Thought of the Day - Hacking

I love the spirit of hacking (the traditional rather than computer definition of the word), taking something and making it fit your needs. Alas i there are limitations to my hacking ability: computers, electronics, mechanical things; sure, more traditional craft things; not so much.

I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers shoes and while they are very comfortable i can't really use them everywhere without socks. Normal socks won't stretch and separate enough around my toes, so i thought i could hack them (literally) into shape. Alas my sewing skills are not quite up to par, after an hour i had neatly sewed lines in so i could cut toe sized slots in the socks. While i did manage to get 5 pockets, unfortunately only 3 of them were large enough to accommodate my toes ... Doh!

The moral of the story is while £60 seems a lot for socks, the time and effort (and socks) i would have wasted perfecting this hack would be better spent on other things. Fortunately Injinji make some lovely high performance socks that fit my needs perfectly, so time to bite the financial bullet.

Book Notes - The Art Of War For Managers

The Art Of War For Managers by Gerald A Michaelson [2001]

Summary:
“Know the enemy and know yourself and you will never be defeated.”
Interplay of strategy and tactics; strategy is the plan, tactics are the implementation.
Information and speed are the key to winning.
Attacking head-on is rarely the best approach, find your niche and expand from there.

Notes:
Page 3: A plan that is not written down is no plan at all, a simple written plan is best.
Page 4: Unlike Tzu’s constant factors for the battlefield in business they are much simpler, you must study:
1. The ‘mission’ of the company.
2. The outside factors (industry/economic trends etc).
3. The marketplace.
4. The leaders.
5. The guiding principles.
Page 13: It is important to for start-ups to have sufficient reserves to ride-out downturns and to tide them over between launch and profitability. As they say; “Profit is king, but cash rules” you can survive without profit but you can’t survive without cash.
Page 27: Have two types of edict; instructions and orders. Instructions are issued as guidelines, to be followed if practical. Orders are to be followed immediately and to the letter but can only be given by someone on the ground in the situation. This prevents stupid decisions being made above.
Page 29: Fundamental principles of business:
1. Organize Intelligence
2. Maintain Objectives
3. Establish A Secure Position
4. Keep On The Offensive
5. Plan Surprise
6. Think Manoeuvre
7. Concentrate Resources
8. Practice Economy Of Force
9. Keep It Simple
Page 31: Strategy always comes before tactics, while a good strategy might succeed even with poor tactical execution, a poor strategy even with superlative tactics will almost never succeed. It is therefore important to make sure that you are heading in the right strategic direction before you determine tactics.
Page 32: “Boil the ocean” appears to be a reference to one strategist’s suggestion for how to get rid of German u-boats in the second world war.
Page 38: Customer input is a vital operational measure, it is key to improved performance and winning. Use of balanced scorecard suggested to keep track of financial and non-financial, lagging and leading measures.
Page 44: The use of extraordinary force to ensure victory, this can be applied on a macro level; a company focusing all efforts to ensure that they take a market or on the micro level; a person focusing all of their effort on a particular task.
Page 51: Keep your products secret until the last minute, it removes the ability of your competitors to plan a response. Apple does this particularly well.
Page 63: Reference to Tyco going from $2b to $30b in 6 years, ironically it was under the CEO who ended up in jail. Book probably written before those events.
Page 67: The rule of three: never make more than 3 points in any one communication, if you make more some of the points are likely to be forgotten. Keep it simple and direct.
Page 77: 5 faults of leadership:
1. Recklessness, which leads to destruction,
2. Cowardice, which leads to capture,
3. A hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults,
4. A delicacy of honour, which is sensitive to shame,
5. Over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble.
Page 91: Acknowledging the role of known standards of performance so that the leader can be perceived as impartial and can set discipline to achieve standards.
Page 93: The importance of going to the gemba for managers to inform their intuition and knowledge of the real situation.
Page 95: It is important to have direct communication with the people on the ground, often information is filtered as it goes up the chain which means you might not be getting all pertinent information. Create relationships with a select few people further down the chain so that you can get direct information.
Page 110: Information on personal survival and career paths.
Page 169: Summary of key concepts.

