Michael Mills

	Home \| Drucilla J. Mills \| Michael Mills \| John Mills \| Family, Friends, etc.

Mills Family Website

Michael Mills

Ideas, opinions, and notes (Links to external sites have orange backgrounds. Pictures in frames are links.)

Quality Management in Engineering

Quality and Process Control

Who needs business processes?
What are ISO 9001 and ISO 14001?
Is ISO 9001 worth it?
"The 'quality' you can't feel" by John Seddon, The Observer, 11/19/2000. (Why ISO 9001 is not a panacaea, and how the author thinks that it makes businesses worse!)
Is ISO 9001 really that bad? (4/24/2006)

Document Control and Configuration Management
- Document Control: proactive or obstructionist?
- The One-Page Document Control Procedure by Christopher Paris (Oxebridge Quality Resources, Inc.)
- Confucius on Configuration Management
Need consulting help setting up your quality and documentation processes? E-mail me.
- Here is an abbreviated resume.
External Links for Quality Management, Business Operations, etc.
- W. Edwards Deming Institute
- Leader to Leader Institute (formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation)
- The Business World of Peter F. Drucker
- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. (author of The Mythical Man-Month, which may be the classic work in the field of software management)
- Project Management Institute
- CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration, one of the standard approaches to process improvement)
- Material on ISO 12207, a standard for software lifecycle processes
- Material on ISO 15504, a standard for software process assessment
- The TickIT scheme
Articles about the technical enterprise itself
- "Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Growth: The David-Goliath Symbiosis" by William Baumol (compares the roles of small and large companies in high-tech innovation)
- "Inside the Leviathan" by James Fallows (Microsoft's corporate culture)
Dilbert.com For about a decade I worked in the networking and telecom industries, the same decade during which Dilbert became a household name. I always found it a little eerie that he worked in the same industry I did.

Politics

My political essays were starting to take up way too much space, so I have moved them to a new site. Click here to see them.

Policy

I moved my public policy essays and links to a new website at the same time that I moved my political essays there. Click here to see them.

Religion

The real Ten Commandments (11/20/05)
Mel Gibson's "Passion" (3/29/04)
Why Paul won't go away (10/29/03)
What's wrong with Protestant apologetics? (10/25/03, rev 11/3/03)
What's wrong with most evangelism ... and how to right it (10/21/03)
What's wrong with liberal Protestantism? (3/26/06)
Did the Pope insult Islam? (9/16/06)
- Richard John Neuhaus on the Pope's lecture (First Things, 10/13/06)

Education

John Taylor Gatto's homepage (an interesting perspective on public schooling)
Is philosophy the highest activity?
Thucydides in Fresno: "Raw, Relevant History" (Victor Davis Hanson, 4/18/98)
Importing public school teachers (Times of India, 8/12/03)
Why nerds are unpopular (Paul Graham, 2/03)

"Stash the smugness: Canadian degrees aren't all they're cracked up to be" (Cameron Wybrow, Special to Globe and Mail Update, 6/13/06)

College rankings and their discontents
Most people with an ear to the educational world know about the annual ranking of colleges published by U.S. News & World Report. Reed College, my alma mater, is one of the few schools that refuses to participate.
- Here is why. (by Colin Diver, president of Reed, 10/05)
- Here is an opposing view. (from the Washington Post, 10/05)
- "The College Rejection Bonanza" (by Richard Baehr in The American Thinker, 4/7/2006)

Leo Strauss and the Straussians

Proof that philosophy is possible (1/16/03)
Strauss vs. scholarship (4/15/99)
Questioning the greatest minds (4/3/99)
Irrefutable alternatives to philosophy (3/13/99)
Who cares if Strauss lied? (5/11/98)

Philosophy

The ethics of "speaking truth to power" (4/11/07)
Spider-Man and commonplace heroism (6/19/04)
Proof that philosophy is possible (1/16/03)
Is philosophy the highest activity?
Two kinds of knowledge (4/21/99)
Robert M. Pirsig website
Metaphysics of Quality website

"Kissing Hank's Ass", a video by Nimpsy, based on a script at JHuger.com

Comments on any of what you read here? Send me feedback.

All the material linked off of this page is mine unless indicated otherwise or unless the link points to an external site. All of it is copyright © 2005. For permission to reproduce an entire piece, please contact me. You may quote reasonable selections of a piece without prior permission, as long as you give full attribution. Thank you.