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Questions to Ask About Your Digital Transformation Journey

August 18, 2023

For something we talk about all the time and build heavily into every one of Executive Platforms’ ten annual events (with more on the way), I was surprised when I spotted the last time I wrote a blog post specifically about the Digital Revolution was all the way back in the beginning of May, and the last time we got into real ‘How to Get This Right’ content was all the way back in January. Let me correct that lapse right now. One of the things I love most about this subject matter is that while everyone’s Digital Transformation Journey…

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SUPPLY CHAIN — NA, BLOG, SUPPLY CHAIN — EUROPE

Building Competitive Advantage as Companies Localize and Regionalize Their Supply Chain Network

July 6, 2023

If you spend your career in any specific field, you will see themes and trends and moods and styles and eras come and go over the course of your working life that are defined by a single issue or pressure or innovation that shapes everything else you do for a time. Supply Chain professionals are no different, and right now as we come out the far side of a pandemic, we are in an extended moment where frequent disruptions of all shapes and sizes are now accepted as a business norm, and all anyone wants to talk about is building…

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BLOG, LIFE SCIENCES

PMWS23 in a Nutshell

May 23, 2023

This 2023 edition of the Pharma Manufacturing World Summit series ran May 15th and 16th at the Boston Marriott Copley Place in the heart of downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It was attended by 275 delegates, speakers, sponsor representatives, and guests from more than 200 different companies and organizations. The agenda included more than 40 keynotes, case studies, workshops, themed lunch discussions, focus groups, interactive think tanks, and more. Early feedback has been universally positive, and work is already underway to build upon this success and make next year’s summit even bigger and better. That is the shortest overview we can offer…

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BLOG

Ideas and Innovations on Mentoring, Sponsoring, and Reverse-Mentoring

May 10, 2023

As I write this, Executive Platforms organizes events for senior leaders relating to Pharmaceutical and Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing, supply chains in both North America and Europe, Technology, Human Resources, Finance, Food Safety and Quality, Sustainability, and Manufacturing. It is surprisingly easy to find common issues and challenges that people in positions of authority in these different roles have in common not just within their own disciplines, but across sectors. At some point as you rise through an organization, the specifics of your profession must include universals about leadership and people. You can have a conversation about a leader’s responsibilities and soft…

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BLOG, MANUFACTURING

The Digital Revolution and Frontline Workers: Putting the Big Picture in the Palm of Their Hands

May 3, 2023

Last week marked my thirteenth anniversary as an industry conference producer, and of all the conferences, summits, forums, and symposia I have worked on over the years, the largest single category must be manufacturing events. I love building events for people who build things. It helps that I worked a bunch of factory jobs to pay my way through school. I crushed rock into powder. I cooked steel until it was hard enough to cut other steel. I made brake parts for trains and gas tanks for cars. When people talk about safety training or shopfloor optimization or materials handling,…

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BLOG

The Rise of ChatGPT and How It Will Impact Businesses

April 11, 2023

At the end of November 2022 the San Francisco-based company OpenAI launched a prototype of a free artificial intelligence chatbot fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques to deliver detailed, articulate responses across a wide range of topic areas. Within five days, the chatbot —called ChatGPT in reference to the category of large language models it uses, which are known as Generative Pre-trained Transformers— had over a million users. By January, it had over 100 million users, making it the fastest growing consumer application ever to date. Within just three months on the strength of ChatGPT’s early performance, OpenAI…

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Avoiding the Curse of Shelfware

March 29, 2023

A universal fear of anyone who buys new equipment or systems for their company is that they might make the wrong choice and end up with nothing to show for their outlay of expense and effort but a never-used user manual that sits somewhere in their office, mocking them every time they look at it. Whatever they were trying to do with the best of intentions, somehow instead of hardware or software all they ended up with was shelfware. I love the word shelfware. Even just the sound of it conveys disappointment and defeat wrapped up in a vague but…

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BLOG

Fixing the Peter Principle in Large Organizations

March 24, 2023

The Peter Principle states, “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to the level of their incompetence.” This is one of those ideas that has been around so long, it has become a joke where the punchline is that everyone knows it is true. We all can think of someone who is bad at their job who got to where they are because they were great at what they were doing before. It is a serious problem that can lead to disastrous long-term results for any organization unlucky enough to have its rising talent find themselves moved upwards into…

