All Features
Rob Moorey
The healthcare technology management (HTM) industry is facing a looming labor shortage and must attract enough skilled professionals to meet future demand. The industry is grappling with an aging workforce, a shrinking traditional talent pool, and increasingly complex medical equipment. Healthcare…
Dan Leiva
The vision system scanned the part and logged a pass. The SPC chart stayed inside its control limits. The line kept moving.
Three weeks later, the customer complaint arrived. The defect had been there the whole time, sitting just inside the algorithm’s confidence threshold, close enough to spec…
Phanish Puranam
When a CEO tells me they wish their employees were more capable of “self-organizing,” I usually ask what exactly that means. The answer matters for more than academic precision; leaders drawn to the notion of decentralization routinely turn to self-organization as the mechanism that will deliver it…
Megan Wallin-Kerth
Every industry has blind spots. Sometimes the problem is not a lack of expertise, or even information, but of connection.
While in Austin, Texas, at a recent Octave Live OnTour event, sitting in a large room filled with people from different industries, different methods, different states,…
Chip Bell
Theodore Roosevelt skinny-dipped in the Potomac River, owned a pet hyena, boxed in the White House, and reportedly drank a gallon of coffee a day (a legend that inspired Maxwell House to attribute the phrase “good to the last drop” to him). At his funeral, a New York police captain said, “It was…
Gleb Tsipursky
The next advantage in business will come from leaders who can manage machine labor as deliberately as they manage people. Professor Ethan Mollick at Wharton framed this as AI management after watching executive MBA students use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Claude Code, and Google Antigravity to build…
Mike Figliuolo
During times of excessive work and crisis, something has to give. Sometimes brutal prioritization is the only way to make it through those challenging times with your sanity intact.
It happens to all of us. The universe, in its infinite wisdom, determines this month, of all months, is the month to…
Craig Cochran
With ISO 9001:2026 just around the corner, the topic of internal auditing is likely on the minds of many quality professionals.
This is the perfect time to reexamine your resources and strategies for internal auditing. The single biggest success factor of your audit program is who you select to…
Chris Chuang
Manufacturers have spent millions investing in safer equipment, smarter automation, and increasingly sophisticated operational technology. Yet employee disengagement, one of the most significant risks to workplace safety and productivity, remains stubbornly difficult to address.
Gallup’s recent…
Mark Stabile, Ridhima Aggarwal
We often think of AI as a technological revolution that will transform industries, disrupt jobs, and change the nature of competitive advantage. But inside organizations, it’s unfolding in a much more complex, less predictable way. In many firms, AI is still more narrative than operational reality…
Mike Figliuolo
All too often, leaders seek to build support for an idea by talking—a lot. They may go on and on about why the decision is a good one, detailing its benefits, the reasons others should support it, and the path forward. There’s passion and excitement behind the talk, and the leader lets it show…
Allen Yeung
As a significant portion of the experienced manufacturing workforce approaches retirement, companies face the critical threat of losing undocumented tribal knowledge. Veteran operators possess decades of hard-won, job-specific insights that rarely exist in paper manuals or corporate file systems.…
Kate Zabriskie
When people hear the word innovation, they often think of groundbreaking products, disruptive technologies, or revolutionary ideas. But not every improvement needs to reinvent the wheel. Small changes might seem insignificant at first, but their cumulative effect can be transformative.
Improved…
Gleb Tsipursky
The office lights are on, but plenty of seats stay empty. Employees have heard the policy, nodded at talking points, and then organized their week around what helps them live well. That quiet opt-out shows up in badge data and calendar behavior, and it’s reshaping how leaders must think about…
Chip Bell
When Odysseus went off to fight the Trojan War, as reported by Homer in The Odyssey, he didn’t take along his wet-behind-the-ears son, who was destined to be heir to his throne.
Concerned about who would give his son “kinging skills,” he chose an old family friend, Mentor, to be Telemachus’…
David Isaacson
Quality Digest recently spoke with David Isaacson, the executive director of portfolio marketing at Octave. Besides his work on marketing strategies, he also helps people manage, understand, and better control their operations with software solutions that protect industry assets and people while…
Seb Murray
Industrial robots don’t just shape pay today. Research from Pinar Yildirim, a Wharton professor of economics and marketing, shows they also make workers less likely to move into higher-paying occupations, cutting expected lifetime earnings.
“Workers aren’t necessarily losing their jobs, and it…
Lexi Sharkov
When a training matrix is built and managed correctly, it’s the backbone of compliance. It ensures that every employee knows how to perform their job and creates the traceability auditors love to see.
The problem is that it doesn’t take much for a training matrix to spiral out of control. What…
MIT News
MIT launched a new initiative—titled Science Is Curiosity on a Mission—to make the case for the long-horizon, curiosity-driven science that has powered generations of American innovation. Through stories of scientists pursuing open-ended questions, the project highlights how fundamental discovery…
Andy J. Yap, Phanish Puranam, Victoria Sevcenko
Away from the dire headlines of Big Tech layoffs, the real picture of how organizations are dealing with the AI tidal wave remains anyone’s guess. What’s clear is that organizations face hard questions that, if addressed poorly, could destabilize the very foundation of their existence: their…
Mike Figliuolo
Managing up can be challenging. Failure to meet your boss’s informational needs can lead to bad decisions and frustrating interactions. Learn how to manage up more effectively.
Sometimes it’s harder to manage your boss than it is to manage your team. All senior stakeholders can prove challenging…
Quality Digest, Josh Santo
Josh Santo, senior director of industry strategy and solutions at EASE, spoke more about the findings behind a full layered process audit (LPA) benchmark report of plant-floor quality audits. Data covered 2.3 million process checks spanning more than 2,200 manufacturing sites. The report not only…
Gleb Tsipursky
A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that output in U.S. businesses is trending higher, even though head count has barely moved. A few years ago you might have blamed pent-up demand or a lucky sales run. In late 2025, the more honest explanation is that a growing share of…
Mark Hembree
Artificial intelligence is accelerating even as I write this (and yes, this is me writing). If anyone tells you they know how this is going to turn out, you should move on to the next expert. No one knows how this is going to turn out.
Leaders in the AI field certainly expect it to become…
Angie Basiouny
New research from Wharton’s Tiantian Yang proves that behind every great woman is another woman.
Her co-authored study on virtual career training found that women who attended remote classes exclusively with other women were much more likely to complete their training on time, earn professional…