Today, the survival of many organizations depends on their plans to leverage cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to transform their workplaces into augmented environments.

A recent IBM study found that, as a result of AI and intelligent automation, 120 million workers will need to develop new skills or even be transitioned out of companies to different jobs during the next three years. Half of the surveyed organizations had done little to rethink their training strategies to respond to this urgency.

For that digital transformation to happen, organizations must avoid the costly “buy, not build” talent strategy that involves opting for expensive new hires instead of retraining their current employees.

The Automotive Industry Action Group’s (AIAG’s) and German Association of the Automotive Industry’s (VDA’s) new Failure Mode and Effects Analysis Handbook (AIAG, 2019) offers significant advances over FMEA as practiced 15 or 20 years ago.¹ The publication is definitely worth buying because the new approach includes valuable methodology; this article will cover the most important points and highlights.

New features

The new process is qualitative rather than quantitative, which overcomes a major drawback of the previous approach. The older occurrence ratings were based on the probability of a failure, and the older AIAG manuals even tabulated recommended nonconforming fraction ranges. If, for example, the failure was 50 percent or more likely, the occurrence rating was 10 (worst possible on a 1 to 10 scale), while one or fewer per 1.5 million opportunities earned a rating of 1. These probabilities can be estimated from a process capability study, assuming that one is available; otherwise, one might easily have to guess.

Having trouble paying attention? MIT neuroscientists may have a solution for you: Turn down your alpha brain waves. In a new study, the researchers found that people can enhance their attention by controlling their own alpha brain waves based on neurofeedback they receive as they perform a particular task.

The study found that when subjects learned to suppress alpha waves in one hemisphere of their parietal cortex, they were able to pay better attention to objects that appeared on the opposite side of their visual field. This is the first time that this cause-and-effect relationship has been seen, and it suggests that it may be possible for people to learn to improve their attention through neurofeedback.

“There’s a lot of interest in using neurofeedback to try to help people with various brain disorders and behavioral problems,” says Robert Desimone, director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “It’s a completely noninvasive way of controlling and testing the role of different types of brain activity.”

After the first crash, of Lion Air in Indonesia in October 2018, people blamed poor maintenance and insufficient pilot training. When a second airliner, an Ethiopian Air aircraft, crashed in March 2019, similarities quickly transpired. There was no apparent external influence such as poor weather. Neither was there any interference with the flight decks, as in a hijacking.

In both cases the pilots could not keep the aircraft from nose-diving. Airlines and regulators around the world started grounding the MAX indefinitely. Australia’s Civil Aviation Authority prohibited any B737 MAX aircraft in its airspace, followed by New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority.

Surprisingly, the last authority to clamp down was the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the governmental body in charge of certifying aircraft.

According to the Journal of Consumer Research, a high price indicates either bad value or good quality, whereas a low price indicates either good value or poor quality.

At the heart of this dichotomy is the role that quality plays in both the actual and perceived price of the product. To understand how quality plays a critical role in pricing, one must look at the stakeholders affecting the price in manufacturing.

A proper focus on pricing must take into account customers’ perceived value of the product and what they believe that value is worth, i.e., what they are willing to pay for it. Without this, engineering and marketing team members are left to develop pricing from a bottoms-up, cost-plus approach: How much are the raw materials, cost of assembly, cost of delivery, and so forth? Often, marketing simply tacks on a percentage of profit to the order to establish the price. For them the calculation is simple math that ensures they will hit margin goals. However, they are not the folks in the field convincing customers to buy. Nor is the engineering team listening to customers’ objections or value perceptions. 

“Before I do the things I do, people call them ‘impossible.’ After I’m done, they call them ‘crazy.’ I call them ‘world records.’”
—Jason Caldwell, author of Navigating the Impossible

Books on leadership can be dry or boring. Not so with Navigating the Impossible: Build Extraordinary Teams and Shatter Expectations, by Jason Caldwell (Berrett-Koehler, 2019). Caldwell, a self-proclaimed “professional jock,” is president and owner of Latitude 35 Leadership, which uses experiential training to explore the fine art of leading and maintaining high-performance teams.

Navigating the Impossible is anchored around Caldwell’s record-setting run at rowing across the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, the Atlantic Ocean. Thirty-five days, 14 hours, and three minutes. That’s how long it took Jason Caldwell and the crew of the American Spirit to row 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean during the perilous 2016 Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge—or, as it’s known to those who attempt it, “The World’s Toughest Row.”

Left to their own devices, humans tend to fall prey to biases that make them poor decision makers. For instance, among other foibles, most purchasing managers routinely under-order. In fact, past research has shown that managers are typically 10 to 20 percent off the mark when it comes to ordering the optimal quantity of products.

However, somewhat surprising, the same research has also shown that this suboptimal ordering only results in a 1 to 5 percent loss in expected profit. This conundrum has left many an executive with a dilemma. As the CEO of a medium-sized online florist shop told me: “I cannot micro-manage all my people. Before I go and intervene, I need to know the impact on my business.”

Fair point. Managers who base purchasing decisions on their gut feelings—either because they have never devised a rational ordering policy or regularly choose to override it—make a lot of mistakes. But if it only costs the firm about 1 percent of extra profit, executives may be reluctant to stir the pot. In most SMEs, a CEO’s path is strewn with seemingly juicier projects in terms of ROI.