James L Adams—People and Products

HOMO SAPIENS AND THE THINGS THEY MAKE

Product quality, creativity and innovation,design, the nature of technology, working with the hands, and people— what do these have in common?  First of all, I am very interested in all six of them.  I have spent a large amount of time and effort studying, teaching courses and writing about,  and consulting with industry on the first four, am a firm believer and practitioner of the fifth, and am constantly fascinated by the last one.  I can tie them all together in many ways.  As an example, any company these days trying to establish a satisfying future should be working on improving the quality of their products. Improving the quality of products involves design and often technology and organizational change—all implying creativity and innovation. I firmly believe that working with the hands gives one the ability to truly understand, respect, and appreciate craftsmanship, which is a critical element of product quality.     Finally, the actors in this play and the audience for the result are people.  See?  It’s not all that difficult. 

I intend to simply throw what I consider to be interesting and related material on each one of these factors into this blog, hoping that it will help you think in different ways about how we homo sapiens and the things we make interact, and perhaps how these things could serve us better.  The overall goal is to discuss product quality. That's why this blog is titled "People and Products".  I will of course give you my thoughts from time to time, with which you are certainly free to disagree.  One of my main purposes for writing this blog is to help myself think about the relationship between us and our stuff.  I am eager for your input. 

 

Technological Determinism and Product Quality

 

Technological Determinism is a reductionist theory which considers technology as the major force for social and cultural change.  It is extremely simplistic and generally not accepted.  An argument against it is made in the book “Why Things Bite Back, - The Revenge of  Unintended Consequences”, written by Edward Tenner (Vintage, 1997) .  But there are still many who believe that technology should be allowed to run free, especially among successful people with technical backgrounds.  The May 2012 Wired Magazine  cover features a picture of Marc Andreessen, overlaid with “The Man who Makes the Future”, the title of the featured article in the issue.  The subtext on the cover reads  “Marc Andreessen invented the browser. He was the first to the cloud. He’s the most influential VC in Silicon Valley. Here's what he sees on the horizon".

In the interview, Andreessen makes his admiration for technology plain.  When discussing his time at Netscape, he says “the idea we had then, which seems obvious today, was to lift the computing off of each user’s device and perform it in the network instead. It’s something I think is inherent in the technology—what some thinkers refer to as the “technological imperative.” It’s as if the technology wants it to happen.’  Later when predicting more computing in the “cloud”, he admits to bandwidth limitations, but says  “If you have infinite network bandwidth, if you have an infinitely fast network, then this is what the technology wants. But we’re not yet in a world of infinite speed, so that’s why we have mobile apps and PC and Mac software on laptops and phones. That’s why there are still Xbox games on discs. That’s why everything isn’t in the cloud. But eventually the technology wants it all to be up there.”

The technology wants it?  Hopefully, it is not technology making decisions, but rather humans.  During my time in the Stanford STS program, I had the time to read and think about technology in more depth than I had before.  I found that periodically, especially in capitalistic countries such as the U.S., technology is given such a free rein that it overshoots, and fortunately, there has always been a backlash to re-direct it back to where it serves us, rather than inconveniencing us and wasting resources.  Sometimes a long time is required. Nuclear “weapons” may have once served a purpose (speeding the end of World War II, but even that is debated).  But slowly people are realizing that the words “nuclear weapon” are an oxy-moron, because any country actually using them will be shunned by the rest of the world, so to use them is to lose.  “Nuclear bargaining chip” is more accurate, and eventually they will disappear because they have no useful function, although perhaps not until most countries have them and realize they can’t use them.

We now realize the down sides of many once miraculous developments, such as the petroleum-fueled automobile, air conditioning, strip mining, and computer games. And it seems to me that the backlash toward the “information economy” and the products involved in it is well underway. Typically, the May 27^th New York Times had a cover article on a large and clever scam based on identity theft, and a critical column entitled “The Facebook Illlusion”.  There is increasing concern about issues of privacy and identity theft, I find the information on the web is becoming less useful as it increases in volume, and of course there is increased pesky advertising and data manipulation such as that described by Eli Pariser in his book “The Filter Bubble – What the Internet is Hiding From You (Penguin Press, 2011).  Perhaps it is time to agree that the digital revolution is here and miraculous, and focus more on the quality of the products involved (be they hard or soft).

