Yes.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an executive at your company, if you’re a coach of a sports team or if you have an important role at your church. We are all leaders. [Read more…]
Are You a Leader?
When Metrics Drive Behavior
I’ve had a lot of responses from last week’s podcast about Fear-Based Leadership, specifically around the use of metrics. Metrics drive behavior and we, as leaders, need to be careful about what we’re measuring and how our people perceive our use of those metrics.
What do I mean? [Read more…]
Thomas Jefferson’s Role in Modern Manufacturing: Interchangeable Parts
My limited formal training about America’s Industrial Revolution came in tenth grade history class. And my few remaining recollections of my studies from that era include characters like James Watt and Alfred Nobel, and their inventions, the steam engine and dynamite. Oh, and how could I forget Eli Whitney and his cotton gin?
Now 40 years later, my interest in manufacturing has grown far beyond these elementary school lessons, and the Industrial Revolution continues to intrigue me. Yes, this era was rife with its inventors and their inventions. But the enduring gains from this era were the philosophies of manufacturing that transcended the specific inventions. [Read more…]
Are You Leading From Fear?
On last week’s webinar (released tomorrow on the Rob’s Reliability Project podcast feed), we spoke about using metrics & KPIs to understand where your company is on their maintenance & reliability journey. Metrics and KPIs are helpful but often, I see them used to discipline, to incent and, in the worst cases, to fire people. [Read more…]
Online Training
As organizations engage virtual teams, they still need interactive training on certain topics. How can this be done with multiple locations? What about colleges, high schools and elementary schools? While details can vary depending on age, the tips provided come from years of academic and industrial training situations. Contact us to learn more to help for your specific situation. [Read more…]
Measuring Relative Variation: A Review of the Coefficient of Variation
Consider the following two targets:
Shooter #1
Shooter #2
Shooter #1 and Shooter #2 both fired 15 rounds into their respective targets. Who is the better marksman? [Read more…]
Management View of Reliability During Product Development
Based on the book Reliability Engineering Insights
I found, while working at HP as a reliability engineer, that most managers of new products had little to no understanding of reliability concepts. They usually had the basic concept that reliability engineers should be brought into the project as the design was being finalized but had no clue what they would work on. [Read more…]
How Is Your Organization Leading?
Early in my career during a period of low commodity prices, a high-level executive sent an email to middle management with the following context:
We are not willing to spend money on new software, projects or ideas. If an engineer comes to you with an idea. tell them to look into how we’ve always done it and get them to do it that way. [Read more…]
Online Meetings
As working at home and virtual teams grow, so does the need for effective online meetings. Having done this in our corporate and consulting life, including with international organizations, we thought we should share some tips with you. [Read more…]
The Most Common FMEA Mistakes and How to Convert Them into Quality Objectives
“Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from poor judgment.” Will Rogers
Much is learned by observing the mistakes companies have made in doing FMEAs. Based on the experience of over 2,000 FMEAs and working with many companies in a wide variety of applications, certain common mistakes show up repeatedly. In this article, I’ll share ten common FMEA mistakes and how to convert them into quality objectives.
How Types of Project Risks Affect Your Project
Guest Post by John Ayers (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
There are basically two types of risks on a project. They are programmatic risks and technical risks. A project cannot meet schedule (hence cost) without resolution of issues that affect the schedule. Events that impact the schedule are programmatic risks. These types of risks determine the risk level of the project. The assumption in making this statement is if the schedule cannot be made, then the project will be over budget. [Read more…]
Myth Busting 9: Planners do all the planning
This myth, is about who should plan your work and there is plenty of confusion around this one. For the most part, I’d agree that planners should do this, but not all – see below.
First understand that all jobs should be planned and those plans should be saved as “standard jobs” (or whatever you want to call them) in a job plan library. Plans should be written once and then used many times. Each use, subjects the plan to what is happening in the field and therefore each plan is subject to upgrading with each use. Feedback from the trades in the field triggers that continuous improvement loop that keeps plans current and ready for next use. [Read more…]
What Are You Experiencing?
A lot of us are heading back to the office, back to the plant or back to the facility and the game has changed. Lock-down has changed our companies and our jobs in different ways. Are you seeing more tracking, more monitoring, more metrics, less trust? Are you seeing more love, more compassion, more human-centered leadership? How has your job changed? Are you excited or anxious about going back to work? [Read more…]
Work from Home
People like the idea of working from home but how can we be most effective? This video provides tips from over 14 years of experience working from home full time. [Read more…]
How is it even possible after 41 years?
The clock in my ’79 Porsche 911 works perfectly. I don’t remember the last time I set it. Maybe I made a small adjustment six months ago, a year ago, don’t know? A modern day quartz clock does this no problem, a mechanical spring clock might struggle in such a rough environment. So was it quartz or mechanical? the ’70s was when quartz came on the scene, so either was a possibility. First I wanted to find out if it was ever replaced or serviced. So what did I do? I contacted the previous two owners. One purchased it new in ’79 and the other owned it for a five year period before I bought it. Neither recalls it ever being serviced or having a problem.
