Traditional corporate hierarchies tend to rely on static design. There’s the CEO at the top, followed by directors and managers. Red tape and inefficient processes can bog down decisions. 

A couple of weeks ago I posed the question, “Are you overproducing improvements?” and compared a typical improvement “blitz” with a large monument machine that produces in large batches.

I’d like to dive a little deeper into some of the paradoxes and implications of 1:1 flow of anything, improvements included.

In lean we talk about “seeing the waste” and using visual tools. Many of us who use these terms  have had a lot of training in engineering, manufacturing, and other highly technical areas. However, the skills needed to “see” problems may lie more firmly in the study of art.

Carrying your smartphone around everywhere has become a way of life. In doing so, you produce a surprising amount of data about your role in the economy—where you shop, work, travel, and generally hang out.

Thasos Group, founded at MIT in 2011, has developed a platform that leverages those data, in anonymized and aggregated form, to measure economies for industry and investors.

The great surprise for people with good ideas is the gap between how an idea feels in their minds and how it feels when they try to put the idea to work.

It’s small enough to fit inside a shoebox, yet this robot on four wheels has a big mission: keeping factories and other large facilities safe from hackers.

Meet the HoneyBot. Developed by a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the diminutive device is designed to lure in digital troublemakers who have set their sights on industrial facilities. HoneyBot will then trick the bad actors into giving up valuable information to cybersecurity professionals.

It’s an article of faith that technological innovation is crucial to prosperity and is currently changing our lives at an unprecedented rate, but how do we know if the pace of pioneering breakthroughs is any faster today than it was during Thomas Edison’s era? In fact, some economists argue that today’s information revolution has had much less impact on our lives than the big inventions of the late 19th century had on people living then.

Ageing wastewater systems are under threat from growing populations, urbanization, pollution. and climate change, not to mention human behavior. However, despite these challenges and fears for health and safety, the new ISO 24516 series is playing a key role in turning what many consider a burden into a valuable resource.

Workplace safety is a vital concern for every organization. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.9 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses were reported by private industry employers in 2016, costing employers tens of billions of dollars.