How many bosses are there just like that out there in this world even today?  I daresay more than we want to admit to and literally more than they themselves realize.  And do they realize what they are doing to the people who work for and with them?  To their work lives?  To their personal lives?  To their producitivty and that of their firm?  Again, I doubt it and probably in most cases, I doubt they care.  A recent article in “The Washington Post” brings this subject up again.  Written by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, the article is “How To Completely, Utterly Destroy an Employee’s Work Life” and I have linked and included it below:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/how-to-completely-utterly-destroy-an-employees-work-life/2012/03/05/gIQAxU3iuR_story.html

HOW TO COMPLETELY, UTTERLY DESTROY AN EMPLOYEE’S WORK LIFE

© The Washington Post Company

Amabile and Kramer have done a great job in taking a vast amount of data and summarizing it for the purposes of their study.  They attempt to show what de-motivates the average worker in regard to the precise things that trigger destructive attitudes from their bosses.  Their four points may seem over-simplified, but they are not.  They are just getting to the bottom line of the things you and I dislike and always will hate about employers who treat us in a less than acceptable manner and destroy our lifes.  Thus, making us that much less productive, which is the whole idea of this blog.  So if you’re an employer, and you haven’t seen this movie, I suggest you see it.  Then read Amabile and Kramer’s book and think about what kind of company you want, one in which you are feared and loathed or one in which you are respected.

Bob

INFORMATION OVERLOAD COSTS U.S. COMPANIES $650 BILLION A YEAR

I was recently reading an article in Business Insider by Kim Bhasin.  It’s link is

http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-how-information-overload-affects-you-in-the-workplace-2012-2  Bhasin suggests that information overload costs U.S. companies $650 billion each year.  Now I can only imagine that the number is huge, but I thought to myself that was huge, so I reviewed Bhasin interesting article.  It is done in an info-graphic style.  If you review the total set of statistics provided and then you seriously give thought to the email’s you deal with each and every day, the tweets you may process, the Facebook contributions you “like” or “unlike”, the blogs you check out, the data sent to you from Sales, from Accounting, from your boss, from your peers, from your direct reports, and so forth, and then you determine how much of that you really really needed to see, deal with and/or process, and then you multiply that by the number of people working in the USA, you can clearly see that possibility of Bhasin number having immense credibility.

So, I thought Bhasin’s article deserved more coverage.  If I can provide even a small amount of deserved distribution and point people into the waste of productivity we create then perhaps, we can help reduce this number one small bit.  Think about it as you review this article and see what you can do to reduce this wasteful expenditure and stop distributing something that truly did not need to be sent out or truly was a CYA.  Do your effort in this regard!!

Bob

This Is How Information Overload Destroys Your Productivity

Here’s an infographic from the folks at Mindjet that has some interesting statistics on workers and how they’re overloaded with information, along with some tips on how to cope with it.

Listening to the Great Ideas of your Employees!!

On Tuesday, February 7, 2012, the Wall Street Journal wsj.com had a great article entitled, “Boeing Teams Speed Up 737 Output.”  The link for this article is:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203436904577155204034907744.html?KEYWORDS=David+Kesmodel

Boeing Teams Speed Up 737 Output

Jet Maker’s Innovation Crews Search for Ways to Streamline Production as Aircraft Demand Soars

By DAVID KESMODEL
RENTON, Wash.—As Boeing Co. strives to lift production of its best-selling 737 jetliner to meet surging airline demand, it is turning to workers like Jay Dohrmann to streamline work.
Mr. Dohrmann, a brawny, 46-year-old engineer at the 737 plant here, is part of an extensive effort the company has underway to rally employees for ways to make its jets more efficiently and avoid expanding its factories and its costs. These innovation teams are growing as Boeing seeks to increase output of the narrow-body, workhorse plane by as much as 71%.