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Thomas Friedman —Please add product quality to your concerns

 

I have been politely requested to write my posts on the same day of the week, so I will be posting on Mondays.  For a while I will be writing only one post per week, since I am also responding to local pressure and adding Facebook and Twitter to my life, so I will be more acceptable to contemporary students.  I must admit to a bit of  ambivalence, since I am not looking for more ways to spend time, but by next week I will be drowning in links—and in two or three weeks I plan to be adding posts to my blog  twice a week.

 A week ago, I heard Tom Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist,  talk about That Used to be Us, the book he recently wrote with Michael Mandelbaum.  If you have never heard Friedman talk, you have missed a treat, because he talks as well as he writes (three Pulitzer prizes, six best selling books).  But Mandelbaum is certainly no slouch, having been author or coauthor of twelve books, and Professor and Director of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of advanced International studies. The two of them are friends and neighbors, and although both study and write on international topics, this book is definitely about the U.S.  I read the book this weekend and loved it.

Friedman describes himself as a frustrated optimist about the U.S.  The subtitle of the book is “How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back”  It is a combination of criticism and cheer-leading.  He thinks we have what it takes to come back, but doesn’t see it happening at present.  Come back from where? 

He thinks we have been falling behind in four major areas.  The first is understanding of the nature of the present world.  As you may know, he is the author of the book “The World is Flat”, which was focused on globalization. He is frustrated because he doesn’t think we understand what globalization has done to us.  His second worry is that even though we were the innovators of what we will call the digital revolution, we don’t seem to understand what that is doing to us either.  In fact, he thinks the juxtaposition of globalizaton and the digital revolution is one of the largest displacements Homo Sapiens has faced.  His other two worries are U.S. debt, at the national, state, and individual level, and our inability to deal properly with the environment.

He feels that we need to get moving fast to bring ourselves up to speed on these four areas.  In order to do this, we need to focus on the five areas that he thinks has traditionally made the U.S. great.  These are education, infrastructure, immigration, research and development, and regulation. The book gives education particular attention, because as he says, if we want to be what we were, average is not good enough. In order to do this, he believes that we will have to have a functioning and less polarized government and population, and that sacrifices will have to be made at all levels.

One reason I like Friedman, is that I tend to agree with him, and he lays out the arguments so clearly and does not shirk bad news.  He fills his book with reliable statistics and does not suggest that there is an easy way for us to recover from our present malaise, but he does think we can, and unlike our political representatives, discusses the problems involved in depth.

Although he is critical of some of the directions that business and finance have taken, he is definitely aware of the major role they play in the quality of life in the U.S.  He is all in favor of entrepreneurship, increasing exports, streamlining regulations that hamper business, and creating a tax scheme and government support programs that aid business.  But, for some reason, he doesn’t mention product quality.  He talks about the need to make jobs and the need to keep productivity high, but does not comment on the obvious benefits of making the best products in the world.  His talk was wonderful except for that glaring omission.  Hopefully, he will read this blog post and write another book.

The book is in the list to the right.  I have been neglecting this list for a while, but I will soon review several excellent books that have to do with product quality.  

Creativity, Innovation, and Copying

Maybe it is my location in Silicon Valley and Stanford University, or  the people I talk to and the things I read, but everywhere I turn, I seem to run into discussions, written material, , meetings, and conversations extolling the importance and virtues of radical creativity and innovation.  I, of course, agree.  But it was almost a breath of fresh air to read the Schumpeter editorial of the May 12-18, 2012 issue of The Economist, entitled Pretty Profitable Parrots.  It is a defense, perhaps even an encouragement, of more attention being paid to legal imitation—or copying. It emphasizes that violating intellectual property laws results in such things as expensive lawsuits, hence stress on the word "legal".   But the article points out that many companies, from Apple to Panasonic, have profited greatly from taking advantage of what others have done.  It refers to work done by Ted Levitt, a powerful business guru of the 1960, who pointed out the advantages of imitating. 

There is a  book entitled “Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge” (Harvard Business Review Press, June 2010) by Oded Shenkar, a management professor at Ohio State University that apparently makes this argument.  I haven’t read it , so I can’t recommend it, but I have ordered it, because it sounds somewhat unique in this day and age of universal extolling of the new and different. Innovation seems to evoke brilliance.  People are dazzled by Facebook’s IPO and want another “information revolution”.  Imitation is talked about only in hushed tones.  Companies brag about their intellectual breakthroughs, not their skill at “industrial espionage”.  But good businesses have always tried to find out as much as they could about what their competitors were up to in order to incorporate it into their products, and not too long ago reverse engineering was a popular topic of conversation.

