Manufacturology

No bullets for Strategy’s strategist…

There’s no bul­let list like Stalin’s bul­let list!

Yes­ter­days post about McK­in­sey Quarterly’s inter­view with Richard Rumelt [D. Lovallo and L. Men­donca, “Strategy’s strate­gist: An inter­view with Richard Rumelt”, The McK­in­sey Quar­terly, nr.4, pp.56–67, 2007] left out one impor­tant point. The bul­let point.

In another post back in Jan­u­ary, I men­tioned that I’d read Edward Tufte’s “Visual dis­play of quan­ti­ta­tive infor­ma­tion” and “Visual Expla­na­tions”. These are great books on how to present quan­ti­ta­tive evi­dence in a clear and non-ambiguous way.

Tufte is also well known for his crit­i­cism of Microsoft Pow­er­point. He makes the (power)point that it lacks the qual­i­ties needed for pre­sent­ing evi­dence that requires reflec­tion and cog­ni­tive involve­ment from the audience.

Using bul­let points so much dri­ves out thinking.

Now I know that Richard Rumelt is also a fan of Edward Tufte, say­ing that: “If I had my way, small groups […] would be absolutely pro­hib­ited from doing Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tions! Using bul­let points so much dri­ves out think­ing. One of the nice fea­tures about Pow­er­Point is how fast you can cre­ate a pre­sen­ta­tion. But that’s the trou­ble. Peo­ple end up with bul­let points that con­tra­dict one another, and no one notices! It’s sim­ply amazing.”

Myself I put pride in using as lit­tle text as pos­si­ble in my pre­sen­ta­tions. Pre­sen­ta­tions are meant to sup­port what you say, not to be read as an alter­na­tive ver­sion of what you say. And if you as a pre­sen­ter need key­words, use a paper note.

Reflections on McKinsey Quarterly interview with Richard Rumelt

I read this inter­view with famous strat­egy pro­fes­sor Richard Rumelt [D. Lovallo and L. Men­donca, “Strategy’s strate­gist: An inter­view with Richard Rumelt”, The McK­in­sey Quar­terly, nr.4, pp.56–67, 2007].

Rumelt thinks that some of the biggest changes in the strat­egy field over the last 20 years or so have been in the process of gen­er­at­ing busi­ness strate­gies. He calls this “strat­egy work”. An equiv­a­lent term would be “strat­egy for­ma­tion”, or “strat­egy [for­ma­tion] process”.

Most cor­po­rate strate­gic plans have lit­tle to do with strat­egy. […] These resource bud­gets sim­ply can­not deliver what senior man­agers want: a path­way to sig­nif­i­cantly higher performance.

Pro­fes­sor Richard Rumelt of the UCLA Ander­son School of Management.

He doesn’t give much for the con­ven­tional annual strat­egy reviews, say­ing that “Most cor­po­rate strate­gic plans have lit­tle to do with strat­egy. […] These resource bud­gets sim­ply can­not deliver what senior man­agers want: a path­way to sig­nif­i­cantly higher performance.”

Instead of strate­gic plan­ning, he offers only two ways to suc­cess­fully achieve sig­nif­i­cantly higher per­for­mance. One approach would be to invent your way to suc­cess. Unfor­tu­nately, he says, you can­not count on this to work. The risk of fail­ure to come up with great inven­tions is sim­ply too high.

The sec­ond alter­na­tive is, accord­ing to Rumelt, to exploit some change in the envi­ron­ment: “in tech­nol­ogy, con­sumer tastes, laws, resource prices, or com­pet­i­tive behav­ior — and ride that change with quick­ness and skill”.

Changes in the envi­ron­ment occur at irreg­u­lar inter­vals, and so strat­egy work must be episodic, not an annual review. He sug­gests that com­pa­nies remove the word “strate­gic” from  the annual resource plan, and sug­gest that they are called just “long–term resource plans”. Then, com­pa­nies that are seri­ous about strat­egy should start a sep­a­rate, nonan­nual, oppor­tu­nity dri­ven process for strat­egy work.

