David Marshall
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Are You Serving on a Good or Bad Board of Directors?
- August 28, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management
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As someone who has served on a board of directors at different times, I pay attention to corporate and nonprofit boards. A few weeks ago, I received an email newsletter from a fellow named Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures about his experience with boards of directors and the two types of problematic boards. He
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Is There Ever a Time ROI Shouldn’t be the Driving Force Behind Decisions?
- August 21, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
The return on investment (ROI) is a good benchmark for business decision making. Will your new piece of equipment achieve a positive ROI? Will expanding your sales territory? Will hiring a new employee? The problem is, ROI shouldn’t be the only deciding factor in making business decisions. In some cases, it shouldn’t even be the
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Improving Productivity Reduces a Factory’s HR, Onboarding Costs
- August 14, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
Improving productivity throughout your operation, especially on the manufacturing floor, can have an amazing ripple effect throughout your entire organization. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how we were able to improve productivity by measuring our results on the floor and in our accounts receivable department. We were able to save a lot of
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Improve Productivity in the Back Office
- August 7, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Measurement
When you embrace measurement as a way to improve productivity of your manufacturing processes, you’ll find all sorts of problems you never knew existed. When we started measuring everything at Robroy, we not only found different problems and issues in different facets of our manufacturing facilities, we discovered that there was a 16 percent rejection
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Improving Productivity Ripples Throughout the Organization
- July 31, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Measurement, Productivity
Last week, I wrote about how improving productivity can reduce the need for hiring new people (Increase Productivity to Reduce the Need for Hiring). So we devised a new way of strapping and stacking the conduit to avoid the problem, and that eliminated the recovery process because we had almost no imperfect pieces. By reducing
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Increase Productivity to Reduce the Need for Hiring
- July 24, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Measurement, Productivity
Unemployment is low enough in this country right now that businesses (especially manufacturers) can’t find enough people to fill open slots. While you can always train your existing people to fill the new slots, you can come at the problem from another direction to increase productivity. This means you can produce more with fewer people
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Another Important Lesson in Self-Awareness from the Center For Creative Leadership
- July 17, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
Last week, I talked about my time at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina. I attended with many military and government leaders who wanted to improve their own leadership skills. I learned a lot of valuable lessons there, including how to communicate, how to manage, and how to lead. One important lesson I
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An Important Lesson in Intelligent Listening Learned from the Center For Creative Leadership
- July 10, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
Several (okay, many) years ago, I had a chance to attend the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. I attended with many military and government leaders who were looking to improve their own leadership skills and better manage their staffs. While I was there, I learned a lot of valuable lessons about how
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What a Tail-less Cheetah Can Teach Us About Partnerships
- June 26, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Management
Take a look at this video. It’s of a mother cheetah and her cub that I took while I was on a safari in Natal, South Africa. I used to own a company in South Africa in the 70s, and I like to return to South Africa from time to time to visit old friends.
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The Benefit of Executive Mastermind Groups
- June 19, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
As an executive, it’s often hard to find someone you can share your experiences and your fears with. The only people who truly understand what you’re going through are your fellow executives, usually at other companies and even in other cities and states. Discussing these kinds of thoughts, fears, and ideas are where executive mastermind