The lack of standardization in present day industrially produced products may be a symptom of this emphasis on  uniqueness.  I wish there was more copying of seat-belt releases, gas tank locations, coffee making machines, foldable baby equipment, fasteners used to assemble knock-down furniture and equipment, portable computer latches, projector connectors, and hotel radio/alarm clock units.  I do not see anything on the horizon that would result in standardization at the level that used to be common, but we consumers could sure use more of it, and maybe the present emphasis on innovation is part of the problem. 

Copying also can aid product quality.  People who make lower quality imitations, perhaps in order to reduce cost, are properly looked down on.  But the production of higher quality legal imitations, although inconvenient for the originators, and perhaps not as gee-whiz as radical innovation, raises the quality bar, and often results in nice profit margins.  As is well known in countries such as India and China,  it is convenient to let others (the U.S.?) pay for the R and D.

The Economist article ends by repeating Joseph Schumpeter’s worry that too much copying would result in a system that suffered from a loss of innovation because it did not offer innovators sufficient support and reward.  But the piece ends with the words “Copying is here to stay; businesses may as well get good at it”.

Maybe lots of room for creativity in learning to legally copy better.

Two More Dave Beach Questions

In Dave Beach and my “conversation” described in my April 16 post, the next two questions from him, after “why is manufacturing important”, were “why is product quality important”t, and “how are the chapter concepts in your Good Products, Bad Products book related”.

Product Quality is  important for three reasons:

     1.  Competitiveness

     2.  The Quality of Life

     3.  Motivation and Self Image

For the foreseeable future, businesses will continue to compete, probably globally, and hopefully material well-being will rise, at least in poorer nations.  It is also probable that businesses in wealthier countries will have continuing problems competing with businesses in poorer countries in the production of  lower quality products,  Also higher quality products have a marketplace advantage and are both more attractive at the same cost (Toyota automobiles), and offer higher profitability at a higher cost (Apple iPhones),

Technology is hopefully for the purpose of benefiting us humans.  It should satisfy our needs, make our lives more interesting, keep us healthier,  maintain our environment,  and decrease hardship. If it does not do such things, it fails.  In a sense, overall product quality can be measured by how much a product improves the quality of life.

It is extremely rewarding to be involved in the production of use of an outstanding product.  Organizations producing such products and the people working in them are proud of their role.  People  associated with them become more involved in their work and more productive.  The United States used to be very proud of the label “Made in America”.  Wouldn’t it be nice to get there again – to feel that whatever we produced, it was the best in the world?

The Chapters in my book have to do with the performance, cost, and price of industrial products, compatibility of the products with the human user, craftsmanship in the production of them, emotional reaction to them, aesthetic appeal of them, the symbolism and cultural fit of them, and consistency of the products with global constraints (environment, etc.)  These factors are related in that they are all essential in the production of them and benefits to the user, and difficult to handle quantitatively.  At first glance such things as performance, cost, and price, seem easily measurable, but it is more difficult to do so over the lifetime of products and when the subtleties of perception are included.  As one proceeds through the chapters, metrics become more and more difficult to describe the quality of the product and the reaction of the user.  Love?  Beauty?  Elegance?  Symbolism? When it comes to global constraints, it becomes simpler to attach numbers to such things as supply of resources, severity of pollution, global warming, and loss of species, but for many (most?) people there seems to be a good bit of resistance to using these numbers and the desire to  collectively bury our heads in the sand and hope the problems are not real. 

I will delve further into this in a future post. 

Creativity and Implementation

Last Saturday I spent a very enjoyable two or three hours with a large number of Stanford Alumni in Portland.  I used to (maybe still do) have a fair amount of visibility with alumni not only because I have taught at Stanford for 40 years, but also because I was very active at teaching and giving talks to alumni.  I have been highly interested in creativity and innovation for these years, and much of my alumni interaction was on these topics.  This time I talked about my Good Products/Bad Products book.  Afterward, some of them asked me why I didn’t focus on creativity “like I used to”

Perhaps the most wonderful ability we humans have is to be creative, and it is not only a fascinating subject to study, but can be affected, for better and worse, by conscious attention.  Usually, in creativity talks or books, one is given exercises, problems, and other experiences in order to better understand the forces that inhibit it, and the approaches that encourage it.  These are chosen by the speaker or writer to make the desired point as quickly and in as entertaining way as possible.  It is probably easier to make such talks and writings more entertaining, and therefore more fun, than those on the topic of quality.

