The turn of the new year stimulates many of us to look back... and hopefully look forward.  This is important, and could even be construed to be the &…

I know it's not just a German or even European thing, but this morning we have yet another example of our friends from across the pond promoting a…

Over the past year I've given Dr. Shahrukh Irani of Ohio State a pretty hard time, especially in the post The False God of the Almighty Algorithm.…

Last week one of my favorite blogs, The Skeptical Optimist, had a post titled Grow or Die.  In it Steve Conover proposes that companies must grow, or…

When you read about a company, there is one very notable combination of phrases that will immediately tell you that they are probably knee-deep into r…

A few days before Christmas I received a long email with the subject of "Help me to understand."  It was from a worker a Whirlpool's Eva…

Over the past week we've been exploring whether the outsourcing or offshoring of subassemblies, later finished, in the United States, has a hidden…

Earlier this week we discussed the myth of manufacturing productivity, and how the number may not account correctly for reduced labor resulting from s…