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Having moved into a new job related to quality, I’ve been trying to learn as fast as I can. One of the most popular ideas in quality right now is Six Sigma. Wanting to learn the basics I picked up Six Sigma for Dummies and wasn’t disappointed! This book goes through all the basics of Six Sigma in common terms. The statistics are there, but the math is not complicated by jargon or techno speak.

While this book is not what I would call enjoyable bedtime reading, for someone looking to learn the basics of the current quality movement, Six Sigma for Dummies is a great place to start.

Books mentioned in this post:

I wrote my mission statement a couple of years ago before I met my wife and well before my son was born. It’s pretty good and has served me well to keep my values clear.

Lately I’ve been taking parenting classes and restitution theory has come up. I’ve also been involved in trying to change the culture at my work and paying a little attention to Tim Sanders. This has led me to look at my Personal Mission Statement more closely. He just posted a series of videos entitled “The end of suffering.” In these videos he talks about developing a quality mission statement. He believes the only truly useful mission statement is one that ties into reducing other peoples suffering. Not ending hunger or bringing about world peace, just ending the suffering we all go through in our everyday lives. It’s the only concept that we can grab onto that will guide us in all circumstances. My personal mission statement is not totally centred on this idea, but the tool at Franklin Covey’s website does a decent job. Over the next few months I’ll give my mission statement a tune up and I’ll be thinking about how I can bring about the end of suffering.

The End of Suffering part 1:

The End of Suffering part 2:

I try always run with my GPS. I have an old Garmin eTrex Venture and I was really been envious of the newer GPS units on the market. On Sunday I found www.motionbased.com. This is a really handy website for anyone who wants to see the information in their GPS! What’s really cool is that it supports a large number of the older GPS units produced by Garmin. It’s not just limited to the units marketed for fitness.

They have a little tray app that is used to download the track data from your receiver and upload it to their website. Once there, they plot it on Google Maps and let you analyze the data in almost any way you want. Want to see the elevation profile of your run? Want to see the distribution of speeds on your run? It’s all there!