management
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What Will the New Normal Look Like? Can We Return to What Was?
- May 27, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Safety
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People are talking about reopening the country and returning to work as if we can “return to normal.” Except we cannot return to what was. There’s a total shift in our country’s paradigm in working, playing, and socializing, especially because the coronavirus is still contagious and spreading. And unless and until there’s a miraculous discovery
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Your Return to Normalcy May Depend on How You Treated Your Associates
- May 20, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
The last few months have been pretty rough, and many companies had to lay off associates or at least furlough them, just so they could collect unemployment for the 2+ months no one was working. But now that we’re reopening the country, the return to normalcy may be a little harder for some companies than
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Donna Waterstraat: The Increase of Women in Management Over the Years
- May 6, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
When I started working at Robroy, I stepped into a culture that was rooted firmly in the 1950s: predominantly white, predominantly male. It was people like Donna Waterstraat who were instrumental in not only changing the culture, she helped improve our productivity, pushed for more women in management, and make the organization very profitable. Here’s
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What Goes Into a Disaster Recovery Plan?
- February 26, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Safety
We’ve had enough natural disasters over the last several years, that any company that doesn’t have a disaster recovery plan is just begging for a company-ending problem to hit them. A disaster recovery plan is the way your company can survive terrible tragedies, like a fire that sweeps through your building, a tornado or hurricane
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How Do You Decide to Allocate Resources and Staffing? (Hint: Measurement)
- February 12, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
There are times where you have to allocate — or reallocate, as the case may be — your money, staff, and resources to solve a particular problem. Maybe you have to do a crash inventory where everyone has to stop what they’re doing and everyone has to focus on counting everything in the warehouse. Or
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Don’t Fall In Love With Your Deals
- December 24, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
As a manager or a salesperson, you’re going to have plenty of opportunities to make all kinds of deals, partnerships, and financially-beneficial arrangements with other parties. Whether it’s a project you’re going to sell, services you’re going to buy, or even the purchase of, or merger with, another company. The problem is that many of
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Who Should Lead and Fund Retraining, Government or Business?
- November 13, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
During the Obama administration, the federal government put a lot of money into retraining and education for workers who had lost their jobs due to the 2008 recession. And while I think it was a good idea for the government to help fix the economy in this way, I wondered if government was really the
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Why Not Just Cut Everyone’s Hours During a Downturn?
- October 30, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
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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Are You Serving on a Good or Bad Board of Directors?
- August 28, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management
As someone who has served on a board of directors at different times, I pay attention to corporate and nonprofit boards. A few weeks ago, I received an email newsletter from a fellow named Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures about his experience with boards of directors and the two types of problematic boards. He
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Improve Productivity in the Back Office
- August 7, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Measurement
When you embrace measurement as a way to improve productivity of your manufacturing processes, you’ll find all sorts of problems you never knew existed. When we started measuring everything at Robroy, we not only found different problems and issues in different facets of our manufacturing facilities, we discovered that there was a 16 percent rejection