EclecticLip

The final book in the book club’s (first?) energy trilogy was Peter Tertzakian’s A Thousand Barrels a Second.  The book came on the recommendation of a colleague, and the author’s metaphor of an energy evolution cycle seemed particularly relevant given the firm’s positioning in the clean tech / clean energy sector.

In addition, the book seemed complementary to Jeff Rubin’s Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller — it was thought that exposure to a second perspectives would add significant value and context for book club members who don’t ordinarily trawl the “energy” section of bookstores, libraries, or the web.

As always, if you find the summary useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy of the book. 

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A Thousand Barrels - summary

My attendance at a (pricey) lecture Peter Senge gave on The Necessary Revolution in 2009 was the germinal cause which led to a spate of business reading, and eventually the idea of creating a business book club at work.  As such, it was natural to eventually return to that text, in the course of book club readings.

Like other tomes in the “business adventures in sustainability” genre, Senge discusses DuPont’s 70% reduction in GHG emissions from 1990 to 2005, and Xerox’s redesign of a new copier design for 93% refurbishability, and 97% recyclability.  He supplements these with suggestions on how coalitions can be built from the bottom up, to drive organizational behaviour and develop system-wide solutions.

The book mentions Darcy Winslow, a past Director of Sustainability at Nike, who led the charge to eliminate SF6 (the most potent greenhouse gas known to man!) from the air pockets of “Nike Air” footwear.  In private correspondence, she explained the importance of reframing designers’ perceptions of the need to remove SF6: they initially perceived it as a legislative burden they didn’t want to work on, but she was able to get buy-in for the project by pushing it as a proof point of Nike’s design genius — devising a harmless alternative would prove yet again that they were the world’s best shoe designers.

As always, if you enjoy the summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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The Necessary Revolution - summary

Saw this at a friend’s house — a combination hammer / screwdriver.  With a gratuitously beautiful floral print.  (I blew the image up to show the pattern better, like what they do on the outside of cookie boxes.)

It’s part of an ingenious product line (”Pretty Useful Tools” — get it?).  Offering drab-free functionality for handymen and handywomen near you!

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Energy Shift was chosen as a book club selection for much the same reason as Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller: the company is in the alternative energy field, and so would benefit from employees knowledgeable about the energy sector.

As a policymaker-oriented volume, the book wasn’t as detailed or analysis-driven as I’d hoped.  An example comes in Chapter 2, which repeats the common refrain that energy demand will continue to rise by 2% per year for the foreseeable future.  It would seem to me that the developed world is likely to continue experiencing several years of economic malaise, in light of the debt overhang and worsening demographics.  Reduced consumer demand could somewhat dampen economic growth in developing economies as well, with a commensurate effect on energy demand.

None the less, the book was highly valuable, if only to know the kind of advice being given to movers and shakers.

As usual, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy. 

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Energy Shift - summary

Got a couple older pieces posted up, finally…  here and here.

We came back from Toy Story 3 today — a great movie, with a dense, well-plotted storyline.  (It’s amazing what happens when you invest your money in the writers, instead of star actors!  A lesson HBO clearly learned, long ago…)  Haven’t seen the latest Shrek instalment, but that’s not material to the current web post.

One of the wonderful things about ancient mythology is how storytellers would (often) amalgamate past traditions into their current narratives.  The most obvious example in the West, is how the writers of the Christian Gospel of Matthew linked everything they recorded Jesus doing, to passages the Hebrew Bible — what Christians refer to as the “Old Testament”.  (Out of respect for the Jewish tradition, I’ll be referring to them as the Hebrew Bible.)  Virgil also meshed his Aeneid to Homer’s Iliad, by linking Aeneas to Troy.

In the East, the Ashtavakra Gita linked itself to the Ramayana by adopting as its eponymous protagonist, a relatively minor character from that epic.  Doubtless, there are innumerable other examples.

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Now, the Toy Story and Shrek franchises are really interesting in that they also build on pre-existing platforms; namely, classic toys and fairy tales respectively.  As such, they’re almost like modern “remixes” of earlier cultural traditions.  And like other “adaptive refreshings” of cultural traditions, they’re doing it in today’s dominant genre, the movie.

(images from Wikipedia)

A colleague forwarded me this Washington Post article, asking my thoughts on the argument that even first-world countries need manufacturing.

I agree with the overarching premise: a country should have a manufacturing base.  After all, not everyone is destined to be a white-collar information worker; nor should we strive to create a society where everyone is.

I suspect part of Germany’s manufacturing strength comes from their proactive public policy on cleantech, but will allow that my thinking may be biased.    Though most PV panels are made in China and installed in Germany, I imagine there’s still a lot of local manufacturing done for inverters and other subsystem components.  Best of all for Germany, by adopting first, their manufacturing firms will have an advantage over French, Spanish, and other nearby counterparts when they eventually adopt the technology.

