Home / Archive by category "Leadership"

Leadership

3 New industry agenda items for progressive metalworkers

Here’s the on-ramp for 2015. There are 3 lanes, choose yours carefully. The HIT boys voted to bring back six of the Bastard’s more critical stories of the few past months. I’ve organized them into the 3 topics most likely to make your next general operations agenda. Six beefy short summaries follow; which themselves offer conversational takeaways. Click the link to the published story and hit th...
Read More

2 Advances in manufacturing challenge your control in 2015

Survivors are no longer the largest, strongest or even the most intelligent—they just know when to adapt. In light of the challenges, they also know that growth begins with control, not revenue. You wonder where they get such insight. Each year around this time, scads of articles appear with predictions about the future and, more importantly, what’s next for manufacturing. This year, two topics s...
Read More

Industrial specialty products are customer focused

A great distributor knows; customers define the specialty products he will purvey. It’s what makes an industrial product a “specialty” in the first place. He knows an anti-flutter could be an unusual specialty to one customer yet an essential stock to another. What’s important, it’s your business—you define the specialties. A great distributor understands that your needs are unique—it’s a customer...
Read More

Collaboration—critical, but attractive choices

Call it what you like but relationships where collaboration thrive is a one-plus-one equals-three proposition. Task by task, you can achieve shared goals that are more meaningful within your company, more valuable to your customers and more strategic within the supply chain. Companies that want to grow seek the competitive advantage gained from collaborative efforts. They see the disruptive comple...
Read More

Few problems are bigger than Cancer

When it comes to solving problems, few are bigger than Cancer. It not only weakens the patient, but it can throw entire families into a life and death struggle. The business? Who cares at that point? Conversely, there are few things more rewarding than helping these families find SOLUTIONS to life’s biggest problems. Solutions are special There’s something special about a solution. You puzzle. Yo...
Read More

From data to wisdom: charting your shop’s new path

Before metalworking coolants are drawn, lubricants changed, adhesives applied or before any conversion coating solution is even dreamt about, data are being collected and managed somewhere along the food chain. I am no expert in data science but I do appreciate how much (and how fast) industry is being tantalized with the power of data. What’s relevant for any shop is that meaningful data manageme...
Read More

25 Industrious news bits challenge YOU to connect the dots

It’s not so much in the collecting of the dots as it is in the connecting a link to your business that matters. Just last week one of my favorites, the best selling business author, Seth Godin wrote “Connecting dots, solving the problem that hasn't been solved before, seeing the pattern before it is made obvious, is more essential than ever before. Why then, do we spend so much time collecting dot...
Read More

Lip service, nosebleeds and value propositions

Why do we find it so hard to walk the talk when it comes to the importance of human capital? No one argues the importance of people to our businesses. CEOs famously assert in their public relations efforts “people are our most important asset.” And in survey after survey we hear various leaders, for small and larger operations alike, recount the importance of good people and the relationship of hu...
Read More

Quality Assurance? Call me crazy

With some companies, recording customer phone calls is common practice. Under the guise of “quality improvement,” or Quality Assurance, you can expect a utility or an insurance company to offer you the fair and familiar warning. “This call might be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes ….” Something like that. I’m never really sure. All they said was it “might” be recorded. I must s...
Read More

“Manufacturing punches above its weight”

Supply chains, out for the count. If you survived the last five years you have to be doing something right. Think back to 2008 and remember the world’s largest economy contracting like a blown front tire by 3.9 percent (fourth quarter 2007 to third quarter 2009) marking the worst economic slump since the Great Depression and the first decrease(s) in the GDP in 17 years. In spite of all that, the m...
Read More
Previous
Top