Twittering

I've decided that twittering is a way to push my more random thoughts out to the world ... as if the world really cares. So, if you do care, look for OutlierTom. The unfortunate thing about both blogs and twitters is that I tend to say more than I should, meaning that there's content that may get me in trouble for writing it. Since my thoughts are dominated by work-related issues and I work on ensuring the highest quality/reliability of pacemakers and defibrillators, I tend to rant about these issues. Now, I see that there are a bunch of medical professionals following my twitters. Ugh!

This doesn't mean that I plan to stop pushing out important concepts on ensuring that cardiac patients get the best possible products and care. It does mean that I need to make the data appear more generic and the opinions reach beyond my own company. Besides, if I get in trouble for what I write with the net result still being better patient outcomes, then I'll just have to deal with that separately. I don't kill myself at work for the money or the job, I do it because I can ensure that the product is significantly better. Case in point, the year before the outlier program was started here, there were as many as 6 product recalls. Yep, in just that year. Since then, we haven't had one. Knock on wood, there may/will be future recalls. The thing is that we've found the future reliability problems in the factory and have fixed the root causes of the issues. We've also made a sea change in employee attitude about statistical signals in manufacturing .

That's the good thing about people here, they listen to reason and will make the changes that are required to improve quality. Don't get me wrong, we still have some employees that are effectively corporate speed bumps, but there are avenues around them so we can get the required results. Also, I like the CEO because he's willing to step in and make things right. I think that most upper management realize that each product that gets returned has a ~$50K price tag but we lose over $1M in customer good will. Since there are three main companies looking to grab the business, customer good will is paramount.

So, back to the twittering. I've decided to still throw random thoughts out there. If people want to know more than that, they'll just need to read it in this blog ... if I get around to updating it.