Are your engineers making your company’s products great? If not, you have a DAM problem. In order to break this DAM you need to learn what Steve Jobs learned: You might not have a horrible manager out of control, but a true management genius that few people understand even today. The PCB Magazine Feb 2012 — READ NOW
If you are happy just having any business at all, then you should be thinking seriously about a new business model this year. As a country, our manufacturing operations must be the best in the world to capture a second chance. A country that no longer knows how to build cannot innovate. The stakes of getting it right this time are high. […]
It isn’t the ideas and tools contained in methodologies that are bad for you; it’s using a methodology of any kind that will kill your business. If you want Lean to work, then you must not apply it as a prescription for everyone to follow, but something else. In order to get at the something else you need to make a simple choice between waiting for others to tell you what […]
Cost accounting selects jobs with the highest margin and rejects jobs with the lowest margin, but this may be the wrong answer; the highest margin jobs may not be the most profitable! The problem is that cost accounting ignores flow—the rate of money generated per unit time. Understanding how to optimize constraint can generate impressive top and bottom line performance. The PCB Magazine […]
I don’t know of a single person who enjoys quality meetings. Why? Because nobody wants to be shot! Quality meetings are about hiding, fear and survival. Want to be shot? Then be the messenger that dares speak the truth. Quality meetings are a witch-hunt to find bad people. Eliminate them, set the example and voilà, no more problems! But, where are they? Hiding behind their story. Who wants […]
Are you about ready to throw in the towel because you can’t compete with China? We have all heard that the labor rate in China is about $1.83/ hr, and the average labor rate in the United States is $12/ hr or more depending on the difficulty of the job and geographic location. Does this difference mean we are done with the manufacturing of PCBs in this […]