Management
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Hire Slow and Fire Fast to Avoid Workplace Toxicity
- July 19, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
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Toxic employees can have a negative effect on company morale and production. Their bad behavior doesn’t just limit them and their accomplishments. It spreads like a sickness to the people who work around them, causing all kinds of internal strife and dissatisfaction. Even your star employees, who are probably pulling the weight of the toxic
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The Importance of Direct Communication Between Management and Labor
- July 12, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
A few weeks ago, I talked about how I was never afraid of unions when I was the president of Robroy Industries. That’s because as the person whose name appeared on everyone’s checks, I always reserved the right to direct communication with anyone, one-on-one, about any issue, whether it was a shared interest or something
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Does the Office Make the Person, or Does the Person Make the Office?
- June 1, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing
There’s a leadership problem in this country that often has to do with people being promoted because of their technical expertise and not their leadership qualities or people skills. They assume they’re a leader simply because their job title says Manager or Director, only to find that no one respects them. I think of this
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Forever to Build, Lost in a Moment
- May 3, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
“To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.” I’ve always been a big fan of Winston Churchill, and as I was growing up, I adopted several of his quotes as philosophies to live by. This month, I’ll discuss four
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Workplace Romances Create Problems in a Company
- April 26, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
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