Workers try to leave few stones unturned. Mr. Dohrmann, for example, came up with the canvas wheel covers that now hug the four main landing-gear tires as the single-aisle planes advance down an assembly line. The covers solved a vexing problem: stray metal fasteners on the factory floor sometimes puncture tires.
The solution saves Boeing about $10,000 for each tire that needs to be replaced—roughly $250,000 a year at the Renton plant based on historical mishaps—as well as the labor costs involved in replacing them.
The idea, in place for about a year, occurred to Mr. Dohrmann as the avid sports fan watched a motorcycle race and noticed crews used special covers to warm up tires so they got a better grip on the track.
“It’s a good feeling,” the muscular engineer said of his fix. “You hated to see these airplanes jacked at the end of the line and people pulling off tires.”
Boeing started emphasizing employee-generated ideas in Renton in the late 1990s, when the 737 plant began adopting “lean” manufacturing techniques that were developed by the Japanese auto industry and embraced by U.S. car makers in the 1980s. Many companies, including fast-food giants, now use lean methods.

Workers here recently boosted 737 output to 35 jets a month from 31.5, and Chicago-based Boeing aims to produce 42 planes a month in 2014. Executives said they are studying ways to eventually reach 60 a month as they plan a retooled version of the plane called the 737 Max, a jet that Boeing expects to begin delivering in 2017. The company is trying to pare an order backlog of some 3,700 jetliners, including about 2,300 of its best-selling 737s.
Boeing also is intensifying its scrutiny of its supply chain, hiring thousands of employees and providing more extensive training for new airplane mechanics as part of an effort to increase jet output without any major hitches.
Boeing’s employee teams are composed of workers with varying backgrounds-from mechanics to engineers-and tend to focus on a specific part of a jet, such as the galleys. Teams meet as often as once a week and typically have seven to 10 members.
“How do you produce more aircraft without expanding the building?” is the question Boeing managers in Renton continually focus on, said Eric Lindblad, vice president for 737 manufacturing operations. “Space is the forcing function that means you’ve gotta be creative.”
Boeing’s employee projects don’t all go smoothly. Some struggle to gain traction or take longer than teams envision.
When Mr. Dohrmann first worked with others to address the tire problem, he created several types of V-shaped sweepers that attached to the landing gear and were designed to push any bolts or other fasteners away as planes advanced on the moving assembly line. But fasteners kept slipping through.
“I was getting a lot of emails telling me that my sweeper wasn’t working,” he said.
Some employee projects take years to bear fruit. One group, for example, spent about five years on a new process for assembling the hydraulic tubes that go into the landing-gear wheel well of the 737.
Boeing workers used to crowd in the wheel well, installing roughly 650 individual tubes, a process that took up one day shift and part of the night shift for each jet. Employees in other roles had to work around the four day-shift mechanics. It was “a very delicately timed ballet,” said Buford Neal, a ponytailed team leader for the wheel-well installers
Mr. Neal was part of a roster of engineers, mechanics and other employees who figured out how to have about 25 assemblies of the tubes made at another Boeing plant.
Now, assembly line workers including mechanic Gabriel Holguin in Renton, Wash., install these larger pieces, along with fewer than 100 individual tubes, saving roughly 30 hours of mechanics’ time on each airplane. The new system, which took effect in 2010 but continues to be refined, also has substantially reduced the amount of hydraulic leaks its 737s have in service, Boeing officials said.
Boeing today takes about 11 days for the final assembly of jets at the Renton plant. That’s down from 22 days about a decade ago, but the company has for years set goals to go even lower. Mr. Lindblad said the company’s near-term goal is to whittle that number to nine days.
Write to David Kesmodel at david.kesmodel@wsj.com

This article by author David Kesmodel, provides a fascinating insight into what an employee idea or problem solution team can do when they are given the right opportunity and freedoms.  In my 37 years in productivity improvement, we always used a program which had a few differences to the one Kesmodel discusses above.  But fundamentally, they were the same.  The theory was to open a communications program which was available to first line supervisors and employees.  With this program, they suggested ideas and/or reported problems that they could find no solution to (or no one else had found solutions to and were frustrating them) and could probably improve productivity.  This program was ALWAYS  successful and the vast majority of the time produced very significant savings anywhere it was installed in the world.

