If you work long enough, you will have a micro-managing boss or two. These bosses think they know your job better than you do. Maybe they had your job before they got promoted to management. They focus on how you do your job instead of on the results you produce. They think that because you are doing your job differently than they would, you must be doing it incorrectly. Micro-management is a big driver of dissatisfaction and attrition in the workplace.

Seven strategies to manage a micromanaging manager

Diagnose the situation. Is your boss micro-managing others or just you? It is important to understand whether you are being singled out, or if you are just one of many victims. If he micro-manages others, too, it’s probably him, not you. But if you are the only one being micro-managed, it might be you, and it is worth figuring out why. Perhaps your boss is just more interested in your job than others. Or perhaps he thinks you need closer scrutiny. If your boss’s micro-management is due to problems with your performance, you need to surface that discussion and address it head on.

We have been examining motion and moving without working, the footprint of the invisible enemy: missing information. Added up, motion—in all its thousand and perverse forms—can steal 10 percent to 30 percent of our usable workday. Its impact is huge. We know the cure: Replace recurrent questions with visual answers, and motion dissolves because information deficits disappear. Do this by implementing visual workplace technologies, and the gain is companywide.

To conquer motion, we need to understand it even better than we do now and go beyond the power of information deficits to trigger struggle in the guise of seemingly innocent interruptions. In this article, I widen our definition of motion so you gain insight into the more deeply hidden triggers of motion—those tied directly to the physical work environment—and a work location I call the “value field.”
• The wider definition of motion: Motion is anything you have to do or you are unable do your work—but it is not your work.
• An explanation of the term value field: The actual physical location where you do your work.
• And let’s also define “work,” so there’s no guessing. Work means: moving and adding value.

Ordinarily, you won’t encounter a radiation thermometer until somebody puts one in your ear at the doctor’s office, or you point one at your forehead when you’re feeling feverish. But more sophisticated and highly calibrated, research-grade “noncontact” thermometers—which measure the infrared (heat) radiation given off by objects without touching them—are critically important to many endeavors besides healthcare.

However, even high-end conventional radiation thermometers have produced readings with worryingly large uncertainties. But now researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have invented a portable, remarkably stable, standards-quality radiation thermometer about 60 cm (24 in.) long that is capable of measuring temperatures to a precision of within a few thousandths of a degree Celsius.

A hot topic of conversation for many B2B industrial companies is the talent and skills gap due to the generational shift in the workforce from baby boomers to millennials. According to Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, “Too many employers are sleepwalking toward a significant skills problem that risks derailing their business strategy if not addressed. Not enough organizations are thinking strategically about workforce planning or even enough about the make-up of their workforce.”

Generational skills gap causing a quality gap

Recruiting and retaining millennials for sales teams is often cited as a primary concern. As baby boomers retire and exit the workforce, decades of quality experience, product, and market knowledge leave as well. Loss of quality is often the impact of this workforce transition on sales teams.

What you see in the image below is a lobe of a liver, times two. On the right, a flesh-and-blood one, removed from a transplant donor; and on the left, one created from plastic to represent bile ducts, arteries, and veins, which were laid down, layer by layer, by a 3D printer. The goal of such technology is to help surgeons plan and practice complex procedures, and train new surgeons with simulators that respond as a patient would.

Surgeons navigate complex anatomical terrain as they manipulate scalpel and suture to cut and stitch precisely and quickly. Their job is made harder by the fact that human anatomy is far from uniform. To properly prepare, they routinely use two-dimensional images from computerized tomography (CT) scans or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to plan.

But increasingly they are turning to realistic 3D models that are specific for individual patients.

Such models are already used to educate patients, to do general training, and to plan and practice especially difficult procedures. But in the future, 3D models, be they physical or virtual, could become routine tools for training surgeons or mapping procedures in advance.

A  technique developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with Dow and Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, is providing atomic-resolution details about magnesium chloride, a material involved in the production of the most common plastic, polyethylene. This could help to create a path toward sustainable plastics. The team’s findings were reported in Advanced Functional Materials.

The researchers used pulsed electron beams in an electron microscope to produce first-of-their-kind images of magnesium chloride. A continuous electron beam rapidly damages this delicate, beam-sensitive material, but the new technique allowed the researchers to study it without harm.

As driverless cars become more capable and common, they will change people’s travel habits not only around their own communities but across much larger distances. Our research has revealed just how much people’s travel preferences could shift, and found a new potential challenge to the airline industry.

Imagine someone who lives in Atlanta and needs to travel to Washington, D.C., for business. This is about a 10-hour drive. A flight takes about two hours, assuming no delays. Add to that the drive to the airport, checking in, the security line, and waiting at the gate. Upon arrival in D.C., it may take another 30 minutes to pick up any checked bags and find a rental car—and even more time to drive to the specific destination. The average person would estimate a total travel time of four to five hours. Most people would choose to fly instead of driving themselves.

Soon after the Great Recession, the U.S. stock markets plunged—and rebounded within 36 minutes. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 9 percent, losing more than 1,000 points before suddenly recovering.

This May 6, 2010, event was the first recorded “flash crash.” Although it didn’t have long-term effects, it raised concerns among investors about the stability of the stock market.

Although the “new approach” to regulating medical devices has always given more urgency to higher-risk medical devices, this is not the case for the European Medical Device Regulation (MDR). Class 1 medical devices must fully comply with the regulation by May 26, 2020, or be shut out of the region. 

This could be more problematic for dental products, which are inherently lower risk. Rubber dams and dental operating lights will have to comply before MRIs and pacemakers. 

To ensure that medical device manufacturers of class 1 devices understand that they must comply immediately on May 27, 2020, when the new regulation goes into effect, the European Commission states this plainly in its “Fact Sheet to Medical Device Manufacturers.”

One fine morning in 1909, Henry Ford made a surprise announcement during a company meeting. In the future, Ford Motor would stick to a single car model, the Model T, in black only. No other choices, or as he said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” The lesser-known part of the story is the reaction of the sales executives present: They were livid.

As Ford put it in his biography: “I cannot say that any one agreed with me.” In fact, equally unimpressed with his decision that the car would be affordable, observers started wondering: “How soon will Ford blow up?”

Of course, we now know that Ford was onto something. The Model T sold for another 18 years, and additional colors returned only in the last year of production. Ford pioneered standardized mass production with its single-minded goal of minimizing operating costs. The Model T came in black because it was the hue that dried the fastest.