David Marshall
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Headquarters and Second Offices Don’t Have to be in Expensive Cities
- November 29, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
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The big expansion news over the last few weeks has been Amazon search for a second North American headquarters and the speculations about where they’ll actually place it. Dozens of cities are all clamoring for Amazon’s $5 billion investment and hoping to be the city to employ 50,000 employees, many with six-figure salaries. Many cities
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Industrial Engineering is a Lost Art
- November 22, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Manufacturing
This month’s blog posts seem to be all about remote work. And this week isn’t any different because I was thinking about my friend, Bob Blair. Bob is a retired industrial engineer, who only ever came out of retirement to do some work for me and Robroy. Otherwise, he spends half the year in Canada
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I Don’t Believe in Remote Work for Employees
- November 15, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Productivity
This one is going to make me unpopular, especially with today’s modern marvels of broadband technology, video conferencing, and our ability to multi-task and work anywhere in the world. I don’t believe in remote work for employees. (Not a big shocker, I’m sure, since you already read the headline.) But I believe that if you’re
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Having a Successful Business Means Having Successful Long Term Relationships
- November 8, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
When your business is in a small rural area, like Gilmer, Texas (where Robroy Industries is located, nearer to Shreveport, Louisiana than Dallas), it can be pretty difficult to attract high-powered help, because they would have to relocate. It’s hard to get big city people to move to a small town. Then again, if you’re
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How Do You Recover From a Devastating Incident?
- October 25, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership
Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve had to fire a lot of people over the years, usually related to performance issues. But in the 21 years I was president of the company, I never had a layoff. That was one of my precepts of managing a business: I believed layoffs were really a
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How Do You Keep Up Company Morale?
- October 18, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management, Measurement
Company morale can have more dramatic rises and falls than a roller coaster. You’ll have your seasonal ebbs and flows, highs before a big product launch, lows after a major crisis or periods of poor performance, as well as the occasional holiday-related highs. But you can also have pockets of high and low morale throughout
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Performance Evaluations Waste Time and Money
- October 11, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
Annual performance evaluations are generally useless. I actually did away with them because I found people would generally work extra hard two weeks before the evaluation, and counted on management not to remember all the things they screwed up along the way. But if you have an effective daily, weekly, and monthly measurement system, you
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How Do You Determine the Value of an Employee?
- October 4, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
Many people don’t realize, but the left guard on an NFL team is often the second-highest paid player on the team, right after the quarterback. That’s because that player guards the back of a right-handed quarterback, his “blind” side. After Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann had his femur snapped by Lawrence Taylor during a 1985
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How the Right Materials Management Person Saved Us Millions of Dollars
- September 27, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing
When you say materials management to a non-manufacturing person, they often have visions of moving boxes around or driving raw materials around the factory on a forklift. When you say materials management to a manufacturer, they often think of the most important person in the building. The Materials Manager is quite literally responsible for the
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Four Steps I Took to Lower Our Workers Comp Costs
- September 20, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Safety
Workers Compensation is the bane of most employers, a much-hated tax they have to pay in order to support workers who get injured on the job. And the opportunities for fraud are so prevalent that just mentioning the phrase “Workers Comp” is enough to make any executive see red. But I managed to reduce our