EclecticLip

(originally written Jan 25)

I’m in training pretty much the whole week — which fact one of my horoscopes must’ve predicted.  I mean, there are so many of them floating out there, that one of them must’ve been right!

 

The past couple days covered FMEA, an engineering topic so obscure I’ll give the unabbreviated name (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) and immediately move the story forward.  We were fortunate to have had a great teacher — a grizzled veteran of industry who tossed out great one-liners such as:

 

"an FMEA without action [items] is called Charmin — because if you print it on softer paper, THEN it has a function"

         (Charmin is a brand of what polite butlers would refer to as ‘bathroom tissue’)

 

"product development is a failure factory"

 

          ….as well as the sentence clause,

" — not that it ever happens here — "

 

delivered each time he described a wince-worthy product development process which had indeed, never happened here. 

 

He also described how a good FMEA meeting ideally comprises the design engineer, a reliability engineer, a facilitator, and a fourth engineer playing the role of "The Opposer".  (Or as they say in the Biblical Hebrew, "Satan".    )

 

 

It turns out this fellow was a co-op student at Ford when FMEA’s were brought there in the 1970’s, due to the tendency of the Ford Pinto to explode in rear-end collisions, as a $4-per-vehicle fix was deemed too expensive.  Though to be fair, that doesn’t account for inflation; according to an unverified internet source, such a fix would cost a whopping $20 today.  That totally changed your perspective, didn’t it? 

 

In crisis, Ford brought in experts from NASA — which had regrettably extensive experience with exploding products — who brought in this FMEA technique.  So, as our teacher wryly noted, FMEA’s are actually rocket science, ported over from the Space Program which invented them.  The very Space Program which employed a colleague on an unsuccessful Mars Lander.  (Not the one which missed the planet; the other one, which stopped phoning home.)

 

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Come to think of it, it’s turning out to be quite the lesson week for me.  At the weekend gold show — bereft of decent freebies, apart from some USB drives — the busiest company booth was from some no-name junior exploration company (read "investing lottery-ticket") which had set up a big-screen TV, broadcasting the big Packers-Bears NFL game.  During commercial breaks, the marketing rep would mute the screen and begin a spiel about how "today’s game is brought to you by XYZ Resources; we have millions in cash flow, hot properties, and you need to buy our stock" — though better-finessed than my paraphrase.  They even had a functioning popcorn-maker to feed the crowd.  Pure genius.  Pity his company has a snowball’s chance in hell.  

 

Then there was the fellow I bumped into, wearing a suit; made of brown corduroy.  See, lessons all around! 

To a classical studies aficionado, one-time richest man in the world Bill Gates triggers thoughts of Alexander the Great.  Both men straddled the world with then-unparalleled might.  And both are arguably less accomplished than their parents.

Philip of Macedon came out of nowhere to make Macedon the leading power of Greece.  Sure, Alexander took things to the next level — but he had the advantage of all the legwork dad Philip had done, to put his son in such an enviable position.

Bill Gates III, software baron, was the son of Bill Gates*, corporate lawyer, whose hard work made it possible for Bill III to attend an exclusive prep school which was privileged enough to have a chunk of time on a GE computer.  He was able to capitalize on that head start in life, to great effect — and good for him.  But his accomplishment might pale in comparison to what his father (and other forebears) made of less-privileged beginnings.
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* in one of those stranger than fiction scenarios, Bill Gates (the lawyer) was the son of Bill Gates II.  But since the lawyer didn’t use the affectation “III”, this passed to his son (the software baron).  As such, Bill Gates III is the son of Bill Gates, the son of Bill Gates II.  So weird, it could come out of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy…

Not originally intended as a book club selection, the insights of John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future on biological succession in the natural environment, seemed to effortlessly explain trends in the energy sector.  On these grounds, its arguments and speculations were deemed highly relevant to company employees, given the firm’s involvement in high-tech energy systems.

In brief, Greer argues that deforested areas are likely to be dominated at first by weeds, which reproduce rapidly.  Over time, however, efficiency counts more than growth rates, and so such areas tend to return to forest, which cycle nutrients more effectively.  In the short run, speed wins; in the long run, efficiency counts.

The energy technology parallel could be that fossil fuels have held a key advantage for centuries, on account of their being ease of exploitation.  (As with weeds, their inefficiency with respect to GHG emissions could have been a small weakness relative to their scalability.)  Energy technologies currently being pursued offer better efficiency (lower “carbon intensity”) but are generally unable to scale rapidly.  Solar panels, wind turbines, fuel cells and even nuclear power plants generally require a much larger up-front investment of energy and money, than their fossil-fuel counterparts.

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

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The Ecotechnic Future - summary

Recently finished Daemon and Freedom, Daniel Suarez’ two-part semi-dystopic vision of the future.  I say semi-dystopic because they weren’t all bad news.  Loved them both, for the fact that they informed of the capabilities of computational power today — in a seamless manner that didn’t slow the action of the story.  In this feat, they reminded me of Gore Vidal’s Creation, the master’s bracing tale spanning pretty much the entirety of 5th-century-BC Eurasia.  Which, come to think of it, might be deserving of a re-read, about now…

On the surface, Daemon is a story in the “machine turns on its creator” genre.  Like “2001″.  And “Frankenstein”.  And for that matter, the Bible.    Freedom builds on this to reveal a clash between two competing visions for the future.

