All Features
Knowledge at Wharton
For decades, relatively easy access to space and the big profits to go with it have dangled elusively just over the horizon. With a little more R&D money and a few more advances in the technology, the thinking went, space would be ours.
Are we there yet? More than a few signs are pointing in…
Victor Prince
If you work long enough, you will have a micro-managing boss or two. These bosses think they know your job better than you do. Maybe they had your job before they got promoted to management. They focus on how you do your job instead of on the results you produce. They think that because you are…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
We have been examining motion and moving without working, the footprint of the invisible enemy: missing information. Added up, motion—in all its thousand and perverse forms—can steal 10 percent to 30 percent of our usable workday. Its impact is huge. We know the cure: Replace recurrent questions…
Caroline Rook
Toby Gould was both excited and petrified on the morning of Dec. 12, 2018. He and the three other nonprofessional rowers in his team were due to set off from La Gomera in the Canary Islands in a rowing boat equipped with only as much kit and freeze-dried food as a 29 × 6 ft boat can carry. Ahead of…
NIST
Ordinarily, you won’t encounter a radiation thermometer until somebody puts one in your ear at the doctor’s office, or you point one at your forehead when you’re feeling feverish. But more sophisticated and highly calibrated, research-grade “noncontact” thermometers—which measure the infrared (heat…
Nextsense
(NEXTSENSE: Graz, Austria) -- Continuous monitoring of rolling and drawing mill production has become a critical factor in the steel industry. To keep costs for quality control at bay measurement expert NEXTSENSE developed an affordable profile measurement system, ATON Wire, applicable for long…
Barrett Thompson
A hot topic of conversation for many B2B industrial companies is the talent and skills gap due to the generational shift in the workforce from baby boomers to millennials. According to Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, “Too many employers…
Sarah Webb, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
What you see in the image below is a lobe of a liver, times two. On the right, a flesh-and-blood one, removed from a transplant donor; and on the left, one created from plastic to represent bile ducts, arteries, and veins, which were laid…
Donald J. Wheeler
During the past three months James Beagle and I presented columns that made extensive use of analysis of means techniques. Since these techniques may be new to some, this column explains when to use each technique and where to find tables of the appropriate scaling factors.
In 1967, Ellis R. Ott…
Brooke Kuei
A technique developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with Dow and Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, is providing atomic-resolution details about magnesium chloride, a material involved…
Harry Hertz
This blog, “Blogrige,” is about organizational performance, but first I need to set the stage.
One of the most prized commodities in many organizations, including mine, is space. Space is tight. Organizational (business) units are always looking to keep their current space and grab more space from…
Stephen Rice, Scott Winter
As driverless cars become more capable and common, they will change people’s travel habits not only around their own communities but across much larger distances. Our research has revealed just how much people’s travel preferences could shift, and found a new potential challenge to the airline…
Romesh Saigal, Abdullah AlShelahi
Soon after the Great Recession, the U.S. stock markets plunged—and rebounded within 36 minutes. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 9 percent, losing more than 1,000 points before suddenly recovering.
This May 6, 2010, event was the first recorded “flash crash.” Although it didn’t…
Exact Metrology
(Exact Metrology: Cincinnati) -- The Cincinnati Reds celebrated their 150th anniversary as the nation’s first all-professional baseball team by dedicating a pavilion outside the ballpark on May 5, 2019.
Local Cincinnati artist, Tom Tsuchiya, created relief figures of the members of the 1869 team…
Kreon Technologies
(Kreon: Limoges, France) -- Presented at a soft launch during the Control Fair held in Stuttgart, May 7–10, 2019, the Zephyr III rounds off the current KREON Zephyr range, opening it up to a new generation of CMM scanners based on more than 25 years of experience in industrial metrology.…
Grant Ramaley
Although the “new approach” to regulating medical devices has always given more urgency to higher-risk medical devices, this is not the case for the European Medical Device Regulation (MDR). Class 1 medical devices must fully comply with the regulation by May 26, 2020, or be shut out of the region…
Jose R. Costa
Few people would deny the crucial role agility plays in helping a person succeed in today’s ever-changing business environment. The best leaders read the shifting marketplace and course-correct to help their businesses stay ahead of the curve. Yet while “agility” may be a trendy concept, the key to…
Jim Benson
If I have been on a decades-long drive to make work more flexible, Alton Brown has been on a similar one in the kitchen. There is no shortage of rants on his various shows about “unitaskers”... things in your kitchen that can only do one thing and therefore are only useful in a few, often unlikely…
Sameer Hasija, Vivek Choudhary
One fine morning in 1909, Henry Ford made a surprise announcement during a company meeting. In the future, Ford Motor would stick to a single car model, the Model T, in black only. No other choices, or as he said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black…
Jeffrey Phillips
As Malcolm Gladwell and other business writers have found, it is entirely possible to write a compelling article around a rather obvious point, and still hold the reader’s attention. As an example I draw your attention to this article, titled “Why Corporate Innovation Is So Hard.”
The article was…
Eddie King
The first message sent by Morse code’s dots and dashes across a long distance traveled from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore on Friday, May 24, 1844—175 years ago. It signaled the first time in human history that complex thoughts could be communicated at long distances almost instantaneously. Until…
Scott A. Hindle
In everyday language, “in control” and “under control” are synonymous with “in specification.” Requirements have been met. Things are OK. No trouble.
“Out of control,” on the other hand, is synonymous with “out of specification.” Requirements have not been met. Things are not OK. Trouble.
Using…
Brian Lagas
‘Why are our changeovers taking so long?”
If you’ve asked this question on the shop floor, more than likely you were met with blank stares by your employees. Open-ended questions like this are overwhelming, so employees try to find quick answers that don’t really address the problem. They don’t…
Knowledge at Wharton
CEOs are stepping forward to confront public policy issues that often extend beyond their core business, in part at the urging of their employees, write Caroline Kaeb and David Scheffer in this opinion piece. Kaeb is co-chair of the Business and Human Rights Pillar and a senior fellow of the…
Productivity Press
(Productivity Press: New York) -- Since the 1980s, lean and Six Sigma have been used independently to make existing processes better, faster, and more cost effective. For almost 20 years, countless companies have embraced the power of blending the two process improvement methodologies. This has…