Unlike your typical “Suggestion Box” Programs, which employees typically laughed at because no one ever normally got back to them about their ideas or problems, the crux of this program was a guaranteed response within 2 weeks of the receipt of the idea/problem/notice. Now certainly there were times that more time was needed to get proper information to resolve the issue, but specific detailed information as to what was causing the delays was always taken back to the initiator, so that the initiator always knew that they were not forgotten about.  A small constantly revolving committee of members of a steering group controlled the program and reported ONLY to the CEO or the equivalent position in the organization.  The members of this group were from a broad swath of departments and from the entire hierarchy of the organization from actual employees to people at a vice-president or similiar level.  The group size should never be much larger than 7 to 9 team members.  These people were constantly revolving, not all at once, but perhaps one or two every month, so knowledge was always on board, but a constant “change initiative” was brought on to keep challenging the team and keep forward momentum going.   These committee members never solved the problems they choose the best people in the organization to solve the problem or confirm that the idea was indeed a good or great idea.  In most cases, the client organization would make some kind of remuneration to the initiator for their idea or problem solution.

And the net result was the near always success of the program.  Do you remember some of the improvements from the WSJ article?  A 50% reduction in jet final assembly time from 22 days to 11 days.  If that isn’t savings to Boeing, I don’t know what is!!!

So if you and your organization do not have a strong hard working anti-bureaucratic program like this working in your company, then you aren’t getting the savings, the employee engagement and the increased productivity that your employees can bring to you, IF YOU WOULD GIVE THEM THE CHANCE.

The factory, which employs about 700 people in manufacturing as well as another 800 in design, engineering and management, is an anomaly in modern America – a manufacturing site in one of most expensive cities in the country.

But to Gillette’s parent company, Procter & Gamble, Boston is an ideal base not only for making Fusion and Mach 3 razors, but to produce machines that assemble Gillette products around the world: After a century of making razors at the site, the company has a critical mass of experienced workers.

“The guys in my world see the new products three to five years before anyone else,” said Ronald Calder, who runs the machine shop at the South Boston facility, which develops the equipment that produces many thousands of razors per day.

Having his crew of machine makers a short walk from the people who manufacture the razors allows them to develop and fine-tune machines quickly and cheaply.

That plays to what P&G management regards as its strength.

“Oftentimes, the basis for our competitive advantage in a category is the process or manufacturing operation that allows us to make better quality than our competitors at a lower cost,” said Bruce Brown, chief technology officer with the Cincinnati-based company.

America’s debate over manufacturing has escalated in the face of stubbornly high unemployment and the realization that younger workers lack some of the basic skills necessary to hold down a job in an assembly plant or a fabrication shop.

Gillette is facing that issue in part by putting interested factory workers through a technical training program at a nearby state university.

One graduate of that program is Mike DiBella, 31, who started at the factory five years ago with a high school diploma and some vocational school experience. After the additional program, today he manages 14 machines that sharpen steel for blades.

DiBella said he is never bored, enjoys the challenges of the job, and sees opportunities for growth.

AGAINST THE GRAIN

P&G runs against the grain in corporate America in believing that the company’s manufacturing skill is a large part of the reason shoppers are willing to pay about $3.50 for a single Fusion razor cartridge.

The company argues that manufacturing in-house and in Boston helps it to meet exacting standards for its razors, necessary since men would be less willing to pay premium prices if they cut themselves during their morning shaves.

It is not just basic items like clothing and furniture that have migrated to offshore production. More complicated, and higher-tech products such as Apple Inc’s iPads and Nike Inc running shoes are largely made overseas, often in subcontracted factories not owned by the brands whose products they are making.

Cheaper labor costs have been the main drivers of such production in China and elsewhere but with Chinese wage costs rising sharply, the yuan currency gaining against the U.S. dollar, and transport costs increasing, the advantage against the U.S. has narrowed a bit in recent years.

Also the main downside of moving production to an outside contractor in a country like China is the danger of losing some control over quality and over intellectual property.

Still, American manufacturing is now considered to be primarily the domain of makers of bigger-ticket, highly engineered products such as medical imaging devices and excavators, including General Electric Co, United Technologies Corp and Caterpillar Inc.

