All Features
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Has your team’s performance fallen off lately? Was it once exciting to be part of the team, and lately you find you’re not having fun?
Perhaps your team has succumbed to team drift. In my Harvard Business Review article, “Diagnose and Cure Team Drift,” I explain how to revitalize a formerly high-…
William A. Levinson
Masaaki Imai, author of Gemba Kaizen (McGraw-Hill Education, 1997), introduced the concept of the value-adding “bang,” the exact moment at which a process adds value for the customer. He meant the moment at which an official stamped a document, but the same concept applies when a stamping or…
Adam Day
There was a time, not long ago, when employers could rely on new hires to possess rudimentary knowledge of basic assembly methods, schematic diagrams, and the proper use of hand tools. These skills were the result of individuals who grew up maintaining their cars. Yet that way of life is largely a…
Mark Graban
Given all of the problems that exist in our American healthcare system, it’s encouraging that most healthcare organizations are endorsing or practicing some form of process improvement or operational excellence strategy. Under the banner of different labels and using different combinations of…
Michelle LaBrosse
Having more independence requires taking on more responsibility: It’s a lesson teenagers hear again and again from their parents, and yet it rarely seems to result in teenagers actually bearing the burden of more responsibility. Fast forward to these imagined teenagers’ adult lives. As their…
Tim Lozier
Recently, there has been a shift in the way quality is led and implemented in organizations. The updated ISO 9001 standard urges leaders to incorporate quality in all levels of business, from stakeholders to upper management and throughout the entire organization. The new view is this: Quality is…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
I carefully filled the cake cone from the frozen custard machine, pushing it up at just the right moment to create a perfect ball. Then as I shut off the machine, I pulled the cone away with a circular motion to give it the company’s signature curl on top. It was beautiful, and I was proud of the…
Harish Jose
There is a concept in lean known as a “monument.” It refers to a large machine, piece of equipment, or something similar that can’t be changed right away, and so you have to plan your processes around it. This generally impedes the flow and frequently becomes a hindrance to lean initiatives. A…
Davis Balestracci
Today I want to concentrate on the foundation of what is most commonly taught as design of experiments (DOE)—factorial designs.
Elsewhere I’ve mentioned three of C.M. Hendrix’s “ways to mess up an experiment.” After 35 years of teaching DOE, I’ve concluded that he pretty much captures the…
Jonathan Jacobi
When I first entered the safety profession, older, more experienced professionals recommended that I consider OSHA as a potential employer. The innuendo I sensed in this advice was that if I worked for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), got to know influential people, and…
Erika Darics
Poking fun at corporate jargon is a current trend. Newspapers and online publications get a kick out of compiling extensive lists of the most egregious examples, and the overarching narrative is that we should puncture the pomposity that this “management speak” is deemed to represent.
To its…
Day in, day out, business leaders are reminded that digital disruption is coming for their customers, for their talent, and for their bottom lines. CEOs of traditional companies consistently rate digital upstarts disrupting their business models as their No. 1 concern.
And it’s no wonder. We’re…
Loic Sadoulet, Thomas Hinterseer
It’s a tragic irony that the day before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster, executives from BP and the rig’s operators, Transocean, visited the platform on a “management tour” that included a number of specific safety-related purposes.
During the tour, there were already signs that all…
Dan Jacob
A few years ago, I was working with a high-tech company that had built market leadership around world-class product quality, then lost it. Several years prior, the company had gone through a cost-cutting exercise. One outcome of the exercise was a decision to outsource engineering on core products…
Bruce Hamilton
I wrote a piece a little more than five years ago about a variety reduction program (VRP), an amazing but little-known product-design optimization tool. At the time I referred to VRP as an idea whose “time had not yet come.” Last week, as I gave a short presentation on VRP, I realized that five…
Knowledge at Wharton
I t wasn’t that long ago that GM ran commercials advertising that its Oldsmobile division didn’t just produce cars for your grandfather, but also for everyone else. It was an attempt to reinvent the brand’s staid image—and it didn’t work.
Now, the Oldsmobile division and its iconic vehicles are…
“Honest feedback is hard to take, especially from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.”
—Franklin P. Jones
I once found myself needing to find new employment. The situation that I was leaving had been complex, to say the least, and I worried that perceptions of failure would dog…
Ken Voytek
In a recent post, I examined the differences in productivity across small and large manufacturing firms, and noted that there were differences across manufacturers in terms of size. But it’s also clear from the literature that productivity differs across companies even in the same industry.
Why…
Annette Franz
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about emotionally unavailable customers. Hat tip to James Lawther for inspiring me to actually flip the tables here and think about emotionally challenged employees, instead.
The question I posed in response to his comment on that post was: Why do we transform…
Steve Melito
How competitive is American manufacturing? By the year 2020, the United States is projected to take the top spot in the Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index (GMCI), a multiyear research platform from Deloitte and the Council on Competitiveness.
The 2016 GMCI surveyed more than 500 of the…
Michelle LaBrosse
Ihave studied systems dynamics modeling for three decades. What I’ve experienced first-hand is that when you establish several key core values, you can create an entire self-replicating system for your organization.
I experimented with this idea first with Cheetah Learning, where our three core…
William A. Levinson
ISO 9001:2015, Clause 4.2—“Understanding the needs and expectations of interested parties” requires the organization to determine the “requirements of these interested parties that are relevant to the quality management system.” When customers block an organization’s content, it is a sure sign…
More than 313 million global work-related accidents occur each year, according to the International Labour Organization, with a high percentage of those accidents resulting in significant time away from work. Each accident bears a personal and financial cost for the worker and the employer. Yet,…
Debby Newslow
Standard operating procedures, or SOPs, are critical to quality assurance. Frequently, in an operation with many associates, each one does his or her job as well as possible (because no one wants to do a bad job). Some people, however, will do tasks differently than others—and usually they think…
Johns Hopkins University
More than one-third of Americans say they don’t have enough time in their day to get things done, and the majority of Americans who report not having enough spare time also say they battle stress, reports the Johns Hopkins Health Review.
Busyness is a badge of honor for those who equate a packed…
