All Features
Amy Kim
As companies continue to adjust to the wave of employees returning to the office, one thing is certain: The pre-pandemic working world is no more. Although remote employee productivity has been proven in terms of output—albeit subjective and loosely defined—many companies are gradually increasing…
Angus Robertson
It turns out that the triple threat of being locked away in quarantine, forbidden from visiting clients in person, and being under pressure to continue to deliver sales and profits, has had a seismic impact on digital transformation. The COVID-19-led paradigm shift in how customers work and buy has…
Corey Brown
Gemba walks are an essential tool to understand the challenges of your manufacturing frontline. Each manufacturing facility is unique. The best way to solve your unique operational challenges is to perform a gemba walk focused on specific goals.
This article will outline the fundamentals of a…
Pat Toth
This morning my favorite local morning news program had an interesting segment on new slang words and what they mean. While the definitions were probably not necessary for millennials or generation Z, but for baby boomers like me, it was an eye-opening vocabulary lesson. I must admit I didn’t know…
Jon Speer
Imagine that your medical device malfunctioned during patient use. Do you know whether quality assurance or quality control is responsible? When working through remediation efforts, do you know which quality function demands the attention, or should you make improvements to both?
More often than…
Richard S. Hawkes
In my work helping to build high-performing teams at a diverse range of organizations, I have found that there is nothing that bonds a team quite like being on an authentic transformational journey. It’s invigorating to experience a continuous improvement journey with others on the same team, and…
NIST
A vulnerable spot in global commerce is the supply chain: It enables technology developers and vendors to create and deliver innovative products but can leave businesses, their finished wares, and ultimately their consumers open to cyberattacks. A new update to the National Institute of Standards…
Matt Fieldman
I remember well when the phrase “a thousand points of light” entered regular usage. Popularized by President George H.W. Bush, the phrase referred to individuals and organizations that provide valuable and even lifesaving work in communities around the country. In 1990, President Bush founded the…
Cybercrime is on the rise. And as we move deeper into the digital age, the era of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s also growing more sophisticated and severe, with serious consequences. As cyber criminals become more adroit, cybercrime has touched all our lives in one way or another…
Ben P. Stein
When we talk about measurement units here at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), you’ll typically hear us rattling off the official ones—such as the meter, the second, and the kilogram. These official measurements, which are part of the International System of Units (SI),…
J. Stewart Black
Marjorie, an HR professional, receives a seemingly impossible mandate: She is asked to recruit six Spanish-speaking, front-end programmers with at least 10 years of experience who are able to relocate to Miami—all within a month.
Not so many years ago, this would have been impossible. Today, she…
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…
Rick Gould
As the world enters the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the climate crisis remains the biggest long-term threat facing humanity, according to the Global Risks Report 2022. Extreme weather due to climate change is seen as the second most serious short-term risk, with biodiversity loss coming in…
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…
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…
Emily Newton
There’s no better time than now. As a species, we need to mitigate the effect we have on our planet. There are many ways to do this—namely, through green and eco-friendly initiatives—but one sector is having the biggest impact of all: the industrial and manufacturing sector. In the 2010s, the…
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…
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…
Mike Kotzian
The pandemic both reduced the available workforce and accelerated online sales. Warehouse operations grew and had to handle increased volume with fewer employees. Prior to Covid-19, the answer to this problem was to hire more fork truck drivers. Now, companies have difficulty finding trained fork…
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.…