Management
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Workplace Romances Create Problems in a Company
- April 26, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
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Since we spend more than a third of our day at work, and form close relationships with our coworkers, it’s not uncommon to find occasional workplace romances blossoming. However, this is something I strongly discourage and have been very strict about in the past. There are too many potentials for problems with workplace romances. Chances
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Kitty Litter in My Parking Spot: Sometimes Leaders Have to Make Hard Choices
- April 19, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
Years ago, when we were still doing warehouse inventory counts by hand, we decided as a company that an inventory would be taken on a weekend so we wouldn’t disrupt service to our customers. This was not an unusual practice, because we were working toward taking inventory in a single day, not our previous 10
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How We Turned a 10-Day Inventory Process Into a One-Day Process
- April 12, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
It’s an inventory cage match! Justin Case versus Justin Time Can you imagine running a factory or business where it takes you 10 days just to do a basic count on your inventory? One of the problems is you might count something on Day 1 only to have to recount it because it’s been used
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How We Managed a Factory Fire in Texas While I was in Dubai
- April 5, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Safety
Always hire good people. If there’s a problem, they’ll take care of it. Several years ago, I was in Dubai on a business trip, and I had just gone to bed. It was 10:30 pm local time, an 8 hour difference between me and our factory in Texas. The phone rang and jolted me awake.
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How to Deal With a Naked Guy in Your Rafters
- March 22, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
I saw a lot of things in my days as president and COO of Robroy Industries. But never in my 21 years did I expect to see a naked man in the rafters. It seems the man, we’ll call him Randy, had been doing the same job every day for 25 years. He was an
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How I Doubled Output By Cutting Head Count by Nearly Half
- March 15, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Manufacturing, Productivity
When I first started with Robroy, we needed an awful lot of cleanup, not only because the facility was dirty, but because there was a lot of nepotism in the organization that resulted in an awful lot of unproductive people working for us. Nepotism is never a good idea in an organization, and we had
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The Time I Locked My Own Son Out of a Meeting for Being Late
- March 8, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
I’m one of those sticklers for timeliness. You know, “early is on time, on time is late.” That idea was drummed into me very early on in my career. It means if you have a meeting at 10:00 a.m., you don’t show up at 10:00. You show up at 9:55 so you’re ready to start
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Hiring Good People Sometimes Means Ignoring HR
- January 11, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
Hiring good people is becoming more and more of an issue for companies as the unemployment rate drops. And it’s becoming more difficult as recruiting services and hiring software have entered into the mix, because the résumés being submitted can be fairly unreliable. Recruiters have a tendency to coach candidates on how to puff up
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The Best Way to Set Goals and Objectives
- December 7, 2016
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
Companies that measure everything should also be measuring their corporate goals, as well as the goals of their associates. This is how you can tell whether your company and your staff are meeting projections, improving productivity, and improving their skills and abilities. To properly measure your goals, they have to be specific, quantifiable, and even
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The Perils of Matrix Management
- September 23, 2016
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
As the business atmosphere moves away from the formal, button down environments I worked in, I’m seeing more companies adopt a matrix management philosophy, which may actually be harmful to a company’s success. Matrix management is where employees report to two or three managers. The management hierarchy is not only flat, but there are fewer