But I simply told them that my talk about quality was about creativity. It takes creativity to increase quality – a great deal of it.  Outstanding products require creativity in all phases of product development frorm sensing and defining the problem, through disposing of the product at the end of its life.  Design, development, test, manufacturing, marketing, packaging, and shipping all require creativity.

But creativity, although necessary, is not sufficient.  Control is essential, as well as attention to things such as the topics in the Good Products, Bad Products book.   It is possible to be innovative and a successful entrepreneur, and still produce crummy products.  In fact, I worry about the large number of students who now think creativity is a magic process that will let them become wealthy rapidly with little effort.  Not that many people are wired properly to be entrepreneurs, and of those who try, three quarters will fail.  Successful companies are usually founded on an intense motivation to build a great company and stubborn people who are willing to weather a large amount of adversity to bring forth a produce they totally  believe in.  In particular, the implementation of a successful idea in a form that succeeds usually requires a great deal of work mixed with recurring frustration.

I remain a firm believer in creativity and remain active in attempting to better understand it and help individuals, groups, and organizations improve their creative ability.   But now I am probably putting more effort into trying to better understanding implementation (which requires creativity).  To use a well-known Steve Jobs term—how do you make insanely great products?

As an amusing Portland anecdote, I wanted to talk about Dave Beach’s program, which emphasizes craftsmanship and its many benefits, in my  talk (I talked about Dave in a previous post).  I was thinking about how best to do this as I walked down stairs to be picked up and taken to the Portland World Trade Center, where I was to give my talk.  The person who met me was Charlie Moore, one of the officers of the alumni chapter, who informed me that he wanted to show me something, and then produced this wondrously capable looking bronze object, which was obviously a super-capable cork screw.  He proudly told me he had designed and made it 25 years ago in one of Dave Beach’s classes.  He obviously loved it, and I predict he will treasure it forever.  And I could happily use Charlie and his corkscrew to introduce the topic of Dave and his program.  Suppose things seem of higher quality if you make them, or participate in making them?  Absolutely.  Does that have something to do with quality?  To be discussed in a future post.

 

The Third Industrial Revolution?

Immediately after my last post, the Economist magazine devoted a couple of articles and its monthly special report to the increasingly discussed “third industrial revolution”, in which manufacturing will be increasingly based on computer control and such processes as 3d printing (additive manufacture). This has resulted in quite a bit of interesting discussion on the internet.  You will see some of it if you put “Economist Magazine April 21, 2012 A Third Industrial Revolution” into your  browser.  Devotees of this third industrial revolution are sure that manufacturing, and the economics and politics of it, will continue to  change to require much less labor and be more dependent on digitally controlled and revolutionary processes. Among other advantages they see, is the return of manufacturing to wealthier countries, because labor costs will no longer be as large a factor. It is true that the cost of such things as 3d printers is rapidly falling, and that the aerospace industry is using them increasingly for manufacturing such things as titanium parts.  But this move has been going on for some time (at least since the entry of computer aided design, computer aided manufacturing, and digitally controlled machining centers), and will continue, but not as rapidly as some people imagine. 

Historically, new technologies have taken some 50 years to mature. Not only must the technology itself mature, but individual values, social norms, and economic and political beliefs must change if there is to be a true revolution.  I first used a computer, a large ÎBM  mainframe. in the 1960’s  (actually I gave problems to a programmer and the programmer gave me the answer). I first owned a personal computer (an IBM PC) in the early 1980’s. It was a long way from this to my present computer and to the age of Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, computer-aided design and manufacture, machining centers, and all of the other digital applications of the present.  But we are obviously still searching for the optimum use of this technology, which really began some 80 years ago.  The first digital computer is now thought to be  the ABC, which was developed at Iowa State College in the late 1930’s, followed by the better-known ENIAC, developed at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid 1940’s.  But these both utilized vacuum tubes, and it was not until the development of the integrated circuit around 1960 that the path to modern digital technology was truly opened.  That was approximately 50 years ago. And many people are still not comfortable with it.

The 3^rd industrial revolution will similarly take a while.  The first one is thought to have lasted from approximately 1750 to 1850,  That’s about right.  It required not only steam and steel, but people moving to cities and working by the clock, large organizations with hierarchical structures, dealing with industrial pollutants, and many other changes in life style. 

