Is innovation critical for your business survival and success? Are you dissatisfied with your ability to bring new products and services to market? Surveys show that most business leaders would answer both questions with a yes.

Historically, quality in a process was something that was done at the end of the line. You inspected your widget once it was made, and if it had flaws, you fixed it or threw it out.

IMTS was a blast, but it was great to be back home in lovely Northern California this week. On this episode of QDL, we covered the skills that workers need and the innovations that organizations want.

As millions of people came online iduring the late 1990s, they needed help figuring out what each web page was about, and how to find what they were looking for. Web indexes and search engines sprang up.

‘How is it that in the middle of a relatively small town of about 125,000 people in Minnesota, you’ve got the No. 1-rated healthcare system probably in the world?”

With more than 110,000 expected attendees, IMTS is Chicago’s hottest suburb this week.

We arrived in Chicago over the weekend to luxuriously appointed accommodations and much fanfare (that’s how it is when you’re the cast and crew of the No. 1 talk show in the quality industry).

IMTS is almost here, so we previewed the show, considered an important industry-academia partnership within manufacturing, and asked serious questions about the nature of motivation. Let’s take a look:

 IMTS Preview

If you want to keep stretching and improving, you’d better get comfortable with the discomfort of change.

T

he federal government just made it a lot easier to form an employee-owned business.