All Features
Max Farrell
While recent economic reports on inflation have signaled positive signs for the future, frontline industry turnover rates remain high. With further supply chain disruptions looming, retaining top talent has never been more important for employers. These pressing challenges and continual raw-…
Ian Wright
It’s been a long and arduous road, but you’re almost ready for that first production run. You made it through supplier selection, your designs and production processes have been finalized, preproduction is finished, and now there’s just one more hurdle to clear: first article inspection (FAI).…
Gleb Tsipursky
Hybrid employees don’t hate the office; they hate commuting to it, surveys show, since for many workers commuting takes more than an hour per day and costs thousands of dollars per year. Peer-reviewed studies find clear associations between longer commute times and lower job satisfaction, increased…
Angie Basiouny
Wharton experts used machine learning to help uncover the secret formula for successful healthy habit formation, and it turned out there’s no one formula.
“There’s this widely spread rumor that it takes 21 days to form a habit,” says Katy Milkman, a Wharton professor of operations, information,…
Aaron Smith
A successful company can’t run without happy and motivated employees. One way you can achieve that is by improving your employees’ uptime. Uptime refers to your employees’ freedom to pursue personal and occupational growth without the burden of preventable injuries. Here is everything you need to…
Mike Figliuolo
You folks know I love asking questions. From this post about forgoing answers in favor of asking questions, to my quote, “Asking the right question about the future is more powerful than having the right answer about the past,” I’ve found questions to be a more powerful leadership tool than many…
Mark Mortensen
The end of Covid-19 workplace disruptions has ushered in a fresh set of challenges for organizations. Chief among them has been establishing new office policies for a workforce that has largely embraced flexible work and has expressed a desire for this to become a permanent fixture.
But…
Mark Hembree
Pick a problem—any problem. As soon as you have one without an immediate answer, we can begin.
Perhaps you’re a quality professional, an auditor, a systems analyst, or just the person your boss sent to find out what the heck is going on around here. Whether you have a problem on your plant floor…
Ethan Mollick
Nano Tools for Leaders—a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management—are fast, effective tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes, with the potential to significantly affect your success.
The goal
Adopt a seven…
Gleb Tsipursky
The unemployment rate is surprisingly low, at 3.7%, shocking economists who expected a slowdown in hiring and rising unemployment rate. Frontline work, such as healthcare, led job growth. Frontline workers are in high demand, and the competition for their services is fierce. Yet wage growth cooled…
Bruce Hamilton
Last May marked the 35th anniversary of the Shingo Prize, an award bestowed each year to recognize organizations that demonstrate the principles and methods espoused by its namesake, Shigeo Shingo. Although I haven’t made it to every celebration and award ceremony, it turns out that I was the only…
Kevin Cool
You probably won’t find it in a book on business leadership, but Faiz Shakir has a dictum for executives of major corporations who really want to understand what their employees’ jobs are like: “Know the coffee.”
The reference was in the context of unionization efforts by Starbucks employees, and…
Shreya Dasgupta
Today’s businesses must innovate and evolve to stay ahead of the competition. However, despite the best efforts of business leaders, many organizations struggle to produce new, innovative ideas to keep up with the changing landscape. This is partially due to the limitations of the human brain.…
Annie Duke
Professional poker players know that continuing to play until they win—however they define that win—is often a losing strategy. Expert players abandon about 80% of their hands in the popular variant, Texas Hold ’em, for example, while amateurs stick with their starting cards more than half the time…
Stephanie Ojeda
Effective complaint handling is fundamental to life-sciences quality management, with implications for operations, product design, risk management, and more.
It’s also critical to ISO 9001, FDA Quality System Regulation (QSR), and EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR) compliance.
Manufacturers that…
Selena Rezvani
Have you ever had one of those career moments where you felt like you’d made it? A moment of proof that you’d finally earned a spot at the cool or important table?
I remember mine vividly.
I was invited to a leadership awards event to accept an honor alongside many strong businesswomen I admired…
Mike Figliuolo
Twice in the last week I’ve heard about “idiot bosses.” Being the inquisitive guy I am, I probed for the root cause of such comments. Rather than simply asking what the cause is, I decided to address the symptoms first.
Q: “Tell me more about this idiot boss.”
A: “I’m so fed up with him. He’s…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
As part of last year’s Masters Summit, hosted by the quality software specialists at MasterControl, Jeff Dewar, Quality Digest’s publisher, approached a few attendees for some candid comments. Since most people there were quality professionals of one sort or another, he cast a wide net and simply…
William A. Levinson
Time value of money calculations, including net present value analysis, is important when selecting projects and investments. The calculations are part of the body of knowledge for some of ASQ’s certification exams. They also go a long way toward explaining exactly what happened to Silicon Valley…
Etienne Nichols
Medical device companies must have established risk management processes that comply with ISO 14971. It doesn’t matter whether you’re developing medical devices in the U.S., EU, Canada, or elsewhere. Every international regulatory agency you’ve ever heard of accepts ISO 14971.
ISO 14971 is a good…
Kate Zabriskie
‘They reduce our bonus if our calls go longer than three minutes. I’m not going to lie; I start talking faster at the 90-second mark.”
“She asked me to suggest ideas, so I did. I now have a whole bunch of extra work to do. It’s the last time I’m opening my mouth. I didn’t realize offering an idea…
Jake Mazulewicz
Wildland firefighters. Air traffic controllers. Flight deck crews of aircraft carriers. Operators of nuclear power plants and the national bulk electric grid. These are among the safest and most reliable work teams in the world. And they don’t try to eliminate all errors and surprises.
Decades of…
Dave Gilson
Many people think of negotiation as a fight, but it’s really about collaboration, Margaret Neale explains to me as we begin our walk. “What negotiation is, to me, is joint problem-solving. Let’s find a solution to a problem that we’re facing.”
Right now, the problem Neale and I face is how to get…
Jeanne Quimby
As I sat with my 7-year-old son for more than an hour in front of an abstract painting, I saw what appeared to be black paint thrown onto a white canvas.
My son loves abstract paintings. He was explaining to me how much I was missing by just looking at the paint color. I hadn’t seen the energy…
Matt Fieldman
German manufacturing is a powerhouse, fueling 21 percent of the country’s economy and contributing nearly $1.4 trillion in exports. Given these facts, we in the MEP National Network have been studying Germany’s vocational educational training (VET) program, which most of us call apprenticeships, by…