Quotes:
Page 6: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything will look like a nail.”
Page 14: “While we have heard of stupid haste in war, we have not yet seen a clever operation that was prolonged.”
Page 22: “To subdue the enemy without fighting is supreme excellence.”
Page 39: “Where everyone decides everything, no one decides anything.”
Page 65: “Do not do what your enemy wants, if for no other reason than he wants it.”
Page 72: “The key to success is what the customer wants, not what you can do.”
Page 78: “When was the last time anyone said; ‘I wish I had waited 6 months longer to fire that guy’” – Jack Welch
Page 81: “Logic sounds most convincing to the presenter; it is in the emotions of the receiver that positions are changed.”
Page 101: “Know the enemy and know yourself and you will never be defeated.”
Page 112: “Too often, the absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy.”
Page 116: “When you can win and retain good relationships, only then can you become strong.”

Thought of the Day - Longest Day

Is it just me or is it vaguely depressing knowing that in 1 month the days will start getting shorter again? Most people think summer is great but past the 22nd of June i just find it sad to know that for the next 6 months there is going to be less and less daylight until the middle of winter.

Thought of the Day - Reliance On Google

I am starting to get a bit worried about how much i rely on Google:

Search - Just about every search i do is through Google, i don't remember the last time i did a search on a competitors site and the only regular time i don't search in Google is when i know what i'm looking for will be in Wikipedia and i start there.
Gmail - for the last 5 years all my personal e-mail has been through Gmail, in one way it is great because i have a great search tool to sift through so much information, in another way Google has a lot of personal information and what happens if i ever lose access to it.
Gchat - Chat from within Gmail with my friends with Gmail accounts.
iGoogle - Customized homepage that aggregates mail notifications, various news sites and various links i use frequently.
Blogger - Hosts this blog.
Google Analytics - Used to track traffic through various websites (including this blog).
Google Checkout - Used instead of paypal on some occasions.

More recently i have started using:
Google Bookmarks - Currently i have dozens of tabs open in 3 Firefox windows, most of which i don't look at on anything approaching a regular basis but don't want to close incase i lose or forget them. I also have various bookmark and favourites lists on different computers none of which are linked. I also have various backups of my bookmarks that never quite made it between computer upgrades.
Google Web History - Cataloguing all of my web viewing activity at home, useful if i forget to bookmark something or wonder how much time i waste online.


So what happens if Google ever; become evil, start charging for some of the products, disappear, are hacked, withdraw certain services etc etc? Frankly i'm kinda screwed. In one way it is great to have everything aggregated in one place, but in terms of risk mitigation it does feel like i have all of my eggs in one basket.

Thought of the Day - More Entertainment Musings

Sadly i have a soft spot for romantic comedies. Sure the plots tend to be predictable and paper thin, often they are neither romantic or comedic and as a general rule i prefer films to have a little more edge, but i am inexplicably drawn to the RomCom.

Why, i don't know, but i can sit and watch the worst dreck Hollywood has to offer and come back for more. I genuinely have no idea why i enjoy RomComs but i do.

Thought of the Day - Electronic Minimalism

Really random thought, but one of the best things about the electronic age is that you can dramatically reduce your number of physical possessions while still retaining the benefits of having them. Do you really need all of those CD's or can you rip them and keep them all on an iPod or portable Hard Drive. Heck maybe you can even upload them somewhere so that you have zero space requirement and can access them everywhere. The same goes for films, books and many other things. You could probably compress all of the 'media' you have onto a single removable hard drive, hook it up to a network and you can access it worldwide or take it with you.

But while it may be minimalistic physically it is the opposite of minimalism mentally. If anything because of the reduced space requirements it encourages us to keep everything all the time. Personally i keep a lot of things (both physical and electronic) 'just in case' but it is much easier to justify the electronic, it doesn't take up any space and hey it might come in handy in the future. The sad fact is that electronic clutter is probably even worse than physical. Just because you have everything stored doesn't mean that you will be able to find what you are looking for, think of all of the disparate locations; CD-R's, DVD-R's, hard drives, online services etc. None of them are linked and unless you are very sad (and create a database of all of you files) there isn't a way to search them all at once. Worse still is the volatility of most of the above, the dye in CD-R's and DVD-R's fades over time rendering the discs useless, hard drives fail, websites shut down or change their terms of use all the time. Not to mention file types and connections that rapidly become obsolete. Combine all of that together and even if you can find where something should be you still might not have access to it.

Real minimalism should be physical and mental, shedding everything you don't need on a regular basis and getting rid of things once you have consumed them.

Thought of the Day - Idea Execution

My idea execution sucks. As with just about everything else i try, whenever i put an idea into practice i am kind of ok at it but not great. Hmmm not terribly clear, an example might help.

