All Features
Gleb Tsipursky
Due to strong employee resistance and turnover, Google recently backtracked from its plan to force all employees to return to the office and allowed many to work remotely. Amazon also backtracked on its plans to have a fully office-centric culture and allowed employees to have a hybrid schedule.…
James daSilva
There was a Twitter thread recently from an early, longtime Facebook executive, Dan Rose. You might have missed it. That’s OK—scrolling Twitter is rarely the best use of our time.
In these tweets, Rose argued for the greatness of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership, especially…
Manfred Kets de Vries
Leonard, the chairman of a global consumer goods company, was wondering what to do with the two co-CEOs running the firm. Although it had seemed a great idea to have two individuals at the helm, this arrangement had led to conflicts, stalled initiatives, and an overall lack of direction. Some of…
Eliot Dratch
If your manufacturing company develops a problem along the way with one of your processes, how do you resolve it? While the shortcut option is to simply patch up the symptoms of whatever that problem may be, the long-term solution is to perform a root cause and corrective action (RCCA) process.
By…
John Preston
‘This government is obsessed with skilling up our population,” said Boris Johnson in his recent speech on “leveling up.” There’s still a fair amount of uncertainty about exactly what the United Kingdom prime minister’s plan to level up the regions will involve, but manufacturing and skills seem…
Sébastien Breteau
Major global events of the past five years have sparked seismic shock waves in global supply chains, relocating where businesses manufacture and source their products. Whether facing rising labor costs in China, new tariffs in the U.S.-China trade war, or cataclysmic shutdowns amid the Covid-19…
ISO
There’s more than one path to service management. It refers to all the activities, policies, and processes that organizations use for deploying, managing, and improving IT service provision. In today’s technology-driven corporate landscape, the two leading methodologies come from the world of…
Corey Brown
Amid the Silver Tsunami, human resources departments are hustling to onboard and fill personnel gaps, but they can’t predict the evolving demands of your operations.
Manufacturing companies are failing to adapt their operational training strategy to meet the needs of a workforce in transition. Put…
Caroline Zimmerman, Theodoros Evgeniou
People often associate the term “data literacy” with mastering a litany of technical skills: SQL for data querying, Python for data analysis, and Tableau for data visualization, to name a few. However, one skill that is less discussed and has great power to scale data-guided decision making across…
Gary Lyng
To uncover the value in data, analysts need powerful combinations of tools to locate data, wherever they are, and regardless if they are structured or unstructured. Most companies don’t realize that their current data-search approaches can’t access distributed information and can’t extract…
Nate Burke
Marketplaces are now dominating the online sphere, which results in more unbranded searches being made by online shoppers who are looking for solutions to their queries, rather than a named-brand product. Nowadays, global brands can expect 58 percent of their searches to be unbranded, while…
Knowledge at Wharton
Considered one of the most successful organizational learning methods, the after-action review (AAR) was developed by the U.S. Army during the 1970s to help its soldiers learn from both their mistakes and achievements. Since then, many companies have used the AAR for performance assessment. And yet…
Jerry Foster
Manufacturers are acutely aware that audits and recalls are just part of business. At the same time, they all agree that the best way to deal with recalls is to prevent them in the first place. Because today’s manufacturers operate on razor-thin margins with little room for error, a reactionary…
Dylan Walsh
Supply chains are having a moment. In March 2021, one of the world’s largest container ships got wedged in the Suez Canal, blocking 10 percent of global trade for a few days and launching a flotilla of memes. Currently, home builders are waiting for more lumber, while a shortage of computer chips…
Ryan E. Day
With the migration to remote and hybrid work during the last year, cyberattacks have increased at a rate of three to five times compared to pre-Covid. No big surprise that, for many businesses, virtual private newtworks (VPNs) have become standard operating procedure for security. But is VPN’s…
Steven Stein
Supply chain management (SCM) has been defined as “the design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand, and measuring…
Jason Chester
Manufacturers have seen the need to digitize operations for quite some time, but the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the issue to center stage. They’ve had to adapt to sudden, dramatic changes like more remote workers and social distancing across production lines. It didn’t take long to realize the…
Harish Jose
Recently, I came across an interesting insight at Toyota’s website. I was taken aback by the first sentence of this paragraph: “Eventually, the value added by the line’s human operators disappears.”
The complete paragraph is shown below: “Eventually, the value added by the line’s human operators…
Chuck Olinger
Most manufacturers want a quality management system (QMS) to meet strict quality values. They need one to expressly meet the needs of their specific organization yet be within the parameters of federal, state, and industry prerequisites.
For example, food, drug, and medical device companies all…
Suneel Kumar, Sreelal Sreedhar
The word “aptitude” is sometimes misused to mean ability or achievement. There is, however, a real and meaningful difference between the three words. Understanding the relationship between aptitude and ability can be a significant factor for your inspection operators.
A basic description of the…
Knowledge at Wharton
Wharton professor G. Richard Shell’s graduate course on business responsibility is peppered with students he calls “ethics refugees.” They are young people who earned their bachelor’s degrees and landed a great job only to fall into an ethical or moral trap set by a boss, a co-worker, or the…
Paul Laughlin
Do you see the limitations and over-hyped expectations of today’s approach to artificial intelligence (AI)? Does it need a reboot, a redirection, to finally achieve its potential, one that truly understands us and we can trust?
That is the premise of a great book on the subject, Rebooting AI:…
Chip Bell
When you played cowboys and Indians as a kid, did you want to be the cowboy or the Indian? I wanted to be the Indian. All the ones I saw in comic books had super-cool moccasins and could move around with their bow and arrows without making a sound. And there were plenty of famous Native Americans…
Iffet Turken
We need instant adaptability to the new skill sets in the unknown future of work. The Covid-19 pandemic is a prime example of how change is accelerating and requiring us to adapt quickly. We often hear about the skill sets we will need but not enough about how executives will adapt to them. A “…
Duke University
Price discounts and other promotions on consumer goods can boost a product’s sales in the short term, but that same strategy may destroy a brand’s equity, according to research from Carl Mela, a marketing professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Brands often focus on the short-term…