Working Wider

Metrics

Safety: The New Norm for Opening in Covid-19

As restaurants, shops, and bars light up their “Open” signs, there’s one question that everyone from employee to customer will be asking: Is it safe to come in? Outside heavy industry, safety training typically stops at fire drills and job-specific items such as arresting grease fires in the kitchen.  Customers don’t choose between Wal-Mart, Costco, [...]

Decimal Point Thinking:
Good for Operators; Dangerous for Innovation

Winter in Detroit is rarely pretty.  Pristine snowfalls quickly turn to grey slush that outwits the best pedestrian avoidance maneuvers.  Once that happens, your feet are cold and clammy for the next three hours. It was on such a day that a new product team was presenting their “comeback” car design to a panel of [...]

Measuring the Unmeasurable:
The Innovator’s Wider Dilemma

How do you convince business colleagues to try something new?  At a minimum, you’ll have to answer three questions: Is it better? Will it work? How much will it cost? When trying something new, these questions are reasonable but difficult, if not impossible to answer definitively.  We live in a time where “If you can [...]