Why is it that relatively few general managers can work—and succeed—in the same company for a long period of time, while the majority cannot and do not?

(Renishaw: Gloucestershire, UK) -- Mike Sullivan founded

Companies aren’t perfect, and neither are the people who work for them. Since this is a fact rather than a judgment, it’s reasonable to expect errors in manufacturing and process management.

Problem solving is much more than arriving at an elegant solution. It is a twofold progression that includes problem resolution and solution implementation.

Story update 4/13/2011: We corrected a misquote regarding who first said, “As goes GM, so goes the nation.”

I was in

(SICK: Minneapolis) -- SICK, a global leader in manufacturing sensors, safety systems, machine vision, and automatic identification products for factory and logistics automation, has launched the

How many times have you heard, “Lean is in and Six Sigma is out” from a colleague? The funny thing about this is that I used to hear the same thing 23 years ago. Only then it was, “Lean is in, and quality improvement teams are out.” Little has changed since then.

In my March 24th column, I discussed how you should handle audits that point out a minor or "Mickey Mouse" nonconformance.

(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have for the first time used an apparatus that relies on the “noise” of jiggling electrons to make highly accurate measurements of the Boltzmann constant, an important value for many scientific ca