All Features
Gleb Tsipursky
Due to strong employee resistance and turnover, Google recently backtracked from its plan to force all employees to return to the office and allowed many to work remotely. Amazon also backtracked on its plans to have a fully office-centric culture and allowed employees to have a hybrid schedule.…
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
If the cascading upheavals of the past year have done nothing else, they’ve spurred widespread calls for reform and renewal in just about every institution we have.
A mishandled public-health response to the Covid-19 pandemic, an economic…
James daSilva
There was a Twitter thread recently from an early, longtime Facebook executive, Dan Rose. You might have missed it. That’s OK—scrolling Twitter is rarely the best use of our time.
In these tweets, Rose argued for the greatness of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership, especially…
Emily Newton
Nitrogen oxides (NOx) are harmful chemical compounds produced as a byproduct of normal boiler function. The EPA regulates them due to the damage they can cause to humans and the environment.
Low-NOx boilers, outfitted with special components that reduce nitrogen oxides, are essential for…
Dawn Bailey
The spirit of service—for a small clinic started in 1913 to provide free care to Los Angeles (LA)—lives today in the servant-leader aspirations of 2019 Baldrige Award recipient Adventist Health White Memorial (AHWM), a 353-bed, safety-net hospital.
The community of two million people that AHWM…
Manfred Kets de Vries
Leonard, the chairman of a global consumer goods company, was wondering what to do with the two co-CEOs running the firm. Although it had seemed a great idea to have two individuals at the helm, this arrangement had led to conflicts, stalled initiatives, and an overall lack of direction. Some of…
Ryan E. Day
It is estimated that in 2021, the average person watches more than 100 minutes of online video every day. But is that relevant to your B2B marketing efforts?
“The vast bulk of this video consumption is marketing content,” says Maury Rogow, CEO of Rip Media Group and CMO of TheVideoBot. “Big-budget…
Eliot Dratch
If your manufacturing company develops a problem along the way with one of your processes, how do you resolve it? While the shortcut option is to simply patch up the symptoms of whatever that problem may be, the long-term solution is to perform a root cause and corrective action (RCCA) process.
By…
Clare Naden
Travel and tourism took a beating during the Covid-19 pandemic, with borders closed, airlines grounded, and many establishments shut for months. Now as the industry attempts to recover in this new context, constantly changing rules and regulations are making it a far-from-simple task. What’s more,…
John Preston
‘This government is obsessed with skilling up our population,” said Boris Johnson in his recent speech on “leveling up.” There’s still a fair amount of uncertainty about exactly what the United Kingdom prime minister’s plan to level up the regions will involve, but manufacturing and skills seem…
Dave Pierson
I’ve heard additive manufacturing is key to driving innovation in our industry, but how does it really deliver value? We’ve looked at some additive manufacturing machines, but how can we justify the expense when we’re trying to eliminate our capital expenditures? Is additive manufacturing worth the…
Sébastien Breteau
Major global events of the past five years have sparked seismic shock waves in global supply chains, relocating where businesses manufacture and source their products. Whether facing rising labor costs in China, new tariffs in the U.S.-China trade war, or cataclysmic shutdowns amid the Covid-19…
Terry Onica, Cathy Fisher
Has the automotive industry learned its lesson about supply chain disruptions? Or will delivery performance continue to suffer with every new disruption?
In addition to constant disruption, auto industry business models are rapidly transforming. Consumers are buying vehicles online. The transition…
Michael Pease
Digital transformation (DX) promises increased competitiveness, optimized processes, and profitability through big data, along with improved employee and customer relations. Gathering data is essential in the 21st century, data-oriented environment and requires flexible, interconnected components.…
ISO
There’s more than one path to service management. It refers to all the activities, policies, and processes that organizations use for deploying, managing, and improving IT service provision. In today’s technology-driven corporate landscape, the two leading methodologies come from the world of…
Renay San Miguel
Machine learning came along at just the right time. The world is now awash in more data than ever before, and computer algorithms that can learn and improve as they perform data analysis promise to help scientists handle that information overload.
Yet researchers who think that machine learning by…
Corey Brown
Amid the Silver Tsunami, human resources departments are hustling to onboard and fill personnel gaps, but they can’t predict the evolving demands of your operations.
Manufacturing companies are failing to adapt their operational training strategy to meet the needs of a workforce in transition. Put…
Jim Benson
Value stream mapping is a team exercise, it’s collaborative, enlightening, and the foundation for professionalism.
I’m pretty well-known for saying that teams are unique and that there is no one process that satisfies every team’s needs. There is, however, one activity that I’ve seen every team we…
Gleb Tsipursky
When a threat seems clear to you, it’s hard to believe others will deny it. Yet smart people deny serious risks surprisingly often.
A case-in-point example comes from my experience helping a midsize regional insurance company conduct a strategic pivot to thrive in the post-Covid world in January…
Silke von Gemmingen
Due to digitalization in Industry 4.0, internal logistics is subject to constant change. Internal traceability—i.e., tracking goods in the warehouse or production facility—increasingly plays a key role. Manufacturers and consumers are placing more emphasis on the safety and quality of products.…
Caroline Zimmerman, Theodoros Evgeniou
People often associate the term “data literacy” with mastering a litany of technical skills: SQL for data querying, Python for data analysis, and Tableau for data visualization, to name a few. However, one skill that is less discussed and has great power to scale data-guided decision making across…
David L. Chandler
This story was originally published by MIT News.
As the world continues to warm, many arid regions that already have marginal conditions for agriculture will be increasingly under stress, potentially leading to severe food shortages. Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a promising process for…
Gary Lyng
To uncover the value in data, analysts need powerful combinations of tools to locate data, wherever they are, and regardless if they are structured or unstructured. Most companies don’t realize that their current data-search approaches can’t access distributed information and can’t extract…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist and collaborators have demonstrated the first-ever “defect microscope” that can track how populations of defects deep inside macroscopic materials move collectively.
The research, which appeared last month in Science Advances, shows a…
Adrian Hernandez, C. Michael White
T
he U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regularly inspects manufacturing facilities to ensure that drugs meet rigorous quality standards. These standards are vital to protect patients from drugs that are incorrectly dosed, contaminated, or ineffective.
But over the past few years, tens of…
