You know the guy on your team who's always pushing back against unusual ideas? The gloom-and-doomer who's convinced that if it's different, it must be wrong? Could be he's just afraid of not succeeding at a new endeavor. Here's some food for thought to convince him that...
The commissioning date of three critical path ethylene compressors at a Belgian chemical plant was in jeopardy because the original compressor valves failed within hours of start-up on the final stage of compression. The valve supplier attempted to resolve the failures twice, without success. This case study illustrates how a...
When an automotive component fails, warranty claims multiply and costs rise. One needs to discover and fix the root cause of the failure as quickly as possible. With IBM Quality Insight, one can view virtually all of the data related to a specific failure regardless of its source or format....
People spend a great deal of time and energy trying to avoid the inevitable. Everyone fails. The difference is that the truly great ones not only learn from failure, they embrace it. In reality it is only a word, but it carries with it a great deal of pain, frustration...
When small businesses fail, the wreckage is often assigned to undercapitalization, among other mistakes. Seldom is failure attributed to a lack of effective communications that might have modified the behavior of sales prospects in a positive way, thus averting bankruptcy. As the entrepreneur, one cannot rely on financing source to...
Schlumberger IPM used the Producing Well Improvement Process PWIP in a Permian basin project with 900 active producers near Pennwell, Texas. Excessive well failures result in lost production, elevate lifting costs, and can lead to premature abandonment. Through using PWIP since 1991, well-failure frequency has been reduced by a factor...
The Idea in Brief If you're like most managers, you frown on mistakes--yours and others. Why? Your organization demands optimum performance. And it rewards you based on the height of your successes, not the depth of your...
Thomas Edison (1847–1931) is credited with the invention of the phonograph and the electric light bulb. When asked about his numerous experimental failures, he said: “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I...
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything. Why is it that in the world of corporations and government that meetings, more times than not, do not work? What characterises the behaviour of individuals and the teams who meet that destroys the ability of any meeting to actually...
Product and Brand failures occur on an ongoing basis to varying degrees within most product-based organizations. This is the negative aspect of the development and marketing process. In most cases, this failure rate syndrome ends up being a numbers game. There must be some ratio of successful products to each...
Research, as currently practiced, is stagnant, describing the market as it currently is, finding solutions and ideas that are already currently known. In turn, profitable revelations rendered from current research processes are few and far between. Failure resides not in the methodology, but in the process leading to the research...
How do you make an easy task difficult? Simple. You put it off and you keep postponing it until it eventually becomes a big deal. Its one thing to procrastinate on the small things, but its quite another to procrastinate on the big issues in life. You can trace almost...
The paper reports the results of a failure mode analysis of our production sequencing facility based on detailed evaluation of 9,216 ESTs generated from two cDNA libraries. Two categories of failures are described; process-related failures failures due to equipment or sample handling and template-related failures (failures that are revealed by...
Concern about patient safety, caused in part by high-profile major failures in which many patients have been harmed, is rising worldwide. This paper draws on examples of such failures from several countries to analyze how these events are dealt with and to identify lessons and recommendations for policy. Better systems...
The causes of pipeline failures can be classified into a few major categories as determined from government statistics. Of these categories two, outside force and corrosion, account for more than half of all service failures in both gas and liquid pipelines. The two major causes as well as the less...
Marketers often face product and ad campaign failures. But, very few try to analyze the reason behind it. Experts suggest that it is beneficial to find the reason behind failures to reach out to the solution. Companies should not blindly believe that they would never encounter failure. Rather, they should...
The idea that people and the organizations in which they work should learn from failure has great popular support and even seems obvious. However, organizations that systematically and effectively learn from failure are very rare. This paper provides insight into what makes learning from failure so difficult to put into...
While it's probably impossible to compute the exact percentage of business initiatives that fail, it is widely acknowledged that most do. After years of research and observation, it is clear that the same reasons for any change initiative failure tend to be the same culprits that make innovation initiatives fail....
The author knew when he had made it. Will you know when you have? Why do some people succeed, some run a treadmill and others fail? Surprisingly enough, many people who succeed have failed many times before. Even Iacocca revealed in his autobiography what the "Gut-wrenching" pain of being fired...
This case study pertains to SIPC’s concerns related to the liquidation of MJK, a broker-dealer in Minneapolis. MJK cleared for 65 introducing broker-dealers and had approximately 175,000 customer accounts. At the time of this study, the liquidation has cost SIPC approximately $110 million. In its Request for Proposal, SIPC requested...