It has taken us at least 100 years to develop the products and infrastructure that comprise our      "automobile revolution”.  We will continue to rely on people in manufacturing for some time, increasingly assisted (or displaced) by smart machines. And since the median income in the world is now approximately $1200 per person, there will continue to be trainable workers aplenty.  There are many advantages to human labor.  Chinese factories are valued because they can rapidly make changes in products and change the size of their workforce, as well as for their low wage scale.   Outsourcing is influenced by tax structures and other business incentives as well as by lower labor costs. As the “revolution” changes the way products are manufactured, the world must deal with the costs (lower employment, economic shifts?) as well as the profits.

And no matter how they are manufactured, products will necessarily improve in overall quality.

Why Manufacturing?

The first question that Dave Beach asked me in the “conversation” I mentioned in my post of May 16, was “Why is manufacturing important?” I gave a short talk on my Good Products, Bad Products book in an annual “Stanford Authors” event at the Stanford Humanities Center yesterday, and the same question came up.  On May 5^th I will be giving a talk to the Stanford Alumni chapter in Portland, Oregon, and am again expecting the same question.

There is much discussion of this issue in the government, in universities, and among the general public. If you want examples, just look on the internet.  People seem to agree that manufacturing is clearly important to our species, and that Manufacturing is also vital to the U.S,  economy, and in fact that of most other countries.  "Mixed" economies are thought to be more stable.  Manufacturing is a tried and true method of creating value, keeping the balance of payments under control, and providing jobs for those who are a questionable fit for such things as the “service " sector, or the “information ” sector.  The U.S. also has a lot of residual pride in the “made in the U.S.A.” product and the tradition of leading the world in manufacturing, which is now being threatened by China.

If you try to find dependable statistics on the situation, you find various interpretations and massive arguments as to what is actually happening.  As you may know, the manufacturing output of the U.S. measured in dollars has continued to climb over the years.  It is true that China, in particular, has drastically increased its manufacturing output, but the U.S. retains about 20%of the world’s manufacturing output (about the same as China).  In 1970 the U.S. produced slightly under 30% of the world’s manufactured products, but the drop to 20% is because of increases in other countries, not because of a drop in the overall dollar amount of U.S. manufacturing. At the same time, the number of employees in the U.S.manufacturing sector has dropped precipitously, partly because of outsourcing, but also because of increased productivity due to changes in technology, organizational approaches.  The nature of manufacturing has also changed, since the U.S. has responded to lower labor costs in other countries by moving toward higher value-added products.

The traditional measure of productivity in manufacturing (output in dollars divided by number of employees) has approximately tripled since 1970.  This pleases some economists.  But these factors have resulted in a decrease in U.S. employment in manufacturing from 19 million in the late 1970’s to 12 million at present.   During this period the  manufacturing output has grown.  But productivity is a double edged sword, since it can be increased by decreasing employment, as well as making more products.

The problems I see are a blow to our national pride, and especially a loss certain types of  jobs in the U.S.  We are definitely becoming more of a service economy.  The fastest growing sectors of the economy are financial services and medical services. Many people think this is wonderful.  I remember reading an article in which the author extolled this change, because he concluded that rather than working on uncomfortable assembly lines doing repetitive labor, people could become doctors, lawyers, professors, and engineers.  Unfortunately not everyone wants to spend the time and money for the training required to do such things, and I even think it is fair to say that some people would not be very good at such jobs.

When I was in high school I wanted to become a tool and die maker – a skilled job producing tangible products.  I like skilled jobs and I like being involved with producing tangible objects.  But I would find it difficult to locate a job as a tool and die maker in the U.S. these days.  Computer controlled machining centers have taken over.  For various reasons, after becoming an engineer and working in industry for a while, I became a professor (service economy).  I was fortunate in being able still to be involved in manufacturing and working with my hands through my consulting, teaching, and hobbies. 

I would not like to work in medical services, or especially financial services.  I love ATM machines because I don’t even have to go inside of banks any more.  And I certainly would not like to work on Wall Street. In fact, I don’t think medical services and financial services will furnish ever-increasing numbers of jobs  in the future.  We don’t seem to be able to afford many more medical services, and  financial services are at this time feeling a good big of pain. If you have never read Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short (W. W. Norton, 2010), you should.  It is a great read chronicling the housing loan-induced crash.  And of course, do we really need more lawyers?

