All Features
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
In today’s highly competitive business climate, creativity can no longer be limited to artists and inventors. The marketplace is changing rapidly, and in the words of Intel Chairman, Andrew Grove, companies must “adapt or die!” Every organization needs people—at every level—who can bring new…
Sandia National Laboratories
As hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles roll out in increasing numbers, so must the infrastructure that fuels them. To this end, a new project launched by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and led by Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will work in support of…
MIT Management Executive Education
The art of the business-plan pitch could fill volumes of business-school literature. But what if the real secret sauce had less to do with content and everything to do with delivery?
Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program…
Dawn Bailey
What does snoring have to do with the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence?
The connection has to do with the popular graphic in the Baldrige Criteria (shown in figure 1) depicting steps toward mature processes. The first step is simply reacting to problems. Operations are characterized…
Jim Benson
What happens when we start a project and it is honestly overtaken by events?
We start a project in good faith, and then, because context changes, we have to set it aside. It’s work-in-progress, so what do we do? The project isn’t done; we will likely come back to it, but it could be weeks or even…
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Think working in an environmentally green building leads to greater satisfaction in the workplace? Think again.
People working in buildings certified under LEED’s green building standard appear no more satisfied with the quality of their indoor workplace environments than those toiling in…
Jack Dunigan
The biography Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (Simon & Schuster, 1997) is one of the great stories in American history. When Merriwether Lewis and William Clark departed St. Louis in May 1804, on what was called the Corps of Discovery…
Paula Oddy
The 2015 version of ISO 9001 is still more than a year away from publication, but ISO/TC 176, the technical committee responsible for the standard, has been hard at work on the revision since 2012. Registrants to the current version, ISO 9001:2008, are wondering about changes to the language and…
Alan Nicol
Last week a friend shared with me a snippet from an employee meeting. All “lean transformation” activities were to stop in order to put every effort into catching up on late shipments.
My friend’s comment, between many expressions of frustration and disappointment, was that the company’s…
Mark Murphy
Have you ever had people completely misinterpret your company’s growth strategy or vision statement? They start negative rumors about your plans, and then you struggle to correct their misinformation.
For example, say you’re launching some new technology strategy and word gets around that this…
Mike Roberts
We’ve got a real problem on our hands in America. A gap is growing between manufacturing workers set to retire in the next 10 to 15 years and the workers needed to fill their vacancies. Despite the exciting and innovative things happening in the manufacturing industry, Millennials’ outdated…
Davis Balestracci
In my last column, I considered two of the most common questions faced by a statistical educator and the deeper questions that need to be addressed. I encouraged people to consider their everyday reality for the necessary context. Predictably, some become frustrated by my lack of concise answers…
Guido Radig
The magic word in industrial manufacturing these days is 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing. But the shift from mold-based component concepts to additive geometric freedom is not just a fad; it’s a major trend. The advantages are striking: faster processing times, lower-cost…
David Wimer
Crises are hard enough in any business. In my business, a crisis advisory practice, I see a number of ways a crisis can become a catastrophe with little effort. Unfortunately, some of the behaviors that increase the odds for failure are considered by many to be “leadership.”
1. Be overly…
Siemens PLM Software
Scheduled for launch in 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope Observatory (JWST) will operate 1.5 million kms above the Earth. Its mission is ambitious: examining every phase of cosmic history “from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang to the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets to the…
Bruce Hamilton
A couple of recent events have given me an opportunity to showcase a great American manufacturer.
First, the events:
1. The 2014 Massachusetts Advance Manufacturing Summit, held April 29, 2014, at the DCU Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, featured keynote speaker Harry Moser, a national…
Tim Lozier
This is the third installment of a six-part series on common business challenges and the quality management system (QMS) tools that can help alleviate those challenges. We’ve discussed corrective action in Part 1 and document control in Part 2, and the ways in which organizations are finding value…
Jack Dunigan
It’s time to become small minded. Visionaries are big thinkers. Planners may make big plans but they think small. They take the grand scheme and turn it into smaller steps.
Planners are comprehensive thinkers whose skill sets include the ability to break schemes and visions into increments, and…
Akhilesh Gulati
In late 2010 an R&D lab at one of the world’s largest microprocessor manufacturers was tasked with identifying solutions to improve the effectiveness of a wireless power transfer system. This article summarizes the thought process and methods used in generating the associated problem model and…
Joel Smith
If betting wasn’t allowed on horse racing, the Kentucky Derby, which this year saw California Chrome gallop to the finish line, would likely be a little-known event of interest just to a small group of horse racing enthusiasts. But like the Tour de France, the World Cup, and the Masters Tournament…
University of Arizona
To keep hospitalized patients safer, University of Arizona (UA) researchers are working on new technology that involves a small, wearable sensor that measures a patient’s activity, heart rate, wakefulness, and other biometrics—data that can predict a fall before it happens.
More than 500,000…
Annette Franz
Ihave been traveling a bit lately and, as a result, have had the chance to catch up on some long-overdue reading. The book I just finished is The Four Agreements (Amber-Allen Publishing, 2011 reprint) by Don Miguel Ruiz, a shaman who writes about how those agreements can help you achieve personal…
Tripp Babbitt
Do you find yourself trying to solve the same problems over and over again? Do you treat the symptom but not the source of problems? Do you get unintended consequences from “solutions” in your organization?
In the book, Idealized Design (FT Press, 2006), author Russell Ackoff discusses four ways…
Editor’s note: Read part one of this series here.
The Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSDGC) serves 800,000 customers and has approximately 600 employees who work at facilities located throughout Ohio’s Hamilton County. When the MSD Wastewater Treatment Division decided to…
While many companies are perfectly satisfied with the performance of their outsourced predictive maintenance (PdM) programs, some don’t get the desired results for the time and money spent. Others recognize that they have a pool of in-house talent that could do the job given enough time and…
