In this evergreen article, Anders Corr explores the relationship between China and Canada. Canada is in an uproar. On Saturday, the New York Times called Canadian concerns about China’s election interference a “political firestorm.” The storm is from intelligence leaked to multiple Canadian reporters and authors over the past few years from Canadian security sources. The intelligence indicates that China allegedly sought to keep Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party in power over the last two elections, albeit…

  Cheenu Seshadri shares an article that explains the ins and outs of doing business in India, including how the EODB (ease of doing business) metrics on India measure up. When a client recently asked us if the investment climate had improved in India, we became curious ourselves and decided to dive in. Having lived through a tortuous investment climate for international investors in the telecom sector between 2009 and 2013, I knew first-hand that there were deep structural issues…

  Dan Markovitz provides an article that explores the ability of public US companies to operate as a wholly lean company. Can public US companies really embrace lean? Well sure, they can deploy lean tools here and there, but the whole socio-technical system that comprises lean? I don’t think so. Wall Street pressure for quarterly profits competes fiercely with lean principles, both inside and outside the company. Executives who take the long-term view and view employees as appreciating assets worthy…

  Dan Markovitz explains why time management and a shorter work week is good news for lean.   In the space of two weeks, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both ran articles on the productivity benefits of reduced work hours. The WSJ introduced us to the workers at Rheingans Digital Enabler in Germany, who only put in five-hour days, for a workweek of 25 hours. The same is true of employees at Tower Paddle Boards (at…

Dan Markovitz reveals a common problem that lean programs often face.    Boeing’s Starliner failed an important test flight two weeks ago. It was supposed to rendezvous with the International Space Station, but was unable to reach the correct orbit.   The problem with this engineering marvel? Not the complex aerodynamics, not the critical separation from the Atlas V rocket, not the all-important re-entry heat shield.  No, the problem was with the internal clock. The spacecraft’s internal clock became unsynced with…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Glenton Jelbert to our community.  Glenton does operational improvement work and data analytics. He is a lean manufacturing expert, recently helping organizations with everything from factory layouts to complete operational turnarounds. He is also a data expert. He has a PhD in Physics, and is comfortable in Excel, Access, MySQL, and Python. He uses these tools to gain operational and strategic insights out of messy data and to set up systems to do the same. He is…