All Features
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
When I was 13, I had dreams of being a rock and roll star. For my birthday, I asked my parents for a guitar, and lessons to play it. My parents hired a staid instructor, and I was uninspired by the folk tunes she was teaching me. She was clueless about Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Kiss... even Black…
Mark Schmit
During the Sept. 18, 2020, session of the “National Conversation with Manufacturers,” our three West Coast manufacturing leaders on the panel kept coming back to their critical need for skilled workers.
The conversation was one in a series of 11 virtual listening sessions hosted by the National…
Gregg Profozich
Welcome to the third installment of our series on lean and Six Sigma. As we saw in the first article, lean and Six Sigma are complementary continuous improvement methodologies that reduce the overall waste and variability, respectively, in production processes. The second article went into some…
Jason V. Barger
Too many teams and leaders operate in thermometer mode. Without clarity of the type of culture they are trying to create and leaders they need to be, the culture they end up experiencing is purely reactionary. The temperature just goes up and down, depending on who is in the room or what is…
James Wells
When is a product “good enough” to accept? This is the classic challenge of quality. High customer expectations demand that suspect products be thoroughly scrutinized and a high standard set for their release. Customers expect this, and quality staff strive to achieve it.
The other side of the tug…
Jennifer V. Miller
As the parent of two teens, I’ve become quite accustomed to the Eye Roll. This ocular straining happens most often when I request that a previously agreed upon task be completed by said teen. Me: “Hey, it’s time to empty the trash. Trash pick up is tomorrow.” Teen: “Ugh,” with a healthy helping of…
Annette Franz
In 2019, I wrote about a marketing phenomenon that I kept hearing about, that customers are in control, that they have all the power. I never felt like that was right.
In that post, I wrote: “So, when you see those headlines about customer control and customer power, what are they really talking…
Nicholas Wyman
It’s a new year, with a new president and new opportunities to boost modern apprenticeship programs in the United States that can help get people back to work and stimulate the economy.
Getting people into apprenticeships has never been more vital, as job losses caused by the pandemic continue to…
Gleb Tsipursky
Stakeholder engagement is one of the more critical aspects of leadership, whether you’re a team leader or a member of a cross-functional team trying to lead team members to focus on quality. Stakeholders can be anyone from your colleagues to suppliers to business partners, and your relationship…
Tamela Serensits
Quality managers have a problem. The success of their quality program hinges on one thing. It’s not KPIs, and it’s not methodology. It isn’t even employee engagement or customer satisfaction. The one thing a quality manager needs most is leadership buy-in.
Quality programs fail because they do…
Fred Schenkelberg
There is a type of error that occurs when conducting statistical testing: to work very hard to correctly answer the wrong question. This error occurs during the formation of the experiment.
Despite creating a perfect null and alternative hypothesis, sometimes we are simply investigating the wrong…
Jose Luis Alvarez
Alexander Hamilton, one of the United States’ founding fathers, famously called energy the most important characteristic of the executive branch of government. “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” he said in the Federalist Papers. “A feeble execution is but another…
Gleb Tsipursky
Negotiators, even professional ones, make surprisingly many wrong decisions that doom negotiations that should have succeeded. Many of these mistakes relate to overestimating how well they can read the feelings and thoughts of other parties in the negotiation, as well as the extent to which the…
Aarti Gumaledar, Sameer Hasija, V. Paddy Padmanabhan
Globalization of trade and decades-long innovation in supply chain networks have resulted in significant benefits for all stakeholders—greater efficiencies, lower costs, and greater access to markets, to name just a few. Yet Covid-19 has exposed vulnerabilities in global supply chains. Dispersed…
Taylor Brown
It’s easy to think of quality as a niche responsibility, requiring only the involvement of those working in quality-based roles. But involving your entire medical device organization—and even suppliers and manufacturers—in the quality process can lead to better products, greater efficiency, and…
Liz Uram
Have you ever dreaded having a conversation with an employee who wasn’t meeting performance expectations? Maybe you avoided it, hoping it would improve on its own? If so, you are not alone.
Most managers would agree that one of their least favorite tasks is talking to an employee about poor…
Gregg Profozich
The manufacturing world, across industry sectors, has witnessed significant improvements in productivity and competitiveness during the past couple of decades as a result of continuous improvement (CI) methodologies. Two of these methodologies that are recognized as having broad applicability are…
Henrik Bresman
Right now it seems far away, but a post-Covid world is coming. Is it closer to us than the start of the pandemic? We can’t say with any certainty, but we must think about how we will work in the future. The sudden changes of early 2020 showed us how we are capable of extraordinary transformations…
Knowledge at Wharton
A new study finds that productivity has remained stable or even increased for many companies that shifted to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic. However, innovation has taken a hit as both leaders and employees feel more distant from each other.
Businesses tend to spend less money and…
Jill Neimark
If you’ve ever stayed in a relationship too long or stuck with a project that was going nowhere, you’re not alone. Humans are generally reluctant to give up on something they’ve already committed time and effort to. It’s called the “sunk costs” phenomenon, where the more resources we sink into an…
Gregg Profozich
In the first article of this series, we saw that Lean and Six Sigma are complementary continuous improvement methodologies that reduce the overall waste and variability in production processes, respectively. Although these two methodologies use different approaches and tools to drive improvements…
Marlene Chism
New leaders often don’t realize that saying “yes” to leadership requires stepping out of the comfort zone. Avoidance is no longer a strategy.
As a leader, it’s up to you to navigate through the cultural politics, make difficult decisions, and resolve conflict between employees or co-workers.…
Renita Kalhorn
Steffen Heilmann is a firm believer in empowering his people and giving them opportunities to grow. During his early weeks as CTO at Aroundhome, he and his staff were heading into an important negotiation with their data center provider to take over responsibility of a mission-critical database.…
Bryan Christiansen
‘Little things make big things happen.” In just a few words, this cliché sums up MRO and its benefits. But what are these “little things,” and what effects do they have on your company’s bigger picture?
In the complex world of maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO), answers to these questions…
Bruce Hamilton
As we begin to take our approximately 4 1/2 billionth trip around the sun, I’m reflecting on the previous 525,600 minutes and looking ahead to the new decade. The decade (the ‘20s), by the way, began last month, not a year ago, a factoid noted in a short address by Hiroyuki Hirano in 1999 as the…