When i was a bit of an audiophile i took it into my head to build a headphone amp. There aren't many sensibly priced commercially available ones and you can build a pretty decent one really cheaply. So i bought some soldering equipment, some parts and set set about trying to learn to solder and build electronics. Only it turned out that while i could solder and get a working headphone amp it was never going to be elegant.

What i am wondering is whether i just suck at execution and am desitned to live in my mind or whether i just don't give each skill required enough time to develop.

Thought of the Day - Customer Focus

What my jobs have been missing is customer focus. Sure i have had internal customers but its not the same as engaging with a real end user, someone who chooses to pay for the product, who uses it directly for its intended purpose and who's life you could make better.

Sure i may have bitched and moaned about customers and the public in the past and there are certain aspects of customer service that would drive me insane. But talking to the customer to understand their needs and coming up with solutions that exceed the customers expectations really appeals to me. Alas while my job in LifeScan somewhat involved that, i was never allowed to talk to real customers, heck i wasn't even supposed to talk to marketing. In my current job i couldn't be more isolated from the real customers if i tried, there is zero customer focus and it frustrates the hell out of me.

Maybe my next job needs to be in sales and marketing or in a company so small and directly linked to the customer that i can't help but get involved.

Thought of the Day - The Nature of Entertainment

What is the nature of entertainment; what makes something entertaining, what value does entertainment provide and where is the line between something entertaining and something valuable?

This is a fairly key question for me, i won't deny it, i watch a lot of TV. I mean more than a lot, like a few hours every day, often more. But why? If you asked me now i would say because it is entertaining, i might not be able to define what 'entertaining' is but any other answers (i learn from it, it is relaxing etc) would be a bit feeble. Not to seem big-headed but i am a fairly bright guy, i would hope that it's not just a case of "turn on and tune out" but at this juncture i don't know how else to explain it. It seems like giving up TV should be a 30-day trial at some point, probably the summer so if i continue to watch tv afterwards i haven't built up a backlog of days.

I think even more strange is my desire to watch ice hockey, i have always said i don't understand people who watch football but then why do i watch ice hockey? I don't play and haven't for around 10 years, i don't have any real investment even in the team i 'support' and yet i enjoy watching it. I just don't know why.

Lastly what about fiction books? For some reason people equate TV with mindless entertainment and books of any sort with knowledge. Books are somehow seen as superior to TV, even though i would imagine a large majority of books are no more intellectually stimulating than TV.

Are some forms of entertainment better than others and what would life be like without entertainment? I suspect most people think there should be a balance between work, learning, entertainment and relaxation, but is entertainment really necessary?


Somewhat interestingly this idea arose from reading some information about Buddhism and one of the 8 precepts of living a good life is; "7. To refrain from dancing, using jewelry, going to shows, etc.". So it isn't explicitly entertainment but it is kind of implied. At the moment i'm not doing too badly with the precepts. The only one i suspect i would fail is not lying, but that is a bit of a grey area as the literal translation is "speaking truth always" and technically do that, i just tend to omit rather than say anything untrue.

NB This is an extension or possibly a branch from a previous post where i discussed TV and Social Surplus. However in that post i didn't really tackle why i watch so much tv, only that it was probably too much and wondered what i would do with the time instead.

Book Notes - The Goal

The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt [1984]

Summary:
Prime measurements should be: Throughput (sales), Inventory (valued as raw material) and Operating Expense (everything that doesn’t fall into the other two).

Steps for a Process of Ongoing Improvement (POGI) in production:
1. Identify the bottleneck(s) – Find Herbie.
2. Exploit the bottlenecks – Work out how to make Herbie Produce the maximum amount possible.
3. Subordinate Everything Else to the Constraint – Keep the kids together with Drum Buffer Rope, have Herbie keep pace on a drum and tether him to the front person with a rope of a fixed length.
4. Elevate the Bottleneck(s) – Lighten the load in Herbies backpack
5. If the constraint is broken go back to step 1 and repeat.

Rules of managing a bottleneck:
1. Balance flow through your plant (not capacity).
2. The value of parts waiting at a bottleneck is equivalent to the sale price of the products that are waiting for the parts.
3. Never lose time on a bottleneck.
4. Never have a bottleneck work on a part that isn’t required immediately.
5. Never have a bottleneck work on a potentially bad part.
6. Redistribute work from the bottleneck to non-bottlenecks even if it seems like they cost more.

