In this issue's column, Joe lays out the basic truth for most manufacturing companies: If you're not moving forward, you're falling behind.

Robots, self driving cars, and artificial intelligence are popular topics in business publications. Depending upon the writer’s perspective, they a...

My last posting may have left you thinking I was anti-intellectual. Far from it; my point is that education is fundamentally different than trainin...

Buried deep within the never ending debate on job growth is a fundamental misunderstanding on the difference between education and training. I am a...

I have several vivid memories of my first week as an apprentice back in 1971. One was the shock of getting a printout from Human Resources in my fi...

I'm sure it comes as no surprise that finding skilled people to work in your manufacturing facility is no simple task. But after finding them, and investing in the development of their abilities, what happens when one of them - an employee your company really needs - becomes a troublesome employee? This is among the trickiest situations a manager can face.

At first, monitoring the energy I use at my plant or the energy for each individual machine seemed trivial. Isn't this just an overhead cost I have to pay? I'm certainly not going to turn off a machine that costs too much to run when I have to get a job out for that month. Then, I realized how much savings there was for monitoring power consumption and the ROI was timely.

Anyone actually enjoy quoting? For such an important part of daily business the process of establishing prices to offer a customer seems universall...

We all got a lesson in leadership from that unfortunate collision between a U.S. Navy destroyer and a container ship off the coast of Japan. The Na...