All Features
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…
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…
Jennifer Rosa
It takes more than a flashy website and clever promotional emails to compete in the manufacturing marketing arena. Chances are, your larger competitors are pitching similar products and services to the same client base. Your company’s industrial solution may be to offer state-of-the-art features at…
Susan Fowler
Are you lazy? Do you think most people are basically lazy? Do you enjoy being disengaged at work? Do you think millions of people worldwide enjoy being disengaged? Is that why we need to be prodded, bribed, praised, and pushed into doing what we’re tasked to do? If managers did not hold us…
Chad Kymal, Gregory F. Gruska
During the early 1980s, GM, Ford, and Chrysler established the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), a not-for-profit organization with the mission “To improve its members’ competitiveness through a cooperative effort of North American vehicle manufacturers and their suppliers.” In the late…
Isaac Maw
How often do you check your phone at work? Maybe you’re reading this article on it right now (Don’t worry; we won’t tell.). Smartphones were a revolution for workplace distractions, but they can also be tools for productivity.
I recently attended the IBM Watson IoT Exchange event in Orlando,…
Shobhendu Prabhakar
In India, Mahatma Gandhi is one of the most revered leaders of our time. He was a man who devoted his life to truth and nonviolence. You may be wondering why I’m talking about him here. Well, we all enter our place of work with a set of values that influence how we see and approach our work. So it’…
Ryan E. Day
Midwest Metrology Solutions (MMS) is a company in Indiana that provides onsite precision measurement services using state-of-the-art metrology equipment and software. With an extensive knowledge of geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), a primary focus on quality, and a proven track…
Christine Alemany
No matter how siloed roles or departments are, no one works in a bubble. What happens in marketing affects finance. And finance’s forecasts have ramifications for customer service. In such an interdependent world, managers must learn to open up with all stakeholders or risk losing others’ faith—and…
Mike Figliuolo
Creating a business plan is the most fundamental step in building a business, and the importance of it cannot be underscored enough. You may ask, “Why do I need a business plan? Why can’t I just launch my business and get to market?”
First, you must define your business and how you’re going to…
Harish Jose
I must confess up front that the title of this column is misleading. Similar to the Spoon Boy in the movie, The Matrix, I will say, “There is no lean problem or a Six Sigma problem. All these problems are our mental constructs of a perceived phenomenon.”
A problem statement is a model of the…
Davis Balestracci
Recently, I’ve had a sad, increasing sense of déjà vu. Twitter has become even more vacuous, and LinkedIn has quickly devolved into a business version of Facebook. Literally right after I finished this draft, I read a newspaper headline: “Twitter Use Eroding Intelligence. Now there’s data to prove…
Boris Liedtke
‘Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants,” said Henry Ford in 1909, “so long as it’s black.” Ford’s strategy of standardization and efficiency made a runaway success of the Model T car and built Ford Motor Co. into one of the world’s biggest automakers. But 110 years on,…
Jon Speer
This notion of risk-based processes within quality systems is something that has become part of our formal lexicon following the release of ISO 13485:2016, the globally harmonized standard for medical device quality management systems (QMS).
Well before these risk-based processes became a quality…
Annet Aris
Even tedious jobs like cleaning out archives can sometimes lead to great insights. Sifting through my old files recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find a treasure trove of old memories and forgotten facts. Among these papers were notebooks from my engineering studies; I realized that I no…
James daSilva
When you think about Domino’s, you think about getting pizza quickly—30 minutes or less. Domino’s has also become known for technology, including flashy and fun concepts such as the Associated Talent Development (ATD) conference in Washington, D.C. There, attendees heard from Domino’s training and…
Jody Muelaner
Whether we like it or not, manufacturing is becoming digitized and connected. Industry increasingly connects production machinery with internet of things (IoT) devices, gathers multiple real-time sensor information into large datasets, and harnesses machine learning to make data-driven decisions.…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
As some of you already know, I was in Ford Motor Co.’s corporate quality office during the early 1980s when, just after “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We” aired on NBC, we pleaded with W. Edwards Deming to help us out of a very bad place. One of the things I most remember about those times was that he…
David Dubois
Faced with a growing range of tech solutions in marketing, from AI to big data to blockchain, business-to-business (B2B) companies too often choose the status quo. Recent evidence suggests the divide between success and failure is not about how much companies spend, but how well they integrate…
Kevin Meyer
My favorite part of a recent podcast with James Clear, author of Atomic Habits (Avery, 2018), was the last five minutes, when he talked about a potential downside of good habits. When we decide to improve and create a new practice with the right cues and rewards, we form a new habit. But habits can…
Jessica Thiefels
A leader’s job is to keep the team on track. You focus on hitting deadlines and executing projects without losing focus or getting lost in the weeds of decisions, communications, and logistics. The ability to execute in this way is critical for every leader.
In fact, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman…
Nicole Radziwill
As early as 2015, McKinsey’s “Digital America” report projected that adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing alone was expected to increase domestic GDP by more than $2 trillion by 2025. This estimate, developed from expectations surrounding productivity enhancements, waste reduction…
Vip Vyas, Diego Nannicini
Is your enterprise dominated by passive thinking and prescribed routines? Or is it one that generates fresh thinking and unlocks insights into the future?
The viral popularity of TED Talks—with more than a billion views to date—highlights the innate hunger we have for discovering breakthrough…
Ryan E. Day
Current business conversation often focuses on data and big data. Data are the raw information from which statistics are created and provide an interpretation and summary of data. Statistics make it possible to analyze real-world business problems and measure key performance indicators that enable…