Notes:
Page 40: “The goal is to make money.” While elaborated up on It’s Not Luck this is still the primary goal of every company and the other two goals are complimentary (like the golden triangle).
Page 46: Primary measurements of making money; Total Profit, Percentage Profit and Cashflow.
Page 51: The above measurements have no meaning to people on the shop floor, so other measurements are needed to convert the management metrics to shop floor ones. The meaning is probably lost, the conversion results in local optima rules.
Page 60: The three operational measures Goldratt advocates are:
1. Throughput – The rate at which the business generates money through sales.
2. Inventory – All the money the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell.
3. Operational Expense – All of the money the system spends to turn Inventory into Throughput.
Page 61: Inventory is deliberately only the price of raw goods and does not include cost of ‘value added’ activities to eliminate the confusion of whether a dollar spent is an investment or an expense.
Page 87: The reason no plant can ever be perfectly balanced is a combination of dependant events and statistical fluctuations. I.e. As the events are dependant the statistical fluctuations do not average out, delays are passed on but shortened times are not, therefore lead times stretch out.
Page 135: Any incentive system based on absolute output over a day or a week is fundamentally flawed, it encourages ‘hero syndrome’ at the end of the shift to meet the quota. Instead the incentive system should be based on how consistent they are in achieving the quotas on an hourly basis. Reduce statistical fluctuations as much as possible.
Page 217: Need to implement Drum Buffer Rope system to prevent an increase in inventory on the shop floor. Use a ‘drum beat’ to signal when to release raw materials into the process. Use a ‘buffer’ of a fixed size to ensure that the bottleneck always has material to work on, the buffer should be twice the statistical fluctuations in predicting when material will arrive at the bottleneck. Finally use a ‘rope’ so that there is a maximum amount of inventory between raw materials and the bottleneck.
Page 230: Benefits of cutting batch sizes in half:
1. Half the WIP
2. Half the cash tied up
3. Lead time is reduced as wait and queue time are halved
Page 238: Halfling batch sizes should increase efficiencies as the next steps will no longer be waiting for parts from preceding steps.
Page 269: For the Socratic method to be successful you must know what questions to ask the people you are trying to teach. To anticipate their questions and issues so that you can pose the right answers to point them in the right direction. The basis for these questions might come from a CRT.
Page 272: While every manager knows that inventory is a liability – cash tied up in the system, things you might not sell – on a balance sheet it is classed as an asset. Therefore by reducing your inventory it can show up as a loss in your P&L. Fortunately this only shows up as a one-time reduction in your assets.
Page 289: Example of Mendeleev and the periodic table, identified an underlying pattern in atoms that not only fit the existing data but was used to determine where there was missing or incomplete data. Rather than imposing an arbitrary order on the table he revealed and intrinsic order in nature.
Page 299: Key parts of POGI are; Improvement, you need the right measurements to know that you are improving and Process, it needs to be a step by step repeatable process.
Page 300: Chain analogy; in the cost world you are trying to trim the weight of the whole chain, in the throughput world you are trying to strengthen the whole chain.
Page 301: Steps for TOC production improvement:
6. Identify the bottleneck(s) – Find Herbie.
7. Exploit the bottlenecks – Work out how to make Herbie Produce the maximum amount possible.
8. Subordinate Everything Else to the Constraint – Keep the kids together with Drum Buffer Rope, have Herbie keep pace on a drum and tether him to the front person with a rope of a fixed length.
9. Elevate the Bottleneck(s) – Lighten the load in Herbies backpack
10. If the constraint is broken go back to step 1 and repeat.
Page 312: If you have spare capacity you can sell that capacity at any value above cost of materials because all of the other costs are taken into account already, the one proviso for this is that your market must be segmented so you do not have to lower the prices for everyone.
Page 317: Pick a hypothesis and then try to rigorously link it with other things using deductive logic.
Page 336: The questions that all managers should be able to answer are:
1. What to change? – Current Reality Tree + Conflict Resolution Diagram
2. What to change to? – Future Reality Tree
3. How to change? – Transition Tree + PreRequisites Tree

Quotes:
Page 41: “An action that moves us towards making money is productive.”
Page 88: “Most of the factors critical to running [a] plant successfully cannot be determined precisely ahead of time.”
Page 138: “Some resources have to have more capacity than others. The ones at the end of the line should have more than the ones at the beginning – sometimes a lot more.”
Page 158: “An hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour lost for the entire system.”
Page 210: “Making an employee work and profiting from that work are two different things”
Page 268: “Don’t give the answers, just ask the questions.”