More profoundly, the dyad explores how our social/societal structures may change in the coming decades, based on the interplay of our current crises and the capacities of new technology.  All wrapped up in a masterful storyline.  With fiction like that, who needs textbooks? 

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note: Suarez has also given a lecture at the Long Now Foundation, well worth the invested time.  It’s available here.  Most intriguing to me was the idea that in a short time, bots will begin to outnumber humans online.  We won’t be the dominant “species”. 

It seems somehow analogous to the apparent fact that mutual funds outnumber stocks, in the investment sector: the derivative species (bots, mutual funds) ultimately flourishing more than the original species it interacts with (humans, stocks).

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm was chosen as the seventh book for the book club.  I’d come across it in an undergraduate course, and thought its treatment of the technology adoption lifecycle was relevant in light of the book club members being in the tech sector.

Moore’s insight was that, for disruptive innovations, there was a large gap — the titular “chasm” — between innovators and early adopters.  To mangle my metaphors in the manner of Thomas Friedman, many a would-be tech titan has shipwrecked itself trying to cross the chasm to the Shangri-La of profitability.

As usual, if you consider the review useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book — or by enlisting his consultancy’s services. 

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Crossing the chasm - summary

(originally written March 17.  Posted March 28) 

The recent issue of TIME magazine included a scribbling by someone named Reihan Salam.  His article “The Dropout Economy” is somewhat sensationalistic and largely unnoteworthy, except for the fact that it directly references the writings of a guy named John Robb, whose ideas on “resilient communities” were footnoted in the article I co-wrote for McKinsey last year, on the future of energy.

Which means that my company’s thought leadership is a full year ahead of the curve of TIME magazine’s ever-shrinking readership.  And based on a quick search of The Economist’s website, they haven’t even heard of the term. 

Robb — a former US Air Force guy who helped mainstream RSS feeds — posits that due to a confluence of factors (financial, demographic, technological) the nation-state is going to be under tremendous pressure in the coming decades.  As a result, communities will reorient themselves to resiliency as opposed to efficiency.  (His blog is here.)

This might be best understood through analogies:

- Redmond’s Technosaurus Rex beat out its corporate competition in the PC era.  But its dominance has eroded in the face of competition from decentralized, ad hoc open-source code.  (Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice and others)

- humans are the dominant animals: with our tools, we can overcome any creature we run into in sky, street or sea.  But we don’t look so kingly compared to bacteria: they can develop immunity to our antibiotics faster than we can invent new ones

- the US is the world’s hyperpower: it can overwhelm all its rival nation-states.  But like all countries, it’s struggling to deal with threats from terrorist cells, which can be small enough to “fly under the radar” of the traditional defense mechanisms (police, armed forces)

In the past half-century at least, there’s been a strong advantage for communities and countries to be organized on the basis of efficiency, at the expense of resiliency.  As such, our world is one of faraway power plants and overseas supply chains.  Like Robb, I think the pendulum is swinging (for at least a couple decades) towards resiliency; it will be seen as advantageous enough, even if it seems more expensive than efficiency.  And *that* creates the kind of opening that fuel cells and other on-site power generation technologies can richly exploit. :)

It might seem strange to talk of Web Classical Studies (net Antiquity?) but it’s been, what, ten Moore’s Law doublings since 1995?

But sticking to the topic of web Classical Studies, this Web 1.0 retrospective made me chuckle.  Especially the part about 36 k modems.  We use Journyx for our timesheets at work, and it sure feels like a 36 k connection…  or maybe even a 14.4…

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A story I’d seen in the Globe and Mail fell by the wayside when I’d first marked it for follow-up.  I rediscovered it when periodically ploughing up old links, searching for overlooked or under-regarded treasure.

(a) the Green Revolution has not, by and large, provided sustainably higher yields than organic agriculture

(b) organic farming can feed the world.

(All but one of the seven links above point to different datasets — and that odd-one-out, from Grist, has additional data cited in one of the first comments.)

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The Vancouver gold show was this weekend. Sadly, the freebies were scant this time around, even worse than during the “great lamentation” of mid-2005. The most creative one was from a company doing work in Australia, giving away monogrammed boomerangs. (Made in China, of course.)

Intriguingly, the free plastic bags featured additives from local company epi; they’re supposed to disintegrate the plastic into powdered pellets, over the course of a few months. I’d run into epi at an environmental show a few years back; they seem to’ve made some progress getting their products out there. It’ll be interesting to follow their business arc over the next few years.

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A couple days ago, I came across two articles about Nippon Oil’s plans to JV their way into solar power and fuel cells production, respectively.  Both projects are with Sanyo (recently taken over by Panasonic, the new official name of Japanese behemoth Matsushita Electric).

This struck me as inspirational, because Nippon Oil is Japan’s largest oil company!  Its core competency, or comparative advantage, is fossil fuels and petrochemicals.  But instead of choosing to fight a bruising, unethical, long rear-guard action to deny global warming or defend its old ways…  management has decided the company needs to evolve.
It’s reminiscient of the decision by pulp-mill / tire-maker Nokia to get into telecommunications.  I’m sure there were doubters — especially since their telco division took seventeen years to turn a profit.  But was it worth it in the end?  I’m sure every Nokia shareholder would now vote “yes”.

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