All Features
Donna McGeorge
The world of work will always revolve around people working with people. Meeting together is an important way to get things done, which is why meetings will always be a part of organizational life. But they’re also hated by most people—not because they get things done (which they do), but because…
Alaina Love
Miles had just been promoted to his first position at the director level after two short years of working for a large manufacturer in a complicated, heavily regulated industry. What surprised him most about the culture of the company is how project-oriented the firm had become during his tenure as…
Laurie Guest
Everyone’s heard of it by now: “Quiet quitting” is the freshly coined phrase to describe the age-old behavior of not quite leaving one’s job entirely but rather opting to no longer go above and beyond. It’s service fatigue to the extreme, risking not just customer satisfaction but also staff…
Adam Zewe
Ask a smart home device for the weather forecast, and it takes several seconds to respond. One reason for this latency is that connected devices don’t have enough memory or power to store and run the enormous machine-learning models needed for the device to understand what a user is asking of it.…
Mike Figliuolo
One of the most awkward situations you can encounter in business is when someone goes from being a peer to being the boss. If you do a few things well, you can make the transition smoothly.
Life is full of awkward moments: the first kiss, an interview candidate having spinach stuck in their teeth…
Stephen Bevan
The UK was supposed to be facing a spike in unemployment after the pandemic furlough schemes ended. But instead the job market is the tightest in a generation. Given that there are also more vacancies than active job seekers, and many sectors are struggling with skill shortages, you might expect to…
Bruno Ménard
While traditional image processing software relies on task-specific algorithms, deep learning software uses a network to implement user-trained algorithms to recognize good and bad images or regions.
Fortunately, the advent of specialized algorithms and graphical user interface (GUI) tools for…
Erika James
Patagonia, the sportswear brand, made headlines this summer when its founder and CEO, Yvon Chouinard, announced his intention to effectively give away the multibillion dollar business instead of selling it.
Chouinard, a famously “reluctant” entrepreneur, detailed his decision to an astonished…
Bryan Christiansen
Assets are resources owned and used by a company to generate a positive economic benefit. Assets can be physical items, like equipment or furniture, or they can be intangibles like software, patents, or documents.
As a business owner, it’s important to know which assets you own, their location,…
Leeza Garber, Allison Jegla
In late spring 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged an elite investment adviser for “misstatements and omissions” about environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations related to its managed mutual funds. This same financial firm has also faced myriad…
Jeff Dewar
This is the final installment of a five-part series.
We’ve considered two quality organizations. The first, ASQ, has been around since 1946. Founded by none other than W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran, Walter A. Shewhart, and George D. Edwards. Titans of the quality field. Visionaries before they…
Elizabeth Benham
Calling all teachers, parents, and students. It’s easy to learn the metric system—or, as it’s more formally called, the International System of Units (SI). Explore these top 10 tips for teaching the SI. Let’s begin the countdown with....
10. Make it fun!
Integrating metric measurements into play…
Gleb Tsipursky
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink claimed in a recent interview with Fox that “we have to get our employees back in the office.” According to him, doing so would result in “rising productivity that will offset some of the inflationary pressures.”
Fink didn’t provide any data in the form of statistics,…
Kerry Stevenson
Operating a desktop FFF 3D printer can be a ton of fun, except when you make mistakes. Mistakes can cause print failures, and also embarrassment when they are so obvious you really should not have made them.
Let’s take a look at my list of the eight dumbest FFF 3D printing mistakes you can make.…
Alex Waddell, Diki Tsering, Peter Bragge, Paul Kellner
Emergency medical workers, already at increased risk for burnout compared to other professions, continue to be challenged by the fallout of Covid-19.
Stretched to the breaking point by increased workloads, highly contagious and acutely ill patients, and limited resources, workers’ risk factors for…
Jeff Dewar
This is the fourth installment of a five-part series.
As detailed in our third installment, ASQE is a new legal entity connected to the ASQ we all know and love. It’s a trade organization to which organizations, rather than individuals, can belong. Current membership is about 180 organizations,…
Quy Huy
In September 2022, Boeing agreed to pay $200 million for charges that it misled investors about two crashes of its 737 Max aircraft that killed 346 people. The penalty imposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is small change compared to the $2.5 billion shelled out by the plane maker…
Matt Fieldman
Customer experience, or “CX,” is all the rage in marketing circles nationally. Customer experience refers to how a customer experiences your company at every point of their buying journey—from marketing to sales to customer service, and everywhere in between. It can be tangible actions, such as…
Gleb Tsipursky
Do bosses trust employees to be productive when working out of the office? Microsoft released a new study in which it found that 85 percent of leaders say the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49 percent of…
Dave Gilson
Like most of us, lawyers think they can be impartial when they rate other people’s work. “They say, ‘Who writes a brief doesn’t matter. A brief is a brief; it stands on its own merit,’” explains Lori Nishiura Mackenzie, the lead strategist for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Stanford Graduate…
Jeetu Patel
In recent years, pretty much every assumption about how, where, and when we work has been upended. But I believe we’re still at just the beginning of a revolution in hybrid work.
Today, there’s a clear opportunity for organizations to step into the next wave of working, supported by even better…
Michael Okrent
Want a new car? You may have to wait as long as six months, depending on the model you order. Looking for a spicy condiment? Supplies of sriracha hot sauce have been running dangerously low. And if you feed your cat or dog dry pet food, expect empty shelves or elevated prices.
These aren’t…
Mark Rosenthal
Once again I’m going through old files. Looking back at my notes from 2005, I believe I was thinking about nailing these points to a church door somewhere in the company. That actually isn’t a bad analogy because I was advocating a pretty dramatic shift in the role of the kaizen workshop leaders.…
Adam Grant
Even before the pandemic, burnout was labeled as an epidemic. It’s the persistent work-related stress that’s exhausting and impairing. In the U.S., more than half of employees feel burned out at least some of the time, and it can lead to what has recently been termed “quiet quitting”—reduced…
Jeff Dewar
In this third installment of our five-part series, we talk with Jim Templin, CEO of ASQE.
Yes, you read that right, ASQE. As in ASQ Excellence. It’s an entirely new legal entity connected at the hip to the ASQ we all know and love. It’s a trade organization that other organizations can belong to,…