Leadership Series

The video game industry spent forty years solving one of the hardest problems in human systems design: how do you make a task so attractive that a person will pay you for the privilege of doing it? The underlying motivational analysis in modern game design is a masterclass in systems design and thinking. Think about all the things in sport/games that aren't inherently fun... and nobody argues that they are. Running 26 miles, for instance, why is that fun? Or chasing an oblong

“Shared accountability" is one of the most misused phrases in manufacturing leadership. Most of what gets called shared accountability is actually shared blame. They are not the same thing. Blame is divisible. Accountability is not. If you're assigning percentages: 50% operator, 50% supervisor, that's blame. You're dividing a fixed quantity of fault until it adds up to 100%. Accountability doesn't divide. When something goes wrong on the floor, the operator is 100% accountabl

There is a frequently-missed moment in every conflict that decides who is actually the leader and it has nothing to do with who's right or in charge. I teach it as a leader skill, but it's just as important and relevant in peer conflict. Once you know it, you'll always see it. As a leader, suppose someone in your organization becomes angry. It could be in your office, the monthly meeting, wherever, and you have to deal with it. You have two options: match that anger, or do

Every plant manager I talk to says the same thing: "We can't find good techs." They're not wrong. The skilled trades pipeline has been shrinking for decades and the guys who came up through apprenticeships in the 80s and 90s are retiring faster than anyone is replacing them. But here's what I've figured out: the shortage is a market condition, not a sentence. Some shops never feel it. They're the ones who are paying fair-to-good and who do the following things well. 1. Stop

In 2006, I was deployed with a unit that set a record for the best AH64 Apache maintenance performance in Army history. I was a platoon leader. If you know the aircraft, you know it's a maintenance pig. It takes relentless, disciplined effort to keep one flyable. You don't get reliability by accident. You get it because people believe in the checks they're running and do them right, every time. That deployment, my battalion set the record for the highest fully mission capab

In Afghanistan back in 2008, I was a battle captain and an aviator in an aviation task force. I was on night shift so I could plan the next day's missions while my team ran operations. That worked fine during the winter until the passes thawed in the spring. Operational tempo spiked when it started to warm up. Suddenly I was managing live operations all night and trying to produce a full day's worth of mission planning. Something had to give. I'd come off shift scrambling to

When I walk into an underperforming plant, I expect the usual: bitterness, low trust, people going through the motions. I'm rarely disappointed. In that environment, I expect to hear management describe their own floor as lazy, pointing at guys barely out of their teens who "don't want to work." Picture a lazy kid on the shop floor at 1pm: leaning on a broom, phone in hand, doing just enough to not get noticed. Now picture him at 1am: video game controller in hand, hunched

A supply chain expert in my network told me something today that I thought was worth discussion: he plans better when he can visualize how his schedule actually unfolds on the floor and that only happens when he's out there, talking to the people running it. He said he thinks great organizations always have leaders on the floor. He's right. Leadership is just a relationship, and relationships start with interaction. If there is no relationship there cannot be leadership. W

Every organization runs on 4 levels of work. Technical. Tactical. Operational. Strategic. Technical - does the work in accordance with process. Tactical - ensures the work is done in accordance with process. Operational - writes the process. Strategic - wields the entire organization. Each level has the same 3 core systems: Daily operations - do what needs to be done (planning and execution) Process improvement - learn from feedback, improve the standard. Accountability

I keep seeing leaders throw "culture" at broken operations like it's a cure instead of a symptom. Ping-pong tables. Core values on the wall. Town halls about trust. And nothing changes. Here's the truth: you cannot build a bad organization with a great culture, and you cannot fix a bad organization by working on culture. Culture isn't a lever. It's feedback. There's an old story. The Sun and the Wind are arguing over who can get a farmer to take off his jacket. The Wind goes

"A bad system will beat a good person every time." - Deming We've all seen the stats, they're clear: 70–90% of Lean, Six Sigma, and TPM implementations fail. The process excellence community's explanation: Leadership. "Superficial commitment." "Treats lean as a toolbox, not a culture." "Weak supervisors." "Doesn't give the floor a voice." The objective function is: We said do this and it didn't happen. It must be the leader's fault. But we already know that weak operational s

Sustaining in 5S isn't hard. But there is a trick to it. You have to do 2 things well: 1) Make success something the operators can control. 2) Check it daily. But everyone fails at #1. The night-shift operator takes a tool home. By the time dayshift figures out it's gone, there's nothing to do about it, even with an audit. Here is the easy way to beat it. Before you add some tool to a 5S board, set up a shelf that has space to hold spares of everything you'll 5S. In a bucket

There. I said it. Not because people can't learn. Not because your trainers aren't talented. Not because the content is wrong. Not because people are bad. Training doesn't work because of how we're wired and because most organizations aren't compensating for how people learn. The numbers are brutal. Studies consistently show that only about 15% of training is ever applied on the job without additional support. Only 10% of companies have a formal strategy to ensure training co

The Uncomfortable Truth Behind Manufacturing's Leadership Crisis Every year, companies spend billions on leadership development: executive coaches, management training, accountability systems, values workshops. Yet, in facilities across the country, the same problems continue to occur: simple repeat errors, accountability complaints, machine downtime, poor morale and unfollowed processes. Looking at the outcomes, business leaders reach the same conclusion: leadership problem.

Every organization I've ever walked into has the same meeting problem. Not too few meetings, but too many of the wrong kind. Let me give you nine laws that explain your calendar and a case for rethinking where decisions actually belong. Sayre's Law: The passion of the argument is inversely proportional to the stakes Wallace Sayre, a political scientist at Columbia University, observed that, "in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the

Many manufacturing leaders have been trained to believe that speaking with urgency communicates importance. If something matters enough, the emotions behind the correction should be visible, that a raised voice or visible frustration signals that you're serious. This is one of the most costly misconceptions in operational leadership and the damage it does is largely invisible because it never shows up on a report. Here's what actually happens when a leader delivers a correcti

There are two kinds of accountability and only one works. Negative accountability is what most companies default to. Something goes wrong. We hunt for the rule that wasn’t followed and we punish the person who did it. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: even if the rule was trained, what if nobody ever checked whether it was being followed? That employee probably deviated dozens of times before the disaster. Likely, other employees are deviating too. The inductive principle o

In the corporate world, leadership promotions often hinge on a subtle but critical distinction: are we elevating the most competent individuals, or simply the least incompetent? This might sound like semantics, but the difference is profound and it explains why so many organizations end up with leaders who excel at spin rather than substance. The Foundation of Flawed Promotions: Poor Documentation and Perception Bias Most companies don't document work and results with the rig

"In any bureaucratic organization, there will be two kinds of people: those committed to the mission of the organization, and those committed to the organization itself. In time, the dedicated protectors of the organization will always gain control of it, and the actual purpose of the organization will be lost." In a merit-based system, we naturally promote those who appear most competent or, phrased differently, those who are least incompetent. On the surface, this makes per

Ever go into a meeting and see a Pareto Chart that is linear? Or maybe there is a slight rise at the top... but clearly it's not in accordance with the Pareto Principle? Pareto Principle: Also known as the 80/20 rule, it states that roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes—in ops, 80% of downtime might stem from 20% of factors. This one is essential for setting priorities in a leadership role. When leading change, the temptation is to pull the most easily accessible dat