Thought of the Day - Distractions

How annoying is it when you open a new window, go to google and then forget what you were going to search for.

Ok maybe you don't get that if your memory is not akin to a goldfishes, but i need to find a way not to forget in the first place (not get distracted) or remember quicker (currently i rely on retracing my steps). Thinking about it, it may be a problem of my own making. I have a fairly complicated iGoogle page and tend to get distracted by e-mails or news so maybe simplifying it might help me stay on topic.

Thought of the Day - How To Piss Off Your Customers

What are the three easiest ways for supermarkets to piss off their customers?


1. Provide plastic bags that tear at the least provocation.
There are two CTQ's for a plastic bag; 1) It is intact and 2) It has handles. Nothing is more annoying when you pack a bag, pick it up, it tears and all your bruisable items fall on the hard tarmac. Sometimes it is because some foolish cashier has used a knife to open a new pack of bags and put a slice in them all. Sometimes the bags are just poorly formed and weak. Either way it is seriously annoying.

If the things the customer just paid for end up ruined because you supplied crappy bags they won't be returning.


2. Put products where customers don't expect them to be.
Where would you expect to find socks? Perhaps menswear, perhaps next to the underwear, heck at least in the clothing section. If you guessed no to all of the above, correct! In fact socks are located in the toiletries section, somewhere between condoms and moisturiser. Who on gods green earth thought that was a sensible choice, what do socks have to do with toiletries?

If the customer can't find what they are looking for you aren't going to sell it.


3. Have barely any stock on the shelves for most of the day.
The reason that Taiichi Ohno (the father of Lean manufacturing), was so impressed with western supermarkets was that while there was limited stock on the shelves, they were replenished as the product was sold in a pull system. I suspect he would be less impressed with the Frome Sainsburys. Whenever i go in there are chronic shortages of a lot of the products, especially in the fruit and veg section. I mean how hard would it be to have an electronic signal to the warehouse to replenish every time half of the shelf inventory was sold? That would mean constant replenishment, constant supply and lots of small shelf-stacking exercises rather than the mammoth ones they have at the moment. The whole point of the shelving is that customers can get what they want, if they can't then what on earth is the point of putting product out at all.

If there is nothing for the customer to buy you definitely won't sell it.


Running a supermarket should be a relatively simple exercise but yet they manage to screw it up. I do find it somewhat ironic that supermarkets inspired some of the principles in one of the great process methodologies but somehow in the intervening period they have lost all of the best parts.

Thought of the Day - Actions Vs Ideas

I was only yesterday cursing that Steve Pavlina had forsaken me, his blog hadn't been updated in over a week and then he made a great post (see link at bottom). Unfortunately this post was about something that profoundly troubles me, the balance between ideas and actions. His argument is that an idea that is not implemented is worth almost nothing. While i completely agree with him, it troubles me because i have great ideas and i am ok at starting to implement them (though sometimes even that doesn't happen) but where i really fall down is sticking with the implementation. I get bored and move on to the next idea.

Coming back to my Strengths Finder Results, none of my strengths relate to action, they are all about coming up with ideas, thinking, analysing and planning. My concern is that i excel at the easy part - having the ideas - granted they are good ideas, but my strengths do not allow me to (nor do i particularly care if i) actually implement those ideas.

I have two questions; 1) Is there a way to be successful just with ideas and not necessarily the implementation? and maybe somewhat related 2) How could i avoid implementation or at least become more effective at implementation?


Idea from: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/05/the-value-of-ideas/

Thought of the Day - Technical Support

How do normal people cope when technology doesn't work?

Further to my previous post on technology not working i have to wonder what less technically savy people than myself do when their technology doesn't work? In my family's case they call me, i suspect most people (or at least i hope most people) have someone they know that helps them with tech stuff. While it can be very frustrating to have to deal with (i understand how hard it must be to work in a call centre), if there weren't people like that in society technological advances would grind to a halt. Imagine if everyone had to call tech support, how much would that add to the cost of consumer electronics, more to the point i wonder how much it adds now.

I suppose alternatively if that was the case it might force manufacturers to make products easier to use, you could almost say that experts are a crutch allowing companies to sell half-baked devices knowing that someone else will sort them out.