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A few days before that article, Andy Grove got some column inches in an opinion piece about how high-tech doesn’t grow as many jobs as it used to, basically because web2.0 doesn’t involve manufacturing.  Which makes sense: apps are all “knowledge work” — there’s no physical manufacturing involved.

I’d like to think Grove is arguing that there’s an overarching benefit to having some manufacturing and its associated skill sets in one’s country.  Mainly because that’s my feeling.   

There should be market niches where in-country manufacturing is cost-competitive with overseas manufacturing — especially in emerging fields where you might want to keep the IP and know-how close.  Most of W.L. Gore’s plants are in the US, for example.  And earlier-stage high-tech companies will probably want to keep manufacturing close to their technical experts — until they’ve mastered the process well enough that the factory can largely run on their own. 

To be clear, lower-tech manual assembly work will drift to the cheapest qualified labour pool (continuing its trend over the years) and there’s no advantage trying to stem that tide.  But that’s no reason for a society not to seek opportunities to develop manufacturing capabilities where know-how still counts.

This Dilbert cartoon was too good to pass up, in light of the fact that the book club covered The Halo Effect at the end of June, for its 21nd book — since the book argues that this is in fact how “serious” business authors write their books.

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A story caught my eye on July 7, about how IBM has a microchip assembly and testing facility — in Quebec.  (That’s high-cost-of-labour-environment Quebec — not low-cost-of-labour-environment China.)

The reason it’s able to do so, is because of the relentless kaizen (continuous improvement) practised there: they’re able to compete in what should be a largely outsourceable industry, through innovation.  Kaizen was one of the underpinnings of earlier book club selection, The Toyota Way.
 
While innovation won’t insulate you fully from arbitrage of labour prices, I think this example shows that (innovative, high-cost labour) can compete better than most people think, against (non-innovative, low-cost labour) and especially (non-innovative, high-cost labour).  Some excerpts from the article include:

The factory, 75 kilometres east of Montreal, started out in 1972 making Selectric typewriters. It has worked its way up to become IBM’s biggest facility for testing and assembling advanced microchips. Its products go into the planet’s most popular video-game consoles and fastest supercomputers…

“We don’t compete on labour rates, we compete on skill, on innovation, on time to market,” said Mr. Leduc, a veteran from the typewriter days, who was appointed last year to be a part-time adviser to Canada’s National Research Council…

While Canada’s productivity has crept ahead by only about 0.7 per cent a year during the past decade, managers at Bromont say their ability to harness the creativity of their work force has allowed some units to boost productivity by an impressive 10 per cent or more a year… 

“One of the greatest competitive edges a company can give themselves, especially these days, is getting each staff member to see their role in contributing to positive change,” Mr. Reid said. “There’s a massive difference between just doing the job and being a high-performance culture.”

Note: that emphasis there was my editorial contribution. 

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I suspect there’s a valid analogy to be made in the economic sphere.  An economy stocked with a million entrepreneurs, each trying to improve their business’s success, is probably going to do better over time than one where a small group decides what’s to be done and how.  That’s the basic difference between a market economy and a command economy (”central planning” is a case where the aforementioned small group is the government). 

The Koreas provide a great example.  As chronicled in Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, back in the day North Korea was richer; it was the industrial area.  South Korea exported seaweed.  Over a few decades, the South Korean government used a market economy to become unimaginably richer than its northern rival.  (Note: like virtually every other industrialized country, its government supported target industries — a practise known as indirect planning — but it let the homegrown competitors fight it out in the marketplace.)

Pulling back from global economics to the corporate level, I’d bet that — just as South Korea ultimately surpassed North Korea, despite its initial disadvantage — companies where ideas for improvement bubble up from all levels, will tend to enjoy more success, longer, than their “everybody just doing the job” counterparts.

Which sort of goes to the root of the book club.  I see it as a way I can suggest improvements, to help myself and others be that little bit more effective; speaking only for myself, I’ve got a lot of “just doing the job” years to make up for.

Over the months, one of the themes for book club selections has been self-knowledge; a tradition that goes back to the “Know Thyself” carved into the side of the Temple of the Oracle of Delphi (and surely earlier still).  As a side note, “Nothing in Excess” (the old golden mean of Aristotle) and somewhat more verbose “Make a Pledge and Mischief is Nigh” were also apparently engraved into the structure.

Given the interest in self-knowledge, Gerd Gigerenzer’s book Gut Feelings — a primary source for Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink — was a natural fit.  Gigerenzer’s data supports the idea that less is more, an idea with enormous implications when it comes to data analysis for the modern researcher / knowledge worker.

As always, if you enjoy the book review, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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Gut Feelings - summary