And it’s not as if P&G hasn’t weighed the options for the Boston site.

When the company bought Gillette in 2005, it considered closing the 45-acre (18 hectare) facility. After deciding to keep it open, it then pulled the company’s white-collar staff out of the city’s iconic Prudential Tower and consolidated Boston operations onto the factory campus.

Keeping both its manufacturing and the design of its machinery in-house makes it harder for rivals to knock off its designs, the company reasons.

Mike Chaney, Gillette’s vice president of product supply, cites the line of Sensor razors, introduced in 1990 and no longer protected by patents, as an example. “Anyone could copy it, but they don’t because they don’t know how to make it efficiently,” said Chaney.

The company has good reason to be protective of its razor business, as it is one of P&G’s most profitable ventures. The company’s grooming division – which includes men’s razors, as well as other products including men’s deodorant but not women’s razors – notched a 20 percent profit margin in the fiscal year ended June 30, well above the company’s five other divisions, which make products ranging from Crest toothpaste to Pampers diapers.

CUT TOO DEEP

While a weak global economy and rising costs in emerging markets have led more companies to think like Proctor & Gamble, manufacturing experts say many executives have long looked at manufacturing operations too narrowly, focusing mainly on cost.

Quick reductions to the cost of making a product, whether by moving production to a lower-cost region or handing it off entirely to another company, can provide a quick boost to profit margins but make it vulnerable to quality problems or theft of technology and designs.

“They call it a cost center. It costs money rather than adds revenue,” said Jung-Hoon Chun, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity. “Because it’s a cost center, if you become a manager of the unit, if you get rid of that then from day one you get rid of costs.”

That attitude has contributed to a slow decline in U.S. manufacturing employment. The sector currently employs about 12 million people in the United States, down from a peak of near 20 million around 1980.

While many companies have reduced headcount due to productivity initiatives, cutting manufacturing too deeply can take its toll.

The world’s largest cereal maker, Kellogg Co, for instance, in November cut its profit forecast for the year, saying that it had cut too many jobs at its factories and would need to boost spending to fix problems related to food safety. U.S. regulators in June found listeria at one of the company’s plants in Georgia that produces Keebler and Famous Amos cookies, and in 2010 Kellogg had to recall millions of boxes of cereal due to an unusual smell.

“We did cut too many people in our facilities in the U.S. network,” acknowledged Chief Executive John Bryant in a conference call with investors.

On a similar note, an executive from Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services company, has concluded that trying to manufacture equipment far from its main centers in the United States and France was not the right move.

“Some of our manufacturing has been seen as something that’s easily commoditized and exported to the low end,” said David Rowatt, Schlumberger’s research director for mechanical and materials science, at a recent MIT conference. “We have had in place an approach of being able to design in one place and produce anywhere in the world and what we have seen internally is that is a model that has not worked for us.”

Schlumberger officials did not respond to request for comment on the specific problems it faced.

DIM VIEW WIDENS SKILLS GAP

Even if executives warm more to the idea of American manufacturing, a combination of factors – the perception that U.S. factories cannot compete with lower-cost rivals in emerging markets and the notion that manufacturing plants are simply cost centers – has soured the American public’s view of the sector. As a result, manufacturing executives say, they have a hard time finding young people with the skills needed to work in today’s highly automated plants.

“Manufacturing has a negative perception and it’s a negative perception because of many years of saying, ‘It’s OK to be a service economy and manufacturing is all about brawn and not about brains,’” said Keith Nosbusch, CEO of Rockwell Automation Inc, a Milwaukee-based manufacturer of factory automation equipment, in an interview last month. “Obviously it’s something we worry about a lot.”

Jason Miller, assistant to President Barack Obama on manufacturing policy, recently addressed an MIT summit about the U.S. government’s new plan to work with major manufacturers and top universities to educate young people on advanced manufacturing.

“It’s not about some desire to return to a romantic notion of the past, of what manufacturing was,” Miller said. “It is about a fundamental recognition that without a robust and vibrant manufacturing sector, it’s going to be difficult for us to sustain a robust and innovative economy.”

