Pilgrims in an Unholy Land

Wed, 18 May 2005 11:36:03 GMT

Time is running out!

How American Management Destroys a Good Idea (Again)

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 12:00:32 GMT

Came across a post about GTD and 5S (on Blog before you Think! via 43Folders links). The post included a listing of the 5 S's:

SEIRI: create tidyness. Throw away all unused stuff, file away the rest.
SEITON: keep evertything at the right place. Keep the tools you need accessible, hide materials you don't need regularly.
SEISO: keep your (work-)space clean, remove all traces from the previous task before starting the next.
SEIKETSU: develop a personal sense for organizing your things. Develop routines, optimize your system according to your needs.
SHITSUKE: stay disciplined doing the above, make it a habit and permanent practice.

5S is a management practice? system of organization? that originated in Japan to go along with Kaizen, a periodic reexamination and restructuring of manufacturing production practices (although it can be and is extended effectively to other work of a routine nature). I haven't read any of the original authors of these strategies, so my comments are based only on my brief read of several articles. Number one impression-these are great ideas when you read the original version, just as Deming's 14 points are great ideas when read as they were intended. However, somehow American business management manages to destroy the intended meaning when they implement these very thoughtful strategies. Let's see how my last employer implemented 5S. First off, all the names were changed to some insipid english variant--all right, I suppose for most people the English mnemonic is easier to remember. I can't remember what terms management used nor do I know Japanese, so maybe they translated correctly. Here's how the implementation went (and why, and some undesired outcomes).

Step one: Throw away everything that isn't used every day. In the manufacturing areas, reasonably rational. In the R&D area, this meant all the stored fittings that we used to make prototypes and test competitors product. Result: Every time we needed fittings, a trip to the local building store, or worse, order at 3x the price from a vendor who would deliver tomorrow, because waiting is "sandbagging". Another example: the supporting arm for a computer monitor, scavenged from another area and stored for a time we knew we would need it. Tossed out, 3 months later, purchased an identical monitor support because we needed it. Step two: Implemented as "Label everything".
One group labeled everything, including snacks, items with obvious function and decorative items. The sarcasm was completely missed by the target executive, who gave them an award for best implementation. Step three: Implemented as "put away everything on your desk every night". This completely disregarded the time required for many people to collect and arrange research materials in a fashion that reflected the non-linear, inter-related nature of the tasks. Also ignored was the meaning of the seiso step-recognizing that multi-tasking decreases productivity (see alsoMulti-tasking makes you stupid [PDF]. Naturally, multitasking was evidence to these people that you were working as fast as possible, because as fast as possible meant you were productive.
Step four: Implemented as the executive in charge coming around to review progress and tell people what they needed to change in their personal work space. One person was told they had too many pens (because they had two containers of pens). Two people sitting side by side: one was told their cube was an example to others, and the other was told they had too many achievement and training completion certificates on the wall. The difference in number of certificates was about 3. These items were on the wall, not in the workspace. They did not affect the flow of work (both did all their work on the conputer). I'm not sure how executive review even constitutes "developing a personal sense" and "optimize your system to your needs". The underlying problem with American business management as I have experienced it, is the attitudes of the people who are in it. They say they want to acheive a goal, but their need for power/control/status makes them blind, blind, blind to the effect of their decisions. They evaluate their employees by superficial observation--this guy moves fast and speaks the company line, therefore he must be acheiving something. Never mind that he is lying on people's performance reviews to hide the lack of acheivement. Nothing's getting done? Why, it is that guy's fault, he isn't doing what you want (because guy X understands that what is being asked won't get us to the stated goal, and wants to do what will, actually, achieve the goal). But hey, we are doing things as fast as possible, so we must be accomplishing something. Who can blame us because we never reach our goal? Do you, a business executive, want to acheive your goals? Then STOP. THINK. PLAN. MEASURE THE CONSEQUENCES, GOOD AND BAD. MODIFY YOUR APPROACH. And it wouldn't hurt you to discuss how things really work with the people who implement your strategies. Your status doesn't depend on making as many decisions as possible, but ACHIEVING as many GOALS as possible. Carly made a ton of decisions, and proved her power over all the VP's she fired. HP, as a company, has to clean up the mess left behind. I'm not bagging on Carly the person, I'm bagging on the prevalent American business mentality that she is a product of. Carly did what most of American businessMEN and businessWOMEN do, act first, think later, think short-term (no more than the quarterly results), because that is behavior that shareholders demand and reward.

