From the Helm Posts

[Post by Chuck Krugh, April 28, 2023] Are you a leader or a manager? Are they the same thing? Can you be both? If you are a good leader, does that mean that you’re a good manager? Is the reverse true? That may be too many questions all at once, but they are important and Read More >

[Post by Chuck Krugh, April 21, 2023] Giving my best effort in anything I do has always been important to me. I take pride in my job and in a job well done. I enjoy looking at the finished product and considering what it took to accomplish it. I usually find myself critiquing my work, Read More >

[Post by Chuck Krugh, April 14, 2023] In March, I spent some time talking to several levels of the leadership in our company about the General Dynamics business model and how we at BIW function within that model. I started each discussion by presenting a diagram that I put together about 20 years ago that Read More >

[Post by Chuck Krugh, April 7, 2023] This week, I want to talk about what I believe should be an important aspect of our individual career paths – pride in what you do. As you all know, the trade I started my career in was not shipbuilding. Using my training from the Army, I built Read More >

[Post by Chuck Krugh, April 3, 2023] Commitment is a measure of dedication or engagement to a cause. In our case, the cause is our mission to deliver high-quality ships to our Navy so they can keep our country and families safe. There is not a better cause or mission for a company than ours. Read More >

[Post by Chuck Krugh, March 24, 2023] It always hurts to hear an employee is deciding to leave “the company.” Making that decision is a deeply personal process, one that might be positive in seizing a new and perhaps unexpected opportunity. Frequently though, it is instead grounded in frustration, missing or bad information, assumptions that Read More >

[Post by Chuck Krugh, March 20, 2023] This will be a relatively short blog because I want you to take some time to think about it – consider it food for thought. Do you really need a title to lead?  Is the title something magical that makes you a leader? If you got a new Read More >

[Post by Chuck Krugh, March 14, 2023] Once upon a time, as a young senior manager in another business, I started my journey using dashboards. I was introduced to the idea during one of my MBA classes and was intrigued by how well it conveyed information. Also, I liked the idea of having a dashboard Read More >

[Post by Chuck Krugh, March 3, 2023] Viz-boards are a wonderful visual tool; they easily communicate our current performance to you, me, an area or the company as a whole. They are designed so any person can look at the information displayed and see at a glance the status of our Safety, Quality, Schedule, Cost Read More >

[Post by Chuck Krugh, February 24, 2023] In the last blog, I talked about the use of balanced scorecards and how they are developed from our strategy. Balanced scorecards help us gain a high-level understanding of how we measure our company’s progress toward our goals in terms of a numeric value. And – like the Read More >