economics

  • What are the Economics of Sustainability vs. Remediation?

    • November 27, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Leadership, Safety
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    The question of sustainability versus remediation is an economic one as much as a humanitarian one. This is a photo of a toxic looking barrel laying on its side.

    Companies that spend a lot of money on remediation, and are doing it only to avoid penalties and fines, are going to end up having bigger and more expensive problems than they were hoping for. When I was at Robroy, we had an old Duoline factory that was costing us $2.5 million every year in

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  • Why Not Just Cut Everyone’s Hours During a Downturn?

    • October 30, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Management
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    A tube bender. Preparing for a recession doesn't just mean cutting people's hours.

    When you see that an economic downturn is on the horizon, just like the one we’re seeing now, the knee-jerk temptation for many managers is to start making layoffs and staffing cutbacks. “We need to reduce expenses by 10 percent, so let’s just cut 10 percent of the workforce.” That works in the short run,

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  • How Do You Recession-Proof Your Business?

    • October 23, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Innovation, Productivity
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    Empty shelves at a grocery store in Florida. Preparing for a recession is like hurricane preparedness.

    Trying to recession-proof your business is like hurricane-proofing your house. Now, we don’t get many (actually, any) hurricanes in Central Texas, but I’ve got friends in Florida who tell me all about it. They tell me the hurricane-prep is almost comical to watch: Five days before a major hurricane will make landfall, all the people

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  • What Signals a Recession?

    • October 16, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Measurement
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    3D graphic representing a recession bar graph and line graph.

    I believe we’re in a global manufacturing recession, it just hasn’t been fully reported yet. If you look at the quarterly earnings reports of the U.S. stock exchange, we don’t see that many companies that are showing top-line revenue growth, or they’re only showing very minimal revenue growth, which could be part of a price

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  • Is Manufacturing Output Really Going Up?

    • October 9, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
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    A factory warehouse filled with inventory. A prime example of ??

    There’s all kinds of talk that the manufacturing economy is heading for a recession, even as manufacturing output is on the rise. But you may be wondering how we even know this, especially as the rest of the economy seems to be doing so well, including having low unemployment in the U.S. When it comes

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