Proponents of manufacturing often point to the so-called multiplier effect of the jobs the sector employs. Each new manufacturing job created in the United States on average creates three more nonmanufacturing jobs – ranging from supplier jobs to restaurants and shops where factory workers spend their pay, according to a Boston Consulting Group study.

Many U.S. manufacturing executives complain that U.S. high schools are not providing students with the technical and scientific training they need to work in modern factories.

“We’re having a challenge increasingly finding capable people coming out of our secondary schools, with high school educations that have the capability to work in some of our operations,” Caterpillar group president Stuart Levenick said at the Reuters Global Manufacturing and Transportation Summit this week. “You think about manufacturing and a lot of people in this country think of it as an old, dirty, unsafe environment. And this is becoming a very high tech, world-class, highly paid job.”

That view was echoed by Rolf Meyer, CEO of Harting USA, a privately held maker of electronic connectors. “Kids don’t have any kind of relationship to manufacturing anymore, so why should they become an engineer?”

Meyer recalled hiring an engineer who was handy with computer-aided design but hopeless at building things. Meyer once had to take a screwdriver out of the worker’s hands.

“I was afraid he’d kill himself,” he said. “The screwdriver had a very sharp tip. He had never used it.”

(Reporting by Scott Malone in Boston, additional reporting by Nick Zieminski in New York. Editing by Martin Howell in New York.)

The First Million

Until I was thirty years old, I wasn’t much of a fisherman. I’d take a rod and reel along on a camping trip, but I never expected to catch much of anything. In my mind, fishing was a relaxing past time you enjoyed with friends and beer. Then my buddy Brian asked me to go fishing. I took him to a lake I knew that was hidden in the woods; and he taught me how to fish for bass. He showed me how to cast my lure along the edge of the lake; how to give the line a couple of tugs to “jig” the lure and attract the fish; then to reel it back in quickly.

I accepted his instructions affably, but with little faith, then popped open a bottle of beer and started to get into the rhythm of relaxation. Cast, tug, reel. Swig. Cast, tug, reel. Swig. Cast, tug, reel… Whoa! Something hit my line. Hard. Really hard! I’d never felt anything like that before. My line started spinning out of the reel with a high-pitched whining sound. I cranked it back in as fast I as could, but the drag was set too low and the fish was pulling it back out faster than I could turn the handle.

Suddenly, a hundred feet in front on me, a bright green monster burst out of the lake. It was a large-mouth bass that came full length out of the water. Shimmering in the sunlight, he shook his head back and forth in an attempt to break free from my hook, then splashed back beneath the surface. I couldn’t believe it – it was just like I’d seen on television – and it was happening to me.

Afraid that I’d lose the fish, I yelled at the top of my lungs, “Brian, Help!” He was nearly halfway around the lake, but he dropped his own rod and charged toward me; yelling instructions all the way. I tightened the drag and reeled the fish in a little, then let him pull the line back out to tire him. It felt like an hour, but was probably less than ten minutes, before I finally got him in. He was 18 inches long and weighed eight pounds. The bass wasn’t the only one to get hooked that day; I was too – I couldn’t wait to go fishing again!

For the first time in my life, I had experienced fishing success. Success in anything is very motivating. It builds confidence and encourages you to keep pursuing that particular endeavor.

Complete Article

Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. is a motivational speaker and humorist. He works with companies that want to be more competitive and with people who want to think like innovators. For more information on Robert’s programs please visit www.jumpstartyourmeeting.com

With the morning mist still on the Hudson River, and the sun just kissing the cliff tops of the New Jersey Palisade, Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States shot and killed former Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Political opponents for years, the duelists faced each other after Burr sent these words to Hamilton: “Political opposition can never absolve gentlemen from the necessity of a rigid adherence to the laws of honor.”

Once upon a time people were motivated by honor. Acquiring it, maintaining it, defending it. Bitter duels were fought in its name. I don’t hear much talk about honor anymore.

