This language thing can be tricky, and on some days, downright frustrating. The particular quirk of language that is the object of my strife today is that most every word has more than one meaning. In order to discern the intended meaning of a speaker/author, the context in which the …

I recently read an article in Quality Progress magazine (a monthly publication of the American Society for Quality) which talked about focusing on the problem before determining a solution. In this article the author quoted two prominent thinkers, Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln. Albert Einstein said: “If I only had …

Standards play an important role in the engineering and business community. Standards provide us with requirements for best practices derived from the community’s input. It is this support from the community which gives standards their significance. Customers often have to show their organizations how a particular systems engineering approach will …

Creativity and problem solving follow a track that moves from the identification and definition of the problem through a relatively rapid generation of alternatives into a deliberative consideration of the merits of a subset of those alternatives and finally to a selection and definition of the solution. This process occurs …