Fishbone everyday sunshine
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Profiles in Quality: Kaoru Ishikawa
Kaoru Ishikawa, considered the father of Japanese quality, is perhaps most famous for his Ishikawa or fishbone diagram.
The fishbone diagram is innovative in its simplicity, helping teams explore quality problems (the fish head) by breaking it down into contributing factors (the fish bones).
While this practical tool is what he’s most remembered for, Ishikawa championed a number of ideas that reshaped quality and manufacturing as a whole in post-WWII Japan.
Working alongside other founding fathers of quality like W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran, his work served as the foundation of quality management as we know it today. Even more indicative of his enduring legacy, his ideas continue to hold true even in the face of widespread technological change.
Download your free Root Cause Analysis 101 Guidebook to learn more about how to use a fishbone diagram
A Foundation in Science and Engineering
Ishikawa was born in Tokyo in 1915, the eldest of eight sons. He graduated with a doctorate in Applied Chemistry from Tokyo Imperial University i
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A Fish Story
It was also surprising. Fishbone was an all-black band, brazenly kicking its way into the rowdy mosh pit of Caucasian college music. “Fishbone helped desegregate the Southern California music scene,” says Chris Metzler. Metzler, along with codirector Lev Anderson, document the personal stories of the members of this groundbreaking band, as well as the cultural progression of L.A. during the last thirty years, in their new film, Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone, supported by the California Council for the Humanities.
The saga began back in 1979, when Norwood Fisher (the band’s bassist and founder), his brother, and others, were bussed from South Central to a school in the San Fernando Valley as part of the city’s attempt at desegregation. The only other black student at the school—a smiling, Jehovah Witness-raised oddball named Angelo Moore—sought out their company and begged to join the band, which practiced in what the boys called “the aquarium,” a bedroom at Mama Fish’s apartment in the hood. There, the boys rejected the burgeoning gangster lifestyl
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Kaoru Ishikawa is considered the ‘Father of Japanese Quality’ for his creation of innovative developments in quality management. He is famous for creating the fishbone diagram, a type of ‘root cause analysis’ which we still use in Quality Improvement (QI) to help make decisions and create actions. Ishikawa is a hugely respected figure in Quality Improvement, having been instrumental in developing quality initiatives in Japan.
His background
Kaoru Ishikawa was born in Japan 1915. He studied at the University of Tokyo, and in 1939, he obtained his Master’s degree in applied chemistry and obtained his doctorate from the university in 1960. Kaoru Ishikawa served in the Japanese Navy from 1939-1941, thereafter joining the Nissan Liquid Fuel Company.
He returned to science in 1947 when he started working as a professor at the University of Tokyo. In 1949 Kaoru joined a quality control research group, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers’ (JUSE). In 1954, he wrote 'Introduction to Quality Control' – and went on to write many other boo
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