Author: Tim J. Clark
Happiness and Decision Making
Want to Be Happier_ Use These Five Charts to Improve Your Life_
“I am living my dream life because I embraced a better way—I measured the right things, I took the right actions, and I created the right outcomes,” he says.
” … there is actually no such thing as atheism”
This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio), The Free Press
I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
PDSA – Value of One-Page Proposal
LinkedIn Post – Dave Nave PDSA
Debra Mervyn: Excellent summary! Benjamin Franklin used Plan, Do, Study, Act long before Deming. Franklin used it for all his inventions, projects and businesses. More important for his life goals as documented in his autobiography, an international best seller, and “Project of Arriving at Moral Perfection” https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page38.htm
The 2025 Baldrige Award Criteria!
Now Announcing the 2025 Baldrige Award Criteria!
The next version of the Baldrige Excellence Framework®, from which the Baldrige Award Criteria are derived, will be published in the fall of 2025. The framework is being reorganized, simplified, and refocused as a maturity model improvement guide that will allow organizations to identify their maturity within each category and start process improvement initiatives based on clear steps.
A Christians Responsiblity for Voting
LinkedIn Post. Barna’s survey results identify quite the paradox. In America, We the People are top management. The aim of our system of government is to enable us to work together toward“a more perfect Union.”
Perfect in a biblical context can be defined as meeting all needs – the Garden of Eden being an example. Needs would include the physical, psychological, and emotional.
Given that God has a plan for us all, wouldn’t this plan include working to meet the needs of others, which would also reduce the harm caused by unmet needs? And, given that all needs are not being perfectly met, what is the “plan” (locally and nationally) for improvement? What feedback is needed to determine that change is resulting in improvement?
Rationalizing doing nothing (not voting) contributes to evil: “…. there has been an emerging convergence of the two ways of thinking that includes the consequences of action and inaction. … We can now do great evil without intending to. What we need today is more awareness, a wider recognition of how vast systems we are caught up in can do terrible things and how we can contribute to evil without even being conscious of it.” (Ref: When Jesus Came to Harvard, Making Moral Choices Today,” Harvey Cox)
We can hold our elected representatives “accountable,” but as citizens, we retain responsibility for the results. The only way to get systemic improvements is to get involved, which includes voting. The seven basic tools of quality can be applied to resolve over 95% of problems. These tools are successfully taught and applied at the elementary school level.
Deming SoPK vs SoPP
LinkedIn Post – Bob Emiliani
“Those trying to practice Lean in the absence of understanding Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge are trying to drive cars without wheels.” — B.D. 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲, 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞.
Linkedin. TNE, First Edition – Metanoia
Post of remarks on Deming’s book, 1st edition. The New Economics, by
Angela Montgomery PhD.
My Reply: This first edition was copyrighted in 1993. Subsequent editions published after Deming’s death were changed. The most significant change, which provided insight into Deming’s thinking, included the reference that the term “Metanoia” was a more suitable term than “Transformation” (TNE, 1st edition, pg 95). This reference was deleted in subsequent editions. The “So what?” If you are looking for buried treasure, it helps to have the map developed by the person who buried it.
Additional Context:
“Another half-century may pass before the full spectrum of Dr. Shewhart’s contributions
has been revealed in liberal education, science, and industry.” (Walter Shewhart, Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1986), p. ii.).
Deming estimated in 1986 that it would take another half-century (2036) for the awareness and understanding of variability to be considered more common knowledge. The reason? Reasons would include ignorance of the humanities. The engineers, mathematicians, scientists, and business majors do not get it – their perspective may be limited to the technical. The Japanese (Toyota) “got it” in a manufacturing context because it aligned with their philosophy.
- A Bull Market in the Humanities, by Luke Burgess
- “I believe we are about to experience a massive renaissance in the humanities, inside and outside of universities—but especially outside of them.”
- ….. “Of course, I don’t mean ‘humanities’ in the way that they’ve been hijacked as ideological programs of cultural change by many elite universities. … He means the humanities broadly understood as the study of history, philosophy, religion, language, and arts that explores “what it truly means to be human.”
Every occupation is a form of ministry
You Are a Priest in God’s Kingdom, by Jimmy Evans, May 7, 2023.
Our roles as priests today, and how the roles will change at the Rapture
A Biblical Truth. “Every occupation is a form of ministry, and God has given all of us work to do.” The purpose of any product or service is to meet a need. Variation is a natural part of God’s design and represents the gap between the perfect (all needs met) and the imperfect, reflected by the current situation.
The secular quality profession has validated through the Taguchi Loss Function that the closer any product/service gets to the target (more perfect) as defined by the customer, the higher the quality (more needs met) and the lower the cost to the individual and society.
W. Edwards Deming was a world-recognized leader in quality management and a devout Christian. He remarked that if he was to reduce his message to just a few words, it all has to do with reducing variation.
Ironically, the need for continuous quality improvement is an accepted practice in “secular” industries throughout the world, yet little to no awareness that reducing variation is “a form of ministry.”
In the Christian community, the most common statement I hear from pastors and scholars is that continuous quality improvement is just a “business thing” and irrelevant to ministry. In America, “We the People” are responsible for working towards that “ more perfect Union” by reducing variation. Additional context on the topic: https://lnkd.in/edH5C4d
ChatGPT Explains the Gospel
I asked ChatGPT to explain the Christian gospel. Here’s how it responded. John Knox, ··Mar 4, 2023 · NottheBee.com
Quality Leadership 
The aim of the U.S. system of government is to enable We the People to work together towards “a more perfect” Union. Who defines “more perfect”?
In a biblical context, perfection is described as having all needs met (the Garden of Eden being a notable example). The more needs that are met, the less harm caused to people as a result of unmet needs.) Thus, continual improvement becomes a moral imperative for Christians.
Take the example of crime: A Christian would embrace the belief that all crime should be continually reduced. A secular belief could include that crime is an acceptable, unfortunate, or normal part of life. A run chart showing a predictable trend would provide feedback on current mitigation strategies.
Within the quality management profession, it is an accepted fact that the closer any product or service (such as crime reduction strategies) approaches the ideal or target (i.e., the more perfect it is), the higher the quality and the lower the cost to the customer and society. (Ref: Taguchi Loss Function).
So, who has “no coherent idea”?
https://lnkd.in/gfMXjiaj