The computer and other technical advances have caused a large reduction of highly skilled jobs, many in the manufacturing of products (so-called de-skilling).   This is a loss for many people in the country who like and whose interests are matched by such work.  Had I married my high school sweetheart instead of  wandering off to college,  which was the norm for most of my high school friends, I just might have spent my life as one of them, and if not retired, be looking for a job.

I think we have a problem here, because I certainly know a lot of people who seem to have a serious computer allergy and would not like to work in an office or store.  In fact, I know people who would not even like to work indoors. 

General Topics on Manufacturing and Product Quality

Since the Stanford ME 314 Good Products, Bad Products course is now over, I will leave the topic.  Should any of you reading this blog be teaching a similar course, or if you would like to do so, contact Dave Beach (dbeach@stanford.edu), and he will be glad to send you information or conspire with you.

I am scheduled to give a few talks on my book, as part of the routine of bringing it to people’s attention.  Dave and I did a “conversation” on the topics contained in the book to a couple of hundred people on the Stanford campus last week, and it was fun.  The format called for Dave to ask me questions, and for me to answer them as best as I could.  I actually had the easier role, because I had the option of muttering a few words and then saying “what do you think, Dave?”. 

I thought it might be of interest to discuss a few of the questions and answers (?) with you.  The questions are here.  Look through them and think about how you might answer them.  I thought that beginning with the next post, I would give you my personal, perhaps biased opinion on some of them.  But just so you know that the U.S. is not alone in worrying about such questions, here is an interesting article on Japanese concerns about the topic of manufacturing that was on the front page of  the April 16 edition of the New York Times.

Interesting use of CourseWork software in Stanford Good Products Bad Products course (ME 314)

The Good Products, Bad Products course at Stanford (ME 314) uses the Stanford course management system CourseWork, now an open source release shared with other schools.  Stanford is now involved in the Sakai project, so that CourseWork 3.0 will no longer be available, but comparable software will be through the Sakai project.  For information on the Sakai project, click here.

In brief, CourseWork allows easy communication over the internet between students and instructors.  One feature of it is a discussion forum, in which student work can be submitted to the instructor and comments/grades/etc. from the instructor submitted to the student.  The work can also be made available to the other students.

David Beach, who now teaches the course, brings in many guest speakers who are involved in the design, development, and marketing of high quality products.  He also assigns my Good Products, Bad Products book, and has the students do the thought problems at the end of the chapters and submit written answers. There is some discussion of the book in class, but also many other activities that require class time.  Also the class is large (100 + students) and many of the students are off-campus taking the course over the internet.  Discussion is extremely helpful in attempting to better understand product quality, so how can he assure feedback to the students and promote discussion outside of class?

The on-campus students are divided into groups of four, and at the end of the quarter each group is asked to give a presentation centered around a company doing a particularly good job of achieving one of the components of high quality contained in my book.  Dave is a fanatic on presentation quality that includes efficient use of media, so he is able to limit each presentation to ten minutes, plus five minutes for questions. The presentations are typically very good indeed.

This year the groups were asked to review the individual student submissions to the thought problems in the book that pertain to the category of their final presentation, give those students feedback on  CourseWork  (open to all), and select the ones they believed to be the best.  This year there were four groups giving presentations on each chapter, so the results of this "pick the best ones" exercise provided  potential additional information for assigning final grades in the course. The groups are thinking about their presentation, so they have a certain amount of "expertise" on the topic, and the individual student submissions help the groups  think about their final presentation as well as resulting in more feedback.   In addition, there are general comments by the students on each other’s submissions.  All of  this added to more discussion outside of class.

This was the first time this approach to encouraging outside discussion and evaluation between the students was used , and I thought it worked quite well, and with a few changes will work even better in the future.    There will supposedly be new “CourseWork” type software available next year that will be similar, but improved. I am hoping for the similarity, because one problem I find with much computer software is that as soon as one learns to use it well, it changes, often by adding new features that add to its complexity and make it more difficult for new users.

After-thoughts on the Stanford Course ME 314 Good Products, Bad Products

 

Due to my time constraints, there were no final student presentations in my post on the chapter in the Good Prodcts, Bad Products course entitled Symbolism and Cultural Values (Chapter 8).  The students did submit individual assignments, which first of all asked them to choose a subculture of which they felt a part and then to choose the product that was most symbolic of this culture, choose the product that was most symbolic of them, and finally choose a product that was not at all symbolic of them.  As I have been doing, I will link you to the student submissions from the 2010 class.  One of the summary pages lists the responses to the first two “choices” above, and is here.  The other lists the responses to the third and fourth “choices” above and is here.  The numbers correlate between the two pages, if you want to follow individuals.  I did not include responses to the question as to whether the product most symbolic was symbolic of them. They were to some extent, but most of of the students, to their credit, resisted the stereotyping of the product.