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 04:00:07 GMT

Classes start again tomorrow and I have today off. The logical thing to do would be to organize my study area, complete dangling home responsibilities, clean off obsolete files from my hard drive and buy my books. So what am I doing? Why, surfing the web, of course! I finally took the plunge and signed up for the bookmark service del.icio.us -- you can find my list here. I've been trying to merge my Camino and Safari bookmark lists... It's just a mess, so this was one way to get the essentials where I can reach them, no matter where I am. I love to swim in a sea of information, but that's not enough. I want to DO something with the information, and to do that, I have to be able to FIND it again. Still struggling with a way to do it that doesn't have overly frustrating limitations. I love VooDoo Pad for the ease of creating links between information, the wiki support and the open data format, am frustrated that I can't use a keyboard shortcut to append to an existing document, and that creating a new page from the Services meno is a two-step process. It breaks my flow to have to switch to give the page a name before I can continue my research, and to add the url. I appreciate StickyBrain's rich set of controls and the transparent saving of information from a web page and the recent addition of Palm support, but I really dislike the proprietary data format, and heartily resent the misleading marketing that has implied since version 2.0 that you can grab text and pictures at the same time from any web browser, when in fact it is only from Safari (and that only in the more recent versions of Safari) and IE. And they continue to misrepresent this capability in their advertising for v3.1. But, in an attempt to fight my N.A.D.D., which causes me to spend more time worrying about my systems than worrying about the work they are supposed to produce, I am going to have to pick one and move on. Heh, maybe I'll just use my WordPress bookmarklet to collect my info in one on-line place, but what about security??? Is the password protection hackable?

< pause to check>
See WordPress web site
Check new mail
Go to meeting on campus
Go grocery shopping
Unpack groceries
Eat lunch (at 2)
Fall asleep
Wake up and greet spouse
Cook dinner
Eat dinner
Clean up
Notice this post is still unposted
< unpause check >

So, quite obvious I have N.A.D.D. Well, no real answer on the hackability, but a lot of anti-comment-spam plugins. And advice on doing htaccess files. So that's a possibility. But I think I need to pull out the database book and figure out how to stick a front end on the work database, then make out lists of plans and actions for all my projects. OK, guess I've got my work cut out for me.

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 04:02:07 GMT

I used to work with someone who worried that she wasn't creative. First off, she shouldn't have worried, because the company we worked for didn't value creativity anyway, just doing what you were told without thinking about it. She excelled at doing what she was told and not thinking about it, and I did not. Hence why I no longer work there. Never was too good at coloring inside the lines either, more prone to doodling in the margins. I sucked at elementary school art, not because I was a bad artist, but because when it was time to draw a leaf, I was drawing something different. And I'm better in 3-D than 2-D anyway, because I can see the 3-D in my head. Useful for visualizing molecules and solid-fluid interactions, but it blocks out the verbalization routines, so I can see it, but can't describe it without a great effort. But I digress-here's a vital quote from an article at Fast Company | The Care and Feeding of the Creative Class.

The essential difference between creative workers and everybody else is that their work product is a personal expression of who they are. As a result, they're more emotionally exposed than other workers and more vulnerable to criticism. "You're really putting yourself out there," says Williams. While a certain amount of rejection is inevitable, Williams says it's important to explain why some ideas don't pass muster. Otherwise, he says, creatives have no understanding of where they went off the rails - and no way to improve. "I've watched their fragile hearts die when a client says, 'This is just crap,' " he says. Managers can minimize failure by being very specific about a project's objectives. "Giving boundaries to creatives is not restrictive," Williams says. "It's directive."