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BLOG

Customer-Centricity, Employee-Centricity

March 21, 2023

There are business leaders in every industry who have made their careers and built competitive advantage for their companies by devoting their time and attention to being great at customer-centricity. There are business leaders —especially with HR responsibilities— in every industry who have made their companies employers of choice by devoting their time and attention to being great at employee-centricity. In a time of rapidly changing customer expectations, thinking deeply about the needs and wants of the people who buy what your business offers can be the difference between success and failure. In a time of rapidly changing employee expectations,…

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BLOG

Institutional Knowledge Retention in a Time of High Turnover

March 16, 2023

We all know a ‘go-to person’ at work. They are competent, hard-working, knowledgeable, experienced. They are who you rely upon when you have questions or need results. Sometimes we refer to these people as Top Talent, but there are also all kinds of rank-and-file employees who are the difference-makers in everything they do without being interested in climbing corporate ladders. Whatever we call them, leaders depend on them. Teams revolve around them. Businesses would struggle to function without them. When ‘The Great Resignation’ was all anyone could talk about and ‘Talent Retention’ became something every organization focused on, all of…

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BLOG, LIFE SCIENCES

A Focus on the Fundamentals During the Fastest Growth in the History of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

March 14, 2023

How fast is too fast when we are talking about the future of medicine? This is not a new question, but it is being asked at a time of unprecedented change and at the tipping point of a whole new generation of products starting to enter commercialization. Between Cell and Gene Therapy, mRNA vaccine technology, and the full width and breadth of other R&D efforts across the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical space, the drug development pipeline has grown from 11 to 21 percent since the global pandemic with no sign of slowing down. All this is happening during a time of…

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BLOG, SUPPLY CHAIN — NA

The Career Path of a Senior Supply Chain Executive

March 9, 2023

I imagine a lot of people who read this blog series also listen to our podcast series. There is a lot of connective tissue between the two in terms of content and intended audience, and of course much of what I talk about there will influence what I write here. Today I want to share something great that came up during a prep call for a future podcast interview. Now I was not recording the conversation, but this is less about quoting someone and more about walking through a way of visualizing and thinking about something that I found really…

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BLOG, FOOD SAFETY & QUALITY

Demonstrating the ROI of FSQ Digitization

March 2, 2023

One of the great challenges of Food Safety and Quality professionals is connecting what they do to the bottom line of the company, especially when they are advocating for new tools and capabilities. We have discussed this briefly before in an earlier blog post. While FSQ is vital to the success of every business that works with food, it is not a profit generator or a competitive advantage. There is also a natural and deep-seated conservatism in tinkering with what already works among the people responsible for safeguarding what we eat and drink. All this adds up to it being…

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BLOG

Does Daylight Saving Time Make Business Sense?

February 27, 2023

We are less than two weeks out from a biannual exercise that everyone seems to enjoy more by complaining about the process rather than from any benefits derived from it. As happens every time this comes around on the calendar, a lot of virtual ink is going to be spilled on what it is, why we do it, and who actually benefits from it. I thought I would do all that with a business spin at the end, in keeping with this blog’s mission statement and intended audience. What is Daylight Saving Time (DST)? Why do we do it, and…

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BLOG

Supply Chain Jargon for the Supply Chain Adjacent

February 23, 2023

Every business that buys something, sells something, or moves something has a supply chain organization. The people who spend their working lives making things arrive where and when they are needed in the quantity and quality expected are professionals, and like most professions they have developed their own vocabulary for what they are doing and what they are thinking. Today’s blog post is not for those people. For most of my columns I try to write for as many of the people in Executive Platforms’ network as possible, and supply chain leaders are probably the single largest demographic who engage…

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BLOG

The Four-Day Workweek as Another Addition to the New Normal of Work?

February 21, 2023

I want to start today’s article with a confession. I had never worked from home a day in my life until COVID-19, but now that I am in a hybrid model where I’m only in the office a couple of times a week I don’t want to ever go back to the way things were before. I am not alone. For almost two years now, survey after survey has said employees in white collar jobs discovered they liked WFH/WFA/Hybrid models a lot more than the Monday to Friday 9 to 5 of pre-pandemic times. We went through a phase we…

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BLOG

Building Towards Long-Term Goals in a Quarterly Report World

February 16, 2023

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it has been under construction every day for centuries. So many of the issues we talk about at Executive Platforms events, in this blog, and through our podcast need to be discussed within the framework of a journey, because the destination is not something that will be reached in a matter of days, or weeks, or months, or even years. In many cases organizations commit themselves to a journey knowing from the very beginning that there will never be a stopping point. A Journey of Continuous Improvement, for example, is the commitment to…

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