When I began my medical device career, I started as a product development engineer.

Does this situation sound familiar? You’re sitting in a meeting, and you and your colleagues are energetically discussing how to handle an important issue or challenge.

In September 2021, I was fortunate to attend the FABTECH conference in Chicago, a sprawling trade show with what must have been billions of dollars of manufacturing equipment on display: robots, automation, 3D printers, you name it.

We’re experiencing rapid change, political and economic uncertainty, employee shifts and a war for talent, and the still-evolving “future of work.” A lot seems out of our control.

Believe it or not, the technology that brought you Bitcoin is beginning to make waves in the food manufacturing industry. This technology, called blockchain, is a digital ledger maintained across several computers, then linked through a peer-to-peer network.

If your food manufacturing plant has to issue a product recall, many people might take to social media to vent their frustrations, resulting in a public backlash that can damage your brand’s reputation.

When the City of Germantown, Tennessee, was named a Baldrige Award recipient in 2019, the small suburb of Memphis (just 20 square miles in size) became only the 

Negotiators are often told they should eschew competitive negotiations, where parties fight for what’s on the table. They should instead increase the size of the pie and seek win-win scenarios. But in reality, competitive negotiations are often unavoidable.

Performance reviews are clearly in need of an overhaul.