All Features
Claire Harbour, Antoine Tirard
Born to a Dalit family, Megha was raised in Southwest India and learned English at her convent school. As a child, she aspired to be a fashion designer or a cardiologist, but her parents insisted that she become an IT engineer. After four years of higher education, Megha found a job in the booming…
Rick Miller
In a recent interview for my new book, Be Chief: It’s a Choice, Not a Title (Motivational Press, 2018), I was asked to share an embarrassing moment I’d had on stage. My mind instantly flashed back to Beijing and a session I’d had 15 years ago.
It was 2003, and China was celebrating the year of the…
CRC Press
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- Responsible manufacturing has become an obligation to the environment and to society itself, enforced primarily by customer perspective and governmental regulations on environmental issues. This is mainly driven by the escalating deterioration of the environment, such…
Jon Speer
You arrive at work one morning, and there are FDA inspectors sitting in your waiting area. If you are lucky, you may be notified ahead of time that they’re coming, but otherwise, the US. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is fully within its rights to show up unannounced at any time.
Because of…
Teofilo Cortizo
Within maintenance management, the term MTBF (mean time between failures) is the most important key performance indicator after physical availability.
Unlike MTTF (mean time to failure), which relates directly to available equipment time, MTBF also adds up the time spent inside a repair. That is,…
Q-Mark
(Q-Mark: Rancho Santa Margarita, CA) -- Q-Mark is now offering precision diamond styli in nearly any standard thread size and configuration. Diamond styli are an excellent choice for demanding applications. Diamond sphere performance is unmatched when measuring hard, abrasive, or very soft surfaces…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Life science companies are no strangers to data, so it would be easy to assume they are adept at making innovative use of huge amounts. Not necessarily. A tradition of rigorous scientific method and clinical trial hasn’t prepared them for the shifting inundation of big data or all its baffling…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
For centuries, medical procedures, prescriptions, and other medical interventions have been based largely on experience—what is known about a set of symptoms. The doctor looks at those symptoms, tests you in various ways (blood tests, X-rays, MRIs), and interprets the results based on experience…
Jason Davis
Competition among ride-sharing companies is intensifying in Southeast Asia, a region where the growth of smartphone use is among the fastest in the world, and the number of smartphone owners could exceed 400 million by 2020.
Since Uber, the first car-hailing app, began disrupting taxi and…
Scott Berkun
The term “set up to succeed” means people have been given most of what they need to do their job well.
Good bosses do more than just set goals and give assignments; they should see themselves as responsible for ensuring that good work happens (see Lefferts Law of Management). First, they think…
Iva Danilovic
New software solutions, designed to help companies digitalize their supply chains, are improving methods of carrying out field work. Transparency of productivity is becoming the driving force of quality optimization. By increasing oversight and collaboration, end-to-end digitalization solutions…
Marlon Walker
Robots have been a part of industry longer than you might think. The patent for the first industrial robot, Unimate, was granted in 1961. While robots were sometimes utilized by larger manufacturers, such as automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), they were rarely an option for small…
Knowledge at Wharton
Many people work on their goals by engaging in positive actions—hitting the gym, planning a trip, or taking guitar lessons. But they may be overlooking one of the most important tools for effecting change: the power of thought.
Harvard Business School professor emeritus Gerald Zaltman recommends…
Ryan E. Day
I love standards, and whether you know it, you love standards, too. For example, let’s say a bulb in your lamp goes bad. You drive down to the local hardware store, buy a bulb, come back home, change out the bulb, plug the lamp back in, and... it lights up. You just benefited from at least seven U.…
Bruce Hamilton
Last year I had a short stay at one of Boston’s best hospitals. Although I will be forever grateful for the excellent treatment I received while in their care, I wondered about a few systems that sat directly in front of my bed. So, I took a picture to share later. Here is what I saw.
1. The…
Nicole Radziwill, Graham Freeman
In 2013, thousands of consumers in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland bought, prepared—and ate—beef lasagna, hamburgers, and frozen dinners. What they didn’t know is what they were actually putting in their mouths.
Although a burger is only required by law in that region to contain 47-percent…
Kelly Kuchinski
Imagine building a brand over decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested in design and development. Sponsorships with celebrity athletes and professional and college teams. Leading-edge marketing making your company one of the top 20 brands in the world. It only takes one incident to unravel…
Mark Rosenthal
The spring and summer of 2000 were a long time ago, but I learned some lessons during those months that have stayed with me. In fact, the learning from that experience is still happening as I continue to connect it to things I see today.
I was a member of a team working hard to stand up a new…
Joseph Warren Walker III
Lately, the term “innovator” conjures up the image of a young entrepreneur disrupting an industry with concepts like ridesharing, e-currency, or meal-kit delivery. But it doesn’t have to. Whether you are 35 or 65, leading a startup or a multigenerational business, you can be an innovator. In fact,…
MIT News
A novel system developed at MIT uses RFID tags to help robots home in on moving objects with unprecedented speed and accuracy. The system could enable greater collaboration and precision by robots working on packaging and assembly, and by swarms of drones carrying out search-and-rescue missions.…
Christy Johnson
It’s worthwhile to nurture a culture of change by creating a new business strategy for the year ahead. However, the strategy can fail when organizations don’t have a plan to create lasting and sustainable change. By the time March hits, it’s typically “new year, same company,” with plans for…
Lee McIntyre
The life choices that had led me to be sitting in a booth underneath a banner that read “Ask a Philosopher” at the entrance to the New York subway at 57th and 8th were perhaps random but inevitable.
I’d been a “public philosopher” for 15 years, so I readily agreed to join my colleague Ian Olasov…
Donald J. Wheeler
Managers the world over want to know if things are “in control.” This usually is taken to mean that the process is producing 100-percent conforming product, and to this end an emphasis is placed upon having a good capability or performance index. But a good index by itself does not tell the whole…
NIST
Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) needed a way to secure smart manufacturing systems using the digital thread, so they turned to the new kid on the block... blockchain, that is.
According to a new NIST report, the security system better known for underpinning…
Rachel Plotnik
All day every day, throughout the United States, people push buttons—on coffee makers, TV remote controls, and even social media posts they “like.” For more than seven years, I’ve been trying to understand why, looking into where buttons came from, why people love them—and why people loathe them.…
