Leadership
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The World Shouldn’t Change for Millennials, They’re Going to Have to Change for It
- January 24, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
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Okay, I’m going to say something that’s going to upset 75.4 million people in this country: I don’t think the work world should change for Millennials, I think they’re going to have to change for it. Maybe I’m being a curmudgeon, and I’m sure there are many people who will tell me that the world
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Make Smart Layoffs With Objective Measurement
- December 27, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Measurement
While I never had to make any layoffs in my career, I’ve seen them happen, and often without any real plan to help the company further. I can say that while I’ve never done a layoff in my own career, I have reduced the workforce to help it run at peak efficiency, like firing third
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Leaders Can Lead More People Through Measurement
- December 20, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Measurement
I sometimes think we have too many middle managers clogging up the business world. I look at companies that do big layoffs of their middle managers and wonder if they were actually that effective to begin with. If a company decides they can do away with 20 percent of their workforce, and the managers are
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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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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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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
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Workers Affected By Safety Rules Should be the Ones Creating Safety Rules
- September 13, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Safety
Last week, I talked about the importance of having a disaster recovery plan, including offsite data backup storage, while I was at Robroy. We updated our plan every year, exercised our tornado and fire drills at least twice a year (so the emergency lighting could be double-checked and replaced). We even had people certified in
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What a Collapsing Bridge Taught Us About Continuing Education
- August 30, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Manufacturing
Robroy specializes in anti-corrosion products, which generally are installed in applications that “have imperative.” Whether it’s corrosion resistant non-electrified electric systems, fiberglass liners that go inside oil field tubulars, or fiberglass enclosures that house electronic and electrical and data equipment, Robroy made it. When I say the products “have imperative,” it means that failure is
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Surround Yourself With People Smarter Than You, and Listen to Them
- August 23, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
In talking with other C-level executives, I’ve learned I was rather unusual in the manufacturing world, especially in the great state of Texas. When it came to our management structure, 60 percent of our managers were women. I always appreciated that, not only because the women I hired were amazingly competent, but they didn’t have