Pro­fes­sor Takahiro Fuji­moto of the Uni­ver­sity of Tokyo.

One reflec­tion I make after read­ing this inter­view is that Rumelt’s view of strat­egy appears to cor­re­spond to what Takahiro Fuji­moto called an evo­lu­tion­ary learn­ing capa­bil­ity, based on “a cer­tain dynamic capa­bil­ity for capa­bil­ity build­ing, but […] not a rou­tine itself” [T. Fuji­moto, The evo­lu­tion of a man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tem at Toy­ota, Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999]. Fuji­moto said that Toy­ota has this capa­bil­ity, and that it is the key to their long term success.

Capabilities, innovation and competitiveness

For the moment I’m con­cerned with indus­trial inno­va­tion processes. Why are they nec­es­sary? What types of inno­va­tion processes exist in an indus­trial pro­duc­tion com­pany? What’s the link between inno­va­tion and com­pet­i­tive­ness? And how is inno­va­tion linked to related fields like organ­i­sa­tional learn­ing and dynamic capabilities?

A cou­ple of days ago I received a copy of D.J. Teece’s book “Dynamic capa­bil­i­ties and strate­gic man­age­ment: orga­niz­ing for inno­va­tion and growth” (Oxford Uni­ver­sity press, 2009). I look for­ward to read­ing this book. One rea­son is that I already read quite a lot about capa­bil­i­ties, mainly research papers, and I even used the word capa­bil­i­ties in the title of my Ph.D. thesis.

I some­times get the feel­ing that there are so many fac­tors that deter­mine the com­pet­i­tive­ness of a firm, that mod­els that aim to explain why one firm out­per­forms another are doomed to become the­o­retic con­structs with­out much prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tion. On the other hand, it has been said that there is noth­ing as prac­ti­cal as a good the­ory. And if a the­ory about capa­bil­i­ties serves to high­light that inno­v­a­tive devel­op­ment processes and devel­op­ment of hard to imi­tate resources is in fact the basis for sus­tain­able indus­trial com­pet­i­tive­ness, then it has already done much good.

As I said, look­ing for­ward to read­ing the book. At the moment I’m also (still) read­ing Reinertsen’s (2009) “The prin­ci­ples of prod­uct devel­op­ment flow”, a book that I’m read­ing with pen­cil in hand. Rec­om­mended.

Batteries of seaweed

Imag­ine an e–book con­sist­ing only of a paper bat­tery with elec­tronic ink and cir­cuits printed directly on the battery.

Sounds inter­est­ing? This may become real­ity with a newly invented bat­tery. Read on.

Will our future bat­ter­ies be made of seaweed?

Algal–blooms have been a major prob­lem in the Baltic sea over the last decade or so. Causes are attrib­uted to be global warm­ing, excess nutri­ents like phos­pho­rus, or a com­bi­na­tion. “What to do with all these algae?” was the title of a research paper pub­lished in 2002 by Albert Mihranyan and col­leagues [Strømme, Mihranyan, Ek, Mate­ri­als Let­ters 57 (2002) 569–572]. Back then, the authors con­cluded that “green algae fil­a­ments can be used as a raw mate­r­ial for the pro­duc­tion of micro­crys­talline cel­lu­lose”. Prop­er­ties of algae–based cel­lu­lose were thought to be suit­able for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal tablet manufacturing.

Now Albert Mihranyan, researcher at the Ångström lab­o­ra­tory at Upp­sala Uni­ver­sity, has won the Chester Carl­son award for invent­ing an inno­v­a­tive “paper bat­tery” in which algae cel­lu­lose has a cen­tral role. Per­son­ally I find this much more inter­est­ing than the pills that were orig­i­nally dis­cussed in the now eight year old article.

Albert Mihranyan wins the Chester Carl­son award for devel­op­ing a bat­tery based on algae cellulose.

“Awards like this are really impor­tant. After spend­ing lots of hours in the lab, test­ing many ideas that didn’t work out, this price is a con­fir­ma­tion that I’m now on the right track. It gives a lot of energy,” says Albert Mihranyan to SvD.

