Don’t Retrain

An important part of maintaining a Quality Management System (QMS) is taking action when a nonconformance to a requirement is discovered during inspection, review or some type of audit.  The expectation is that an investigation is performed and the Root Cause of the...

Don’t Just Do It

Yeah, I know.  The “just do it” mantra is thrown at us constantly.  I was just at a conference where this was the header of a slide in a presentation.  I get it, having a bias for action is good, but in my experience “just do it” is typically followed by “do it again”...

Don’t Set Priorities

Have you ever been told that you need rethink your priorities?  That can be good advice, but I will add this twist:  you can only have one.  The plural form of priority was invented in the 1900s and the term “priorities” didn’t really show up in print until around the...

Don’t Manage

I’ve never liked the title of Manager.  Because Managers, well, manage.  I don’t like to manage, and I don’t like to be managed.  To me, manage means “to scrape by” or “make do”.  This sounds very similar to “do more with less” that I spoke negatively about in my last...

Don’t Do More with Less

Have you ever been told that you need to “do more with less”? I have.  And I think this has become more prevalent during the COVID pandemic where many organizations continue to be short staffed.  But honestly, this was always a thing.  Companies have always had...

Don’t Make Them Feel Needed

I just finished a book titled The Capitalist Philosophers by Andrea Gabor.  One chapter focused on Elton Mayo who the author (partially) attributed the invention of corporate “human relations”.  This was a great contrast to the very popular “scientific management”...