Leadership Starts Before the Title
When people think about leadership, they often think about titles like supervisor, manager, or director. From my experience, leadership starts long before that. I learned some of the most important leadership lessons while working as a machinist on the shop floor. You learn quickly that people pay attention to how you work, how you handle […]
Small Problems Rarely Stay Small
One thing I learned over the years in manufacturing is that small scheduling errors rarely stay small for long. At first, a delay might seem manageable. A material shipment arrives a few hours late. A setup takes longer than expected. One job gets moved slightly out of sequence. On its own, none of that feels […]
Where Things Start to Break Down
In manufacturing, most people notice problems when they show up on the floor. A job is late. A machine is sitting idle. Parts are piling up. Everyone starts reacting, trying to fix what is in front of them. What many people miss is that these problems usually started much earlier. In most cases, they started […]
Stepping Into a Different World
When I first joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I knew I was stepping into something different. I had already spent years on the shop floor and in leadership roles, but JPL operates at another level. The expectations are higher. The complexity is greater. The margin for error is smaller. You are not just building parts. […]
What Lean Six Sigma Looks Like in the Real World
When people hear Lean Six Sigma, they often think about certifications, charts, and formal projects. Those things have their place, but real improvement does not live in binders or presentations. It lives on the shop floor where the work actually happens. I earned my Lean Six Sigma certification, but what mattered most was not the […]
Learning Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T)
I did not learn GD&T from a textbook first. I learned it on the shop floor, where parts either worked or they did not. When something did not fit, you had to figure out why. It was not enough to say the dimensions were correct. That is where GD&T started to make sense to me. […]