{"id":5726,"date":"2022-05-24T01:00:50","date_gmt":"2022-05-24T07:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=5726"},"modified":"2022-06-14T15:32:52","modified_gmt":"2022-06-14T21:32:52","slug":"quality-improvement-insight-from-mark-twain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/quality-improvement-insight-from-mark-twain\/","title":{"rendered":"Quality Improvement Insight from Mark Twain"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>When asked how he tackled writing books, Twain replied with his simple secret to success. Here&#8217;s how it applies to quality improvement:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/701319532?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;Hi, I\u2019m Jay Arthur, author of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Demystified-Second\/dp\/0071749098\/\">Lean Six Sigma Demystified<\/a>\u201d and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/demo\/\">QI Macros [software]<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/quotes\/219455-the-secret-of-getting-ahead-is-getting-started-the-secret\">Mark Twain said<\/a> the secret to being successful is to get started, and to get started you have to take your huge, potentially impossibly unmanageable thing &#8211; a project &#8211; and break it down into smaller chunks, and then you start on the first one. You just chunk it down, start on the first one and work your way through.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Many people, when they first get started in quality, they&#8217;re looking at their whole corporation and [thinking], \u201cOh my gosh, where do I start?\u201d Chunk it down, find one terrible thing that needs fixing, work on that one terrible thing.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Start with the worst first. When you start with the worst first, guess what? You can make massive progress\u2026 massive progress. And if you get stuck and you don&#8217;t know what\u2026 you&#8217;re not sure what to do with certain kinds of data, send it to me and I will help you think it through; if it gets too expensive, I will I will ask you to pay for some help, but initially just\u2026 you know, get going, right? Chunk it down, find something important to work on and fix it.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the secret to success with Quality Improvement. Too many people get flummoxed by all the possible opportunities in their company. Nope, pick one that&#8217;s nasty, fix that, right? That&#8217;s how I started. When I finally got it figured out I started working on things that work: problems, big problems that nobody seemed to know how to solve. I&#8217;d get a little data, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/free-excel-tips\/data-analysis-101\/\">do a little analysis<\/a> and pinpoint where it was going wrong, get people together to do <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-articles\/firefighters-root-cause-analysis\/\">root cause analysis<\/a> based on what I found, and bada-bing bada-boom we found ways to make things better.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So that&#8217;s my Improvement Insight for this week: Chunk it down. Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When asked how he tackled writing books, Twain replied with his simple secret to success. Here&rsquo;s how it applies to quality improvement: &#65279; &ldquo;Hi, I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma Demystified&rdquo; and QI Macros [software]. &ldquo;Mark Twain said the secret to being successful is to get started, and to get started you have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5837,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290],"tags":[449,168,448],"class_list":["post-5726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","tag-mark-twain","tag-qi-macros","tag-secrets-to-success"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5726"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5872,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5726\/revisions\/5872"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}