All Features
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.…
Bruce Hamilton
In 1985, about the time I was discovering there was a better way to produce products, The Natural, a film about an aging baseball player with extraordinary talent, was garnering multiple Academy Awards. This archetype concerning natural “God-given” abilities is common in Western culture—in sports…
NIST
To combat Covid-19 amid supply shortages in 2020, healthcare facilities across the United States resorted to disinfecting personal protective equipment (PPE), such as N95 masks, for reuse with methods such as ultraviolet (UV) light. But questions lingered about the safety and efficacy of these…
Mark Hembree
As a late Boomer, I can say my particular age group is better positioned than any to marvel at and bemoan what’s become of journalism and publishing in the last 40 years.
Not that I’m a Luddite. The advent of word processors was a boon to ham-fisted typists like me. A word processor that actually…
Andrew Myers
Standard image sensors, like the billion or so already installed in practically every smartphone in use today, capture light intensity and color. Relying on common, off-the-shelf sensor technology—known as CMOS—these cameras have grown smaller and more powerful by the year and now offer tens-of-…
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…
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,”…
Bryan Christiansen
Top management often struggles to approve large sums required for annual maintenance because the expense is seen as a necessary evil. As a result, if a business encounters short-term financial constraints, the first place it looks for savings is maintenance.
This is why your maintenance budget can…
Anthony Tarantino
In 2007, Nassim Taleb described black swans as highly improbable events that had dramatic or even catastrophic effects on markets and economies. Until recently, it seemed that such events were indeed rare.1 There’s now a major rethinking with the world entering the third year of the Covid-19…
Del Williams
From design to prototyping to manufacturing and scaling up, manufacturing is fraught with risk. Machining of critical parts may not be on the front burner until well into a product’s development. This isn’t in stakeholders’ best interests.
Take products with semiconductors as a component, for…
