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Imagine building a brand over decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested in design and development. Sponsorships with celebrity athletes and professional and college teams. Leading-edge marketing making your company one of the top 20 brands in the world. It only takes one incident to unravel…
The spring and summer of 2000 were a long time ago, but I learned some lessons during those months that have stayed with me. In fact, the learning from that experience is still happening as I continue to connect it to things I see today.
I was a member of a team working hard to stand up a new…
Lately, the term “innovator” conjures up the image of a young entrepreneur disrupting an industry with concepts like ridesharing, e-currency, or meal-kit delivery. But it doesn’t have to. Whether you are 35 or 65, leading a startup or a multigenerational business, you can be an innovator. In fact,…
A novel system developed at MIT uses RFID tags to help robots home in on moving objects with unprecedented speed and accuracy. The system could enable greater collaboration and precision by robots working on packaging and assembly, and by swarms of drones carrying out search-and-rescue missions.…
It’s worthwhile to nurture a culture of change by creating a new business strategy for the year ahead. However, the strategy can fail when organizations don’t have a plan to create lasting and sustainable change. By the time March hits, it’s typically “new year, same company,” with plans for…
The life choices that had led me to be sitting in a booth underneath a banner that read “Ask a Philosopher” at the entrance to the New York subway at 57th and 8th were perhaps random but inevitable.
I’d been a “public philosopher” for 15 years, so I readily agreed to join my colleague Ian Olasov…
Managers the world over want to know if things are “in control.” This usually is taken to mean that the process is producing 100-percent conforming product, and to this end an emphasis is placed upon having a good capability or performance index. But a good index by itself does not tell the whole…
Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) needed a way to secure smart manufacturing systems using the digital thread, so they turned to the new kid on the block... blockchain, that is.
According to a new NIST report, the security system better known for underpinning…
All day every day, throughout the United States, people push buttons—on coffee makers, TV remote controls, and even social media posts they “like.” For more than seven years, I’ve been trying to understand why, looking into where buttons came from, why people love them—and why people loathe them.…
I went to a meeting about innovation recently with a former client, and a discussion about digital transformation broke out. It was both interesting and strange.
Most corporations are struggling to comprehend the changes in front of them, but at the same time are so fixated on short-term thinking…
In the 1999 film Office Space, a dark comedy about the mundane conventionality of work, disgruntled software engineer Peter Gibbons tells his new love interest, Joanna, that he hates his job and doesn’t want to go anymore.
When Joanna, played by actress Jennifer Aniston, asks Peter whether he is…
Applying just a bit of strain to a piece of semiconductor or other crystalline material can deform the orderly arrangement of atoms in its structure enough to cause dramatic changes in its properties, such as the way it conducts electricity, transmits light, or conducts heat.
Now, a team of…
Imagine there was a store where there were no prices on items, and you never knew what you’d pay until you’d picked out your purchases and were leaving the shop. You might be skeptical that the store would have any incentive to offer reasonable prices.
This exact situation has become the norm in U…
(Wiley: Hoboken, NJ) -- Harness your company’s incumbent advantages to win the digital disruption game.
The book, Goliath’s Revenge: How Established Companies Turn the Tables on Digital Disruptors (Wiley, 2019), is the practical guide for how executives and aspiring leaders of established…
The Pareto principle calls for focus on the vital few rather than the trivial many. While none of ISO 9001’s clauses are trivial—a nonconformance for any of them requires corrective action—ISO 9001 users can avoid most nonconformances by focusing on the clauses that are the most frequent trouble…
In the past, I’ve written about some of the myths of journey mapping. One of those myths is: Without a digital mapping platform, I can’t even begin to map. Let me explain my position.
You probably know by now that I’m an advocate of digitizing your maps, for a variety of reasons, not the least of…
A few years ago, I received a call from a very frustrated vice president of development in the Midwest. He sent his staff to get trained in Scrum. He thought he was sending his team off to learn how to develop software. Instead, they came back scrumbroken.
The team spun in circles arguing about…
(Buehler: Lake Bluff, IL) -- Buehler has announced their latest addition to the world-renowned Wilson hardness testing range, the new UH4000 Series Universal Hardness Tester. This tester comes in two key configurations: UH4250 Hardness Scale 0.5-250 kgf and UH4750 Hardness Scale 3-750 kgf.
The…
During recent visits to Twitter and LinkedIn, I’ve become increasingly shocked by the devolution of the posts to vacuous nonsense. I felt a Network moment of, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Is your organization getting to the point where executive reaction to what’s…
Electrodes are essential components of modern lithium-ion batteries, which are used to power mobile electronic devices, electric vehicles, and many other products. The battery’s surface structure and engineering are directly related to its performance, life expectancy, and safety.
The batteries…
(Marposs: Auburn Hills, MI) -- Marposs, a world leader in measurement and process monitoring technologies, has announced the availability of its Brankamp X7 “smart” in-process monitoring systems for cold- and hot-forming, thread rolling and stamping operations.
The X7 system’s artificial…
(Banner Engineering: Minneapolis) -- Banner Engineering, provider of technology for industrial automation, announces its Q5X Sensor for solving difficult distance-based applications, even at acute angles, from a range of 9.5 centimeters to 2 meters.
The high-power laser sensor reliably detects…
In the manufacturing universe, metal tube fabrication is a world of its own. That being said, the requirements for developing a new world-standard solution for tube bending are common to all manufacturing—be faster, more accurate, and more economical.
With customers like Delta Air Lines, British…
I had the pleasure of interviewing Whitney Johnson, author of the book, Build an A Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). Whitney has done ground-breaking work in the arena of personal disruption—applying these concepts to…
Most people have a notion about the visual workplace that is much too small for themselves and their companies. They think of it as a series of point solutions that are helpful, even clever. Yet they should expect more—because they need more.
In fact, visuality is a language—an imbedded system of…
