The Bottleneck
Q:Â Do you know why most accountability conversations get ugly?
A:Â Because the person on the receiving end never agreed to it in the first place.
It happens at every level of a manufacturing organization and almost always follows the same pattern. A leader sets an expectation, per...
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"Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you." — Walt Whitman
The Bottleneck
Have you ever walked onto a manufacturing floor and felt the energy before you saw a single metric?
Most experienced leaders have. A well-run shop floor offers more than just good metr...
The Bottleneck
When was the last time you watched a supervisor stop cold because the plan didn't work out the way they expected?
It happens more than it should on manufacturing floors. A supplier comes up short, a key machine goes down, a process that worked last week stops working today. The lea...
The Bottleneck
Trust doesn't announce itself when it arrives. There's no meeting where the team decides to follow a leader, no moment where respect gets formally granted. It accumulates graduallly through small interactions that most leaders don't even realize are being measured:
A supervisor wh...
An extra bonus for those burned out leaders on my list...
Leadership Lever
In manufacturing, we spend a lot of time getting execution right. When execution improves (clear goals, aligned metrics, consistent follow-through) results usually follow.
But I’ve seen something else happen.
Even when thi...
I knew a leader who was exceptional at his job for years, then gradually started losing his edge. Â
The operation didn’t dramatically change or get harder, and the team didn’t fall apart.  But he had been running on empty for so long that he didn’t notice how much it was costing him until one ba...
I consider myself lucky that at the start of my career I did not have an ego and wanted to learn more about everything manufacturing related.
A wise man I respected handed me a book one time and said, "Read this before next month." I almost didn't. I was busy and I figured I was learning enough j...
The Bottleneck
Many years ago I worked alongside a machinist who ran the same routine every day. He followed the same setup sequence and made the same checks at the same intervals.
To anyone watching casually, it looked like he was just going through the motions. But what they missed was that h...
The Bottleneck
I was sitting in on a shift meeting at a plant a few years back, watching a production manager run his team through the week ahead. Â About ten minutes in, one of his supervisors started to raise concern about a scheduling conflict that was going to create a problem on the floor. Th...
THE BOTTLENECK
I walked into a facility a few years back where the production schedule was posted on a whiteboard in the middle of the floor. Clean. Color-coded. Updated every Monday. The manager was proud of it, and honestly, it looked sharp. By Wednesday of that week, the team was already 18% b...
Discover five proven strategies manufacturers can use to help workforces adapt as production goals are set to increase profitably.
INTRODUCTIONÂ As automation expands in manufacturing. Learning how to lead innovation, collaboration, and company growth inside factories is necessary for competitive ...
After 40 years in global manufacturing—on the floor, in engineering, and in executive roles—I’ve learned one unshakable truth: every day brings a new challenge. Equipment fails. Materials don’t arrive. Quality takes a hit. People have off days. And yet, production must go on.
The best leaders don...
