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

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

Your organization has a structural problem that's destroying productivity. It looks like this: train the workforce, then hold supervisors accountable for adherence. It sounds reasonable. It fails reliably. Training doesn't transfer the way we assume it does. You can almost pick your study, they all say the same thing: the average transfer rate of training is between 10-15%. And what little does transfer, doesn't stay: Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped this in the 1880s with his for

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

It was already July and we were set to miss our quality target for the year. The quality manager asked if I had any ideas. In truth, I didn't. But I love a challenge. I'd just read The Power of Habit and I was enamored with the idea of using habits to improve process. So I set about building a method, and it came out pretty simple. I proposed that people break rules for 2 primary reasons: They don't know the standard or they don't think the standard is important. I proposed

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