to strive for excellence.
Quality Management Systems
This post provides concise overview of six Quality Management Systems, based on the work of Professor Andrea Chiarini.
Aristotle on Excellence
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
Playing Lean Australia
Sometime around January or February 2016 Miro Hegedić introduced me to Tore Rasmussen, one of the guys behind Playing Lean. Given my background and interests, Lean Start-up wasn’t really on my map, but all that changed after meeting with Tore. Since then, it just kept on rolling, and today we are working together on several projects.
For the uninitiated, Playing Lean is an educational board game which facilitates learning of the Lean Start-up principles through gamified experience. Playing Lean is aligned with Ash Maurya’s Running Lean, and he is involved with the development of the game. He endorses it as an educational tool for the Lean Start-up. Tore has written more about how Playing Lean conveys Lean Start-up.
In May 2016 I became a Certified Playing Lean Facilitator, and in agreement with Tore and Simen, I started to plan a promotional Australian road-trip. The idea was to cover all major cities over the course of one month.
Quality Philosophers
Previously presented definitions of quality could be considered new, but philosophy of quality is far from new. Well known Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle considered qualities as hylomorphically formal attributes, and described four types of qualitative opposites: correlatives, contraries, privatives and positives (Whitaker, 1996).
On Managing for Quality
Quality thinking developed with manufacturing systems, and could be considered both order qualifier and order winner.
