All Features
Eric Whitley
Unplanned downtime is a major source of costs and loss in productivity for the manufacturing industry. According to IndustryWeek, unplanned downtime costs industrial manufacturers an estimated $50 billion annually. A major cause of such unplanned downtime is usually poor maintenance.
The…
Zhanna Lyubykh, Jennifer Bozeman, Nick Turner, Sandy Hershcovis
Managers may mistreat employees who perform poorly because they assume their behavior results from a lack of diligence rather than other factors, according to research we published in September 2021.
Surveys show that about one in seven U.S. workers feel that their manager engages in hostile…
Dario Lirio
By now, it’s no secret that good clinical practice (GCP) guidelines used by FDA inspectors are expanding. These GCP guidelines are developed by the International Conference on Harmonization. The ICH last revised its GCP document, called ICH E6(R2), in 2016. It will be releasing a new version in…
Oliver Binz, Elia Ferracuti, Peter Joos
In early 2021, people had already started commenting that inflation might be coming back. But few people could predict just how high it would go. In January 2022, year-on-year inflation in the OECD area rose to 7.2 percent. Consumer price inflation in the United States hit a 40-year high of 7.5…
Dale Crawford
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment of electricians is projected to grow by 9 percent from 2020 to 2030. As in other fields of construction, this is developing into something of an HR crisis. Demand for qualified electricians is outstripping availability, and the…
Gleb Tsipursky
Google recently announced its new post-pandemic hybrid work policy, requiring employees to work in the office for at least three days a week. That policy goes against the desires of many rank-and-file Google employees. A survey of more than 1,000 Google employees showed that two-thirds feel unhappy…
Katarina Bennich
Ever found yourself hitting the wrong button and then flipping through the manual in a frenzy, trying to figure out how to get that thing to stop doing what it’s doing? If your answer is yes, you’ve been an unfortunate victim of bad user experience (UX).
UX is defined as all aspects of a product,…
Steven I. Azizi
It has been more than five decades since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted to outlaw harassment and discrimination against workers in American workplaces. Unfortunately, workplace harassment is still a serious problem for millions of workers in the country.
Different forms of…
Anas Hassan
Very few businesses today rely on push marketing alone as their strategy to ultimately produce sales. Although the larger picture of inbound marketing is proving itself effective, marketers continue to debate the relative value of content marketing vs. social media marketing. But here’s the spoiler…
Lisa Apolinski
The pandemic arrived and brought with it many new and surprising changes in how companies do business. One of the most interesting, and most impactful, changes for organizations has been how consumers engage with brands. A recent survey indicated that consumers are rethinking how they interact with…
Paul Smith
Good leaders ask, “How do I tell better stories?” Great leaders ask, “Which stories do I need to tell?”
Does that mean how you tell a leadership story doesn’t matter? Of course not. But if you tell an irrelevant, unimportant, or self-serving story, it doesn’t matter how well you tell it. The story…
Harish Jose
T he dictum, “purpose of a system is what it does” (POSWID) is famous in cybernetics, attributed to the management cybernetician Stafford Beer.
Beer notes: “A good observer will impute the purpose of the system from its actions and thus from the resultant state.”
Hence the key aphorism and acronym…
Oliver Laasch
It’s been a tough few years for people who own or manage a business. Lockdowns shut down whole industrial sectors worldwide, turning profitable businesses into loss-making ones, while a lot of smaller businesses went under.
Many companies will now be hoping for a return to some type of normality…
Knowledge at Wharton
More than a half-million healthcare workers in the United States have quit their jobs in recent months, driven to the breaking point by the Covid-19 pandemic. But greater use of technology could help save jobs by reducing the kinds of inefficiency and stress that lead to burnout for many hospital…
Richard S. Hawkes
Adapted from Navigate the Swirl by Richard Hawkes, CEO of Growth River
How many meetings have you been in that caused you to ask yourself, “Why am I here? What am I doing? What’s the purpose of this meeting? Are we accomplishing anything?” I call this “The Swirl.”
High activity, low focus.…
Quality Digest
This year’s World Conference on Quality and Improvement (WCQI) will be a hybrid event—online and in person—scheduled for May 15–18, 2022, in Anaheim, California. Themed as “The art and science of quality,” the conference will explore the symbiotic relationship between human and scientific aspects…
Gleb Tsipursky
The biggest falsehood in business leadership and career advice may also be the most repeated: “Go with your gut.” Surely you’ve heard this advice often as a decision-maker, as well as some variations of that phrase, such as, “Trust your instincts,” “Be authentic,” “Listen to your heart,” or “Follow…
Kate Zabriskie
‘Kendra, I think you’re going to do wonderfully at this next task. You have a good eye for detail, and that’s exactly what’s required here.”
“Tom, you have a real knack with people, and I’d like you to take on a temporary role in account management. I think you will thrive based on what I’ve seen…
Gleb Tsipursky
The future of work—of hybrid and fully remote workers—will require upskilling of employees for organizations that wish to succeed in the post-Covid world. Leaders who want to seize a competitive advantage in that future will need to benchmark their training initiatives for best practices on…
Brittney McIver
At some point, every medical device company will encounter an issue that requires an internal investigation. Whether it’s due to a nonconformance, complaint, CAPA, or an audit issue, you’ll have to conduct a failure or root cause investigation to pinpoint why the issue occurred in order to resolve…
Marc Lepere
As the war in Ukraine rages, finance professionals on Wall Street and in Europe recently attracted outrage by suggesting that investing in arms manufacturers should be treated as ethical investing. In the fight against tyranny, they argued that such an investment “preserves peace and global…
Knowledge at Wharton
Negotiating a salary increase or a job promotion ranks high on the list of hard conversations to have at work, and it doesn’t get any easier without a plan.
“People think, ‘I’m just going to knock on their door, sit down with them, and noodle around and see where this goes.’ That’s not a plan,”…
Susan Robertson
Every year in the spring, Amy B., a buyer for a large retail chain store, hosts an Easter egg-decorating, team-building party, where she and a bunch of her suppliers spend an entire afternoon coloring and bedazzling hard-boiled eggs. None of them bring their kids.
They do this for the sheer…
Ben Bensaou
Not every CEO can be the next Steve Jobs, constantly conjuring up game-changing new ideas and revolutionary products. But what all CEOs and senior leaders can be are champions for innovation within their own organizations. They are the ones who can help give their employees the freedom and space to…
Ethan Drower
Launching a service-based business is so appealing to entrepreneurs because these businesses are the easiest to start with no capital. Any person can launch one simply by creating a website outlining their offerings and promoting their service for free on social media. On the other hand, product-…