The bat­tery con­sists mainly of paper and salt water. Or more pre­cisely, nano–structured paper and a con­duct­ing poly­mer. Pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions are envi­ron­men­tally friendly energy stor­age sys­tems, biodegrad­able elec­tron­ics like sen­sors and dis­plays, and “smart” tex­tiles. [source]

Pre­vi­ous shots at devel­op­ing paper bat­ter­ies have been suc­cess­ful, but failed to reach the mar­ket because of high man­u­fac­tur­ing costs. On the con­trary, man­u­fac­tur­ing of the new algae cel­lu­lose bat­tery is said to be very sim­ple and low cost.

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Automatically creating an index in LaTeX

When I wrote my doc­toral the­sis I decided that I wanted an index. I even­tu­ally man­aged to cre­ate one with the help of a Tcl script that I wrote. You can see the final result in the pic­ture below.

Exam­ple of index cre­ated with my script lixtcl.tcl.

Why write my own script?

Although I’d known for a long time that I wanted an index, I decided not to start with the index­ing until my text was fin­ished. Once I got work­ing on the actual index, I realised that the task of man­u­ally insert­ing \index tags would be over­whelm­ing. Some sort of auto­mated solu­tion was needed. I wanted to index all occur­rences of 350 words and phrases in about 100 pages of text.  After search­ing around for a while, I found some scripts and pro­grams to do the job, but none served my needs completely.

What I really would have wanted is a script that inte­grates with my edi­tor Texnic­cen­ter. But in the end I decided to write a Tcl script to do the job. I’m now mak­ing the script avail­able under the GPL license in the hope that other peo­ple may find it useful.

Please note that I only improved the script to the level that it served my pur­pose with a min­i­mum amount of pro­gram­ming work. If you make fur­ther improve­ments, please post the code back to me so that I can pub­lish an updated ver­sion here.

How to use the script

In order to use the script you must:

1. List the LaTeX files you want to index in a file called indexfiles.txt.
2. Pre­pare a file called indexwords.txt that con­tain all the words you want to include in the index.
3. Make sure you make back­ups of all your source files before you exe­cute the script.
4. Run the script.
5. Copy the indexed files from the out­put direc­tory to the orig­i­nal location.
6. Re–compile your LaTeX doc­u­ment with makein­dex enabled.

I’ll describe these steps in more detail below.
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Celestial jogging experience

After a cou­ple of won­der­ful spring–like days that caused much of the abun­dant snow to melt, there was a back­lash today with almost 20cm of snow falling. Despite this, I decided to make another attempt to get going with my jog­ging, which has more or less been on hold since last fall.

I went out at about 7 pm just after sun­set, and chose my usual 7.8km win­ter round.

After a few min­utes I was run­ning west­wards towards the direc­tion where the sun had set shortly before. Then, in the still bright sky straight ahead of me, I saw a very bright evening star. I realised that it must be Venus.

Slightly to the left, and at about 45 degrees alti­tude, I had the wax­ing moon.

I then turned my head upwards, and I could see Mars high up above, slightly behind me. The planet is brighter than all the stars sur­round­ing it, and has a clearly vis­i­ble slightly red colour.

And, look­ing around, I saw another bright star south­wards on my left hand side. Although I was uncer­tain, I first thought that this might be Jupiter or Saturn.

In a sud­den moment I had an intense feel­ing of being a part of a larger whole, run­ning on the sur­face of one planet among many. I had a sen­sa­tion that, if I wanted, I could take one giant step off the sur­face of earth and con­tinue out in space.

As soon as I got back home I pulled out my 150mm (6″) Sky­watcher dob­son­ian tele­scope from the garage and pointed it towards the sky. From where I stood, I could see Mars and, between the trees on my back­yard, the star that I sus­pected to be Jupiter or Sat­urn. I could see Mars clearly, but I found that the other sus­pected planet was actu­ally a bright star. It was now get­ting darker and other stars started to appear, but the ones sur­round­ing the bright planet (that turned out to be a star), were hid­den behind the trees sur­round­ing my house.

