All Features
William A. Levinson
Quality-related data collection is useful, but statistics can also deliver misleading and even dysfunctional results when incomplete. This is often the case when information is collected only from surviving people or products, extremely satisfied or dissatisfied customers, or propagators of bad…
Faustino Gomez, Sepp Hochreiter
With ongoing global shortages of all kinds of goods, from cars to lumber to cooking oil, both consumers and companies are struggling. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with renewed Covid outbreaks in China, are two things that are likely to make things worse before they get better.
One way to…
Nathan Parde
For years, organizations have taken a defensive “castle-and-moat” approach to cybersecurity, seeking to secure the perimeters of their networks to block out any malicious actors. Individuals with the right credentials were assumed to be trustworthy and allowed access to a network’s systems and data…
Amy Kim
As companies continue to adjust to the wave of employees returning to the office, one thing is certain: The pre-pandemic working world is no more. Although remote employee productivity has been proven in terms of output—albeit subjective and loosely defined—many companies are gradually increasing…
Angus Robertson
It turns out that the triple threat of being locked away in quarantine, forbidden from visiting clients in person, and being under pressure to continue to deliver sales and profits, has had a seismic impact on digital transformation. The COVID-19-led paradigm shift in how customers work and buy has…
In an open letter, Bob Fangmeyer, director of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, wrote that the Baldridge Award process would be suspended this year. The reasons and future plans are outlined in the letter shown below.
Dear Friend of Baldrige,
I am writing today to provide an important…
Corey Brown
Gemba walks are an essential tool to understand the challenges of your manufacturing frontline. Each manufacturing facility is unique. The best way to solve your unique operational challenges is to perform a gemba walk focused on specific goals.
This article will outline the fundamentals of a…
Pat Toth
This morning my favorite local morning news program had an interesting segment on new slang words and what they mean. While the definitions were probably not necessary for millennials or generation Z, but for baby boomers like me, it was an eye-opening vocabulary lesson. I must admit I didn’t know…
Jane Cavalier
We live in an upside-down world where the old rules no longer apply. Many call it a VUCA world—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Mass consumerism is being challenged by a new consumption paradigm as people are driven by new essentialism where things matter less and relationships,…
Sabrina Habib
Creativity is among the most in-demand skills in the workplace.
It’s not surprising that top multinational companies are looking to hire inventive thinkers: Research shows that creativity can drive innovation and resilience in organizations.
Tech giant Google has grown by innovating the way we all…
Richard S. Hawkes
In my work helping to build high-performing teams at a diverse range of organizations, I have found that there is nothing that bonds a team quite like being on an authentic transformational journey. It’s invigorating to experience a continuous improvement journey with others on the same team, and…
Gleb Tsipursky
Covid-19 has disrupted many areas of our lives, including our careers. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to strengthen and secure your career during these uncertain times.
Due to the devastating effect of the pandemic on the restaurant industry, one of my coaching clients, Alex, who served…
Matt Fieldman
I remember well when the phrase “a thousand points of light” entered regular usage. Popularized by President George H.W. Bush, the phrase referred to individuals and organizations that provide valuable and even lifesaving work in communities around the country. In 1990, President Bush founded the…
J. Stewart Black
Marjorie, an HR professional, receives a seemingly impossible mandate: She is asked to recruit six Spanish-speaking, front-end programmers with at least 10 years of experience who are able to relocate to Miami—all within a month.
Not so many years ago, this would have been impossible. Today, she…
Eric Whitley
Unplanned downtime is a major source of costs and loss in productivity for the manufacturing industry. According to IndustryWeek, unplanned downtime costs industrial manufacturers an estimated $50 billion annually. A major cause of such unplanned downtime is usually poor maintenance.
The…
Zhanna Lyubykh, Jennifer Bozeman, Nick Turner, Sandy Hershcovis
Managers may mistreat employees who perform poorly because they assume their behavior results from a lack of diligence rather than other factors, according to research we published in September 2021.
Surveys show that about one in seven U.S. workers feel that their manager engages in hostile…
Dario Lirio
By now, it’s no secret that good clinical practice (GCP) guidelines used by FDA inspectors are expanding. These GCP guidelines are developed by the International Conference on Harmonization. The ICH last revised its GCP document, called ICH E6(R2), in 2016. It will be releasing a new version in…
Oliver Binz, Elia Ferracuti, Peter Joos
In early 2021, people had already started commenting that inflation might be coming back. But few people could predict just how high it would go. In January 2022, year-on-year inflation in the OECD area rose to 7.2 percent. Consumer price inflation in the United States hit a 40-year high of 7.5…
Dale Crawford
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment of electricians is projected to grow by 9 percent from 2020 to 2030. As in other fields of construction, this is developing into something of an HR crisis. Demand for qualified electricians is outstripping availability, and the…
Gleb Tsipursky
Google recently announced its new post-pandemic hybrid work policy, requiring employees to work in the office for at least three days a week. That policy goes against the desires of many rank-and-file Google employees. A survey of more than 1,000 Google employees showed that two-thirds feel unhappy…
Katarina Bennich
Ever found yourself hitting the wrong button and then flipping through the manual in a frenzy, trying to figure out how to get that thing to stop doing what it’s doing? If your answer is yes, you’ve been an unfortunate victim of bad user experience (UX).
UX is defined as all aspects of a product,…
Steven I. Azizi
It has been more than five decades since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted to outlaw harassment and discrimination against workers in American workplaces. Unfortunately, workplace harassment is still a serious problem for millions of workers in the country.
Different forms of…
Anas Hassan
Very few businesses today rely on push marketing alone as their strategy to ultimately produce sales. Although the larger picture of inbound marketing is proving itself effective, marketers continue to debate the relative value of content marketing vs. social media marketing. But here’s the spoiler…
Lisa Apolinski
The pandemic arrived and brought with it many new and surprising changes in how companies do business. One of the most interesting, and most impactful, changes for organizations has been how consumers engage with brands. A recent survey indicated that consumers are rethinking how they interact with…
Paul Smith
Good leaders ask, “How do I tell better stories?” Great leaders ask, “Which stories do I need to tell?”
Does that mean how you tell a leadership story doesn’t matter? Of course not. But if you tell an irrelevant, unimportant, or self-serving story, it doesn’t matter how well you tell it. The story…