My observation of life and myself is, you have to be emotionally involved to be creative, be obsessed with getting it right, not just getting it done without regard to the sufficiency of the outcome. That emotional involvement conflicts with the modern business world philosophy "Get it done as fast as possible". These are mutually exclusive mindsets, and attempting to "get it right" in an environment of "get it done fast by cutting corners" leads to enormous mental and physical stress. My colon will attest to that, and thanks me for getting out of there. So, if you want to be creative, be prepared to deal with the emotional pain of having your work taken for granted, at best, or criticized or worse. Are you willing to pay the price?

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 03:00:07 GMT

This speaks for itself, don't you think?

While the Graphing Calculator story works in one sense as a "Dilbert"-esque parable, it's ultimately a reminder that what drives our very best work is not necessarily the almighty buck.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6777636/site/newsweek/

Check Your Backup Strategy

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 20:58:54 GMT

I found a hole in my backup strategy. Middle of October, my laptop died for the 5th time. Unlike previous times, it wasn't a video issue, where I could hook up as a Firewire target drive and slurp off my files. This time, it was well and truly dead - no response at all to the power key. Fortunately, I had backed up my user folder two days before, so the important school files were saved. But, my strategy did not include my Library folder, and that is where the email files are stored. Nor did my strategy include my applications folder, and Radio stores the weblog files in its application folder. My most recent copy of the Radio root file was 6 months old. If I were to start Radio, the old copy would overwrite all the stuff I posted, including trip pictures, etc. It took almost a month and a comedy of errors to finally get a return shipping label. With the excellent assistance of Apple Customer Relations, I got a replacement laptop, and was able to get caught up on schoolwork in time for the second round of mid-terms. So today's task (more study avoidance) was to recreate all the posts that did not exist in the local copy. My procedure was to use Web Devil to download a local copy of all the linked html documents. Turn off Airport (so no internet connection), launch Radio and turn off upstreaming. Then I set the laptop's date and time to the date of each post I needed to recreate, plug in some text for placeholder and post (not publish). Once my placeholders were created witht he proper date, I set the clock back to the proper time and opened my local Web Devil copies of the missing posts. Copy and paste the HTML from the page source into the Radio edit page for each post, and after 2 hours of work, voila! The posts recreated. Now to fix my backup strategy. I think a regular copy of the Radio root file to the desktop Mac would be in order. Oh, and I bought a 200Gb hard drive to stick in a Firewire case for making backups. I sure hope this laptop is not cursed like the last one.

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:58:58 GMT

Well, why the heck not???

I have mentioned in the past couple posts about having a new job. The first week is over, and things have gone pretty well. My role is (continuing) the experimental production of 3D engineered wood-based wet-formed composites to compare with finite element models developed by the principal researcher. Previous research assistants made flat panel product to get initial material parameters for the FEM, and tested the initial 3D prototype molds. I will be making modifications to improve the reproducibility and reduce the incidence of non-uniformity, and making panels for mechanical testing to compare the FEM and actual product results. I get to learn CAD software, FT-NIR (Fourier Transform-Near Infrared) for pulp characterization, possibly Neutron Densitometry for finished panel density profiles. It's a complex subject (I love complexity), and I have already been told that getting it right is very important. I like that emphasis. Oh, and there are societal benefits to this-the source material comes from usually unmarketable small or crooked timber in the fire-prone western stands, so it helps reduce forest fires and improve sustainable economies. The process is designed to be operated by small scale producers-mom and pop or small entrepreneurs, and to use agricultural fiber, recycled paper or corrugated cardboard as alternate fiber sources. Panel strength has been shown to be as good as equivalent thickness particle board, using 1/3 the fiber.

But enough nattering, time to focus on getting my lab report done for class....