Sky chart for the Bor­länge area at the time of my “celes­tial jog­ging expe­ri­ence”. Click to enlarge.

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Will Volvo Cars go to China?

Room for one more? Pub­lic trans­porta­tion in China… Image: SXC.

The Chi­nese are every­where these days. Until now I’ve made no com­ment about Ford’s plans to sell Volvo Cars. But after my recent post on Chi­nese rail­roads, it feels timely to make a remark on the pos­si­bil­ity that Ford sells Volvo Cars to Chi­nese Geely.

I wrote a cou­ple of posts (here, here, and here) when the SAAB deal was in its final stages. In the SAAB case my rela­tion was a bit per­sonal since I worked a cou­ple of months in their BIW devel­op­ment depart­ment when I did my mas­ters the­sis at KTH’s vehi­cle engi­neer­ing pro­gramme back in 1998. How­ever, my rela­tion to Volvo is much longer: I’ve been dri­ving a Volvo S60 for the last eight years.

There was a time when a large major­ity of cars sold in Swe­den were either Volvo’s or SAAB’s. That was when SAAB was known for its turbo engines and Volvo for its boxy and safe design. Before the GM and Ford times. Today, both brands are just brands like any else. How­ever, sta­tis­tics from Bil Swe­den shows that Volvo keeps the posi­tion as the most poular car in Swe­den:
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Polluting ships prevent global warming

Power plant tak­ing short term action to reduce global warm­ing? Photo: Wikipedia.

The Inter­na­tional mar­itime organ­i­sa­tion (IMO) is about to ban the high sul­phur con­tent fuel burned by most of the world’s ships today. Accord­ing to New Sci­en­tist this will reduce sul­phur diox­ide (SO₂) emis­sions will by as much as 90 per­cent, and with them the result­ing haze of sul­phate particles.

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China to connect Asia and Europe with high–speed trains

China is plan­ning to con­nect Asia and Europe with high–speed trains. If realised, an 8000km trip Lon­don to Bei­jing will take 48 hours.

Report­edly (SvD, DN, NyT, Inhab­i­tat), three lines are planned: Beijing–London, Kunming–Singapore, and Delhi–Astana (cap­i­tal of Kazakhstan).

It appears that Chi­nese author­i­ties will spare no resources to make their con­try reclaim the name mid­dle king­dom. These ambi­tions show off in many ways. For exam­ple, China has grow­ing mil­i­tary inter­ests, with mis­sile sys­tems, newly estab­lished mil­i­tary bases in Africa, as well as ambi­tious plans for space–based mil­i­tary arms.

I’ve twice been invited on indus­trial study trips to China, but missed out both times due to the births of two of my daugh­ters. How­ever, report­edly, the Chi­nese rail­way net­work already is the worlds most mod­ern with com­fort­able high–speed trains.

The high­speed rail­way net­work (IN OPERATION) in Greater China. Source: Wikipedia. Click to enlarge.

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Creating pressure for process innovation with production systems models

This post is a slight rewrite of the abstract for a pre­sen­ta­tion that I’m prepar­ing for a mini–conference next week.

Most niche mar­ket steel pro­duc­ers, like for exam­ple all major Swedish steel com­pa­nies, would likely be able to make sub­stan­tial pro­duc­tiv­ity improve­ments with pro­cess­ing tech­nol­ogy that per­mit cost effi­cient low vol­ume pro­duc­tion in the pres­ence of high prod­uct vari­ety. Cur­rent pro­cess­ing tech­nol­ogy is not opti­mal since it has been designed for high pro­duc­tiv­ity in the case of high-volume pro­duc­tion and low prod­uct variety.

I make these claims based on the results of my own analy­ses. Over the last few years I’ve devel­oped a num­ber of steel pro­duc­tion sys­tems mod­els in order to study how the steel­mak­ing, con­tin­u­ous cast­ing and hot rolling processes inter­act dynam­i­cally dur­ing oper­a­tion. The result­ing behav­iour depends on, among other things, the com­bi­na­tion of cus­tomer order pat­terns, pro­cess­ing tech­nol­ogy and pro­duc­tion con­trol strategies.

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