How do workers move up the corporate ladder, and how can they maximize their career mobility?

Let’s say a store has been selling large snow shovels for $15. The morning after a major snowstorm, the store raises its price to $20. Is this acceptable?

Some of the most celebrated education reform efforts today serve to make instruction more difficult. Personalized learning, project-based learning, mastery-based learning—they all require more work of teachers and more work of students.

Although automation has been successful in replacing repetitive, simple tasks, the human workforce still plays a critical role in manufacturing. Even the most sophisticated and automated manufacturing operations rely on human operators to configure, run, and properly maintain production equipment.

Does your organization benefit from lessons learned? Does it learn from previous quality issues? A vast amount of learning takes place every day in every manufacturing facility. Do global manufacturing companies share experiences gained from resolving quality issues between overseas plants? And what will they gain if they do?

Studies show that decisions made during the first few months of a CEO’s tenure are disproportionately important in determining his success. However, several issues—unique to CEOs and often overlooked—complicate or even cloud good decision making.

Tensile testing of materials is critical to a wide array of industries, which means preparing specimens for testing is equally important. If a specimen is not prepared correctly, the test results will be inaccurate; this is costly if a material fails a test that it should have passed, and potentially catastrophic if it passes a test it should have failed.

Policies define expectations and boundaries for behavior, but these expectations frequently go unmet.

Schools are always trying to get their kids interested in pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). But that’s hard to do when the students don’t have a solid idea of what having a STEM-related job really means.

“I don’t think there’s a good connection between the classroom and what people actually do in their jobs,” says Beth Bryan, a middle-school enrichment teacher in Edmond, Oklahoma.

I would like to share with you a tale from the real world. It’s an extract from the book Michael McLean and I wrote, Manufacturing Money (Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2015).