Decision-Making & Planning
"The chemical industry is leaving the United States, and it won't be back," said Peter Huntsman, CEO of chemical firm Huntsman Corp. "When demand picks back up, they'll build new capacity overseas--in the Middle East, Singapore and China." He was quo
| 2 min read
Turning your researchers into consultants for your customers has at least three advantages. First, in ever more fierce global competition, your firm is selling not just a product but a product and technical service. Your customers will be speaking to
| 3 min read
I've been rereading some of Peter Drucker's books on management. Even though some of these books are over thirty years old, Drucker was quite prescient in discussing trends shaping the business world and the results of these trends. Many of these res
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Laboratories face an uncertain future of more work, fewer resources, more bureaucracy, less discretionary time, more data reporting requirements and fewer experienced people with the knowledge to handle these issues. What does this mean for lab managers?
| 5+ min read
For half a century, Peter Drucker has been the gold standard by which management consultants are judged. He was the first to recognize that management is a discipline worthy of deep study. Some of his remarks in an interview published in the January
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The sell-off of the federal strategic helium reserve has driven up demand for the vital element and poses a threat to the supply that researchers need, a panel of U.S. experts reported on Friday.
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Different industries will recover from the recession at different rates. So in addition to monitoring general economic news, company managers – including lab managers – must closely track business trends in their own industry. The World Chemical Outl
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The Anglo Platinum Group, the world's leading primary producer of platinum metals, recently identified a pressing need to implement more efficient ways to analyse its geological assay data, and turned to Octoplus and the SAS JMP data visualisation tool.
| 4 min read
There are many reasons why projects fail and this will be the subject of my next blog. Right now we'll talk about why you might want to make projects fail early and how you can design projects to for early failure. This seems crazy but there is metho
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The beginning of a new year, let alone a new decade, is the perfect time to rethink the processes used in your lab to procure new equipment. Thanks to evolving online resources, forward-thinking print media content and new solutions offered by vendors, there is likely room in every lab buyer's procedure for improvement.
| 3 min read
From screening job candidates to benchmarking laboratory performance and energy use, today's lab managers have a cornucopia of online tools to choose from.
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What leads individuals to pursue a career in freelancing? What do they find most appealing about free-agent work in the scientific industry? In order to better understand the positives of contract scientific employment, Rich Pennock interviewed four former and current freelance scientists.
| 5 min read