Could it be the concept of honor is too difficult to understand? Is it truly ineffable – impossible to define – to the point that no one really knows what it means? As a virtue, it has certainly taken a beating when some cultures identify the murder of family members as an “honor killing,” and when criminals such as the Mafia call themselves “men of honor.”

I looked it up in the Webster Dictionary and found the words “reputation” and “integrity.” But, honor seems to be more than that. It is similar to the definition of character which is: “what you do when no one is watching.” Again, it must be more than that. So, I researched what some historical figures said about it. Most of them described honor by what it is not.

Thomas Jefferson said, “Nobody can acquire honor by doing what is wrong.” OK, we’ll assume he means you must do what is right or good. The problem may be that by today’s standards those are up for debate.

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Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. is an author, humorist, and coach. He works with people who want to achieve more without sacrificing life balance. Contact Robert at www.jumpstartyourmeeting.com

By Shobhana Chandra

May 6 (Bloomberg) — The productivity of U.S. workers probably rose in the first quarter at the slowest pace in a year as employers took on staff to meet growing demand, economists said before a report today.

Employment may keep growing as companies such as Timken Co., which slashed payrolls and relied on becoming more efficient to lower expenses and protect profits during the recession, now look to expand as sales improve. The drop in labor costs is also helping limit inflation, giving Federal Reserve policy makers room to keep interest rates near zero.

“Productivity is still pretty good, but we’re likely to see it moderate,” said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Labor costs are going to remain very modest. The Fed will be on hold for quite some time.”

The Labor Department’s productivity figures are due at 8:30 a.m. in Washington. Economists’ estimates ranged from gains of 1.5 percent to 3.9 percent.

Labor expenses adjusted for the gains in efficiency fell at a 0.7 percent rate after dropping at a 5.9 percent pace the prior quarter, according to the survey median. For all of 2009, labor costs plunged 1.7 percent, the most since records began six decades ago.

Complete Article

By Annalyn Censky, staff reporter

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The manufacturing sector grew for the ninth consecutive month in April, and at its fastest rate since June 2004, according to a report released Monday.

The Tempe, Ariz.-based Institute for Supply Management (ISM) manufacturing index rose to 60.4 in April, from a March reading of 59.6. Any score above 50 indicates growth in the manufacturing sector.

April’s number is slightly better than expected, driven by increases in productivity, new orders and manufacturing jobs. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com were expecting a reading of 60.

“Overall, the recovery in manufacturing continues quite strong, and the signs are positive for continued growth,” Norbert Ore, chairman of the ISM’s survey committee, said in a release.

Of the 18 industries surveyed in the report, 17 reported growth. Apparel, non-metallic minerals and wood products were among the industries showing the strongest growth.

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By JACK EWING

FRANKFURT — The past weekend was definitely not a good time to be a Kenyan flower grower, an Israeli avocado farmer, a package tour operator or anyone else trying to run a business that depends on air transport to or from Europe.

Consider TUI, the largest travel operator in Germany. With all the country’s airports closed because of the danger posed by a cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland, the company, based in Hanover, had to take extraordinary — and costly — steps to bring customers back from Mediterranean vacations.

Late Saturday, TUI flew 540 of its customers from the Spanish island of Mallorca to Barcelona. After staying overnight in hotels paid for by TUI, the vacationers boarded a dozen buses for a 20-hour trip to Frankfurt. From there they continued home by train.

Economists have begun considering when, and to what extent, the extra costs sustained by companies like TUI — not to mention the airlines — will start to damage Europe’s already shaky economy.

Most say the effects will not be catastrophic if the skies clear soon.

There were signs of hope Sunday as airports in Frankfurt, Berlin and some other European cities reopened on a restricted basis, at least temporarily.

But a longer spell of airport closures — or intermittent disruptions in the coming weeks and months as the volcano continues to erupt and winds carry the ash to Europe — could start to take a toll.

“Given that the recovery of the euro-area economy is anyway so weak, it might have an impact,” Daniel Gros, director of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, wrote in an e-mail message.

While most economists are not predicting that the volcano will push Europe back into recession, there is a risk of unexpected consequences that could amplify the economic damage.

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