Managers Don't Know Any Better!Written by Fred Mercer
Managers Don’t Know Any Better!90% of managers today haven’t slightest clue about how to perform their jobs. If they did we wouldn’t have astonishingly high business failure rate, or job movement. But our managers have never been properly shown or explained on how to perform. Yet they’re so important to overall outcome. No matter what your position is today, we’ve all had wonderful job experience at some point in our life (maybe now) where you felt uninspired, lacking in confidence, confused, stressed, tired and more than anything frustrated every day! And didn’t know what you would do about it. You probably spent far too much time in this ‘gray zone’ and wasted valuable personal time, plus your company’s time. I’m talking specifically about when person directly responsible for your results (your manager or supervisor) was seemingly ‘against’ you every day, always just riding your tail to force productivity from you, and never agreeing with your thoughts or ideas. When you desperately needed improved results but they just are not coming. Did you know, that probably wasn’t your fault at all? (Ok time you took a quick nap during your work hours was your fault). But no person that is being ‘coached’ properly in their job would ever dream, or need to take a nap…or consider any other obvious productivity waster. Managers are largely unsuccessful in their jobs because no-one has ever explained to them importance of ‘coaching’ their team to success. That’s right ‘coaching’! Standing with a whip and screaming and yelling at tigers to make them jump through a ring of fire might work in circus, but that’s where it belongs…and certainly not in today’s workplace. Monitoring height of your plants or amount of seeds that sprouted each week, and then adjusting triggers that make them grow (water, light, heat, soil, etc..) works in garden, but NOT with human beings. Empowering people on your team, or those you are directly responsible for, is KEY to attaining any level of success. To prove this point think of a time right now where you felt very important to an outcome. When inside you felt like leader. You had so much to give and it was bursting out of you. You were excited and eager to get going. You were enjoying yourself tremendously and time was flying by. You were using your strengths and knew that any positive outcome was based on your participation. Whether it’s playing on a beach volleyball team, singing in a choir, playing in a team golf tournament, completing a research project on time, attracting customers at a company booth, selling a car, helping a neighbour put up his Christmas lights, analyzing a report, fixing a computer, leading a meeting…whatever. That wonderful feeling existed because you were empowered. You were naturally using a strength of yours and were connected to effort. You were giving it 100% easily. Now imagine for a few seconds that feeling existed in all employees in your company, existed within you every day at work, existed within your team….what do you think your results would look like?
| | Molding Dreams into Reality, Art to Part in PlasticsWritten by Steve Koons
Art to Part in Plastics: Molding Dreams into Reality An introduction to Injection Molding. Every plastic product you see needs to be shaped, and most common method is Injection Molding. Most people using their computer to read this give no thought to how all those plastic parts were formed. Or how complex and expensive it is even to produce a ballpoint pen. Just about every part made of plastic these days is formed using some kind of an injection mold, from tiny precision parts that can barely be seen to large automotive exterior parts. Just about every industry relies on some kind of injection mold for their products. Injection molding is forcing of molten plastic into a shaping cavity. An injection molding machine has three basic components: 1)Injection. Plastic pellets are fed into a hopper and then heated up. Once they are melted they are injected under extremely high pressure into a mold. 2)Mold. This is a custom designed tool for shaping and cooling melted plastic. Two halves are precisely designed with cavities for shaping of part, channels for cooling molten plastic, and an ejection system. 3)Clamping. This is part of machine that holds removable mold in place, keeps two halves together during molding, and opens mold for part ejection. Molds are complex and must be of heavy-duty construction since they are subjected to a considerable amount of pressure. They are usually carved/milled out of aluminum or steel blocks and contain many different parts such as mold base, clamp plates, support plates, ejector plates and pins, guide pins, sprue puller pins, and of course, two cavities with channels for molted plastic flow, cooling and/or secondary heating units. The mold is most expensive part of injection molding, with molds ranging from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Think about that next time you use that cheap plastic pen.
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