I am sorry that the time did not allow more complete coverage of this topic, because it is my feeling that as population densities, and population in general, rise, there is more and more desire, and possibly need, for people to belong to a culture (or sub culture) that they respect and admire and that shares their values.  Industrial products play a role in this.  Think of the Prius, the Parker shotgun, the slow cooker, the Harley Davidson, the  private jet, the home steam espresso/capuccino maker, the recliner, the gas grill, the Ford F-150 pickup, and the iPhone.  The traditional direction of industry, has been to try to attract an increasing segment of the population with a product.  This results eventually in a situation which we now face with midsize four-door automobiles or kitchen appliances – they vary only slightly in details from one manufacturer to another throughout the world, or at least the “developed” world.

I am a fan of the traditional trucks in India, which have typically been sold without cabs, allowing the owners huge variation in applying and furnishing the cab—a lower income version of the days in which one would have a custom cab built for one’s Rolls Royce chassis and drive train. I suspect this will not last, and within a few years, Indian trucks will start looking the same as those in the so-called developed world.

 In my high school and college days, there was a wide variation in personal possessions, partly because there was not much money around.  As an example, when I was in high school cars were old and often repaired, and we would modify them partly because we wanted to put a personal mark on our possessions, and in the process became even more closely associated with our cult.  Extreme lowering (the forbears of low-riders), extreme funk, extreme (in those days) speed, etc.

The sub-cultures in my high school were both racial and reflections of the income level and urbanity of the junior  high schools that fed our high schools.  Because of the time and the age group, there was considerable animosity between the sub-cultures, extending to fights, social snubbing, and other painful behavior.  But it was exciting and educational, and we all felt good about being members of our “car” club, even the Sultans of Rialto.

Of course there were other more significant sub-cultural divides—Caltech students vs. Pasadena City College students (source of girls, to the annoyance of the male students there), nerds vs. fuzzies, small school vs. big school, etc.  I never will forget the thrill and anxiety experienced when I escorted a U.S.C sorority girl to a formal sorority/fraternity dance at U.S.C., and won the presigious raffle prize of the night— a set of Tommy Trojan cufflinks.  Fortunately my date did not rat on me, so I returned to Caltech unharmed.

Different cultures and sub cultures cause life to be rich.  Stanford is much more interesting now that it has become more global and offers much more cultural diversity.  California is wonderful because one does not need to travel far to experience different cultures.  A casual trip with local stops from Stanford University into the Central Valley, visiting say Biola and Fresno, and returning by way of Monterey and San Francisco, making sure that the final lap includes Hunter’s Point and East Palo Alto, gives one a fascinating experience with many cultures without the need for a trans ocean flight. Long live cultural diversity.  May industrial products encourage it!

Product Quality and Longevity

One thing I noticed in the ME314 class I have been reporting on, was a focus on new products.  This is in fact typical of our society.  This completely overlooks the value of products that have served the owner well for a long time.  Sometimes, they almost become a part of the owner.  This is a photo of me in my Carhartt jacket, which I bought some time ago—at least ten years.  My son the farmer discovered Carhartt work clothes and suggested that I buy one.  It was quite expensive for work clothes at the time, but I bought it, and plan perhaps to be buried in it.  As you can see, it has seen some hard service, and it is stained and faded.  But never has the zipper failed, it has withstand many brutal slashes and snags, it doesn’t mind water, oil, mud, or most other materials, and it keeps me properly warm and snuggy when the California climate turns treacherously cold. It is part of me, and I don’t want a new one, a cleaner one, or one with  more bells and whistles. To me it is priceless.  And oddly enough, Goodwill Industries would probably  not accept it.

I told this to Marian,my wife, and she countered with a younger, but similarly important garment that has become part of her in only a year or two.  Happily, I noticed it in a student submission on good products and told her about it.  It is a woman’s vest made by Scottevest. Like my Carhartt coat, it was fairly expensive for a vest, but she looks swell in it, and can you believe, it has 24 pockets inside.  Here she is looking for something in it.  She originally bought it to travel, which it was originally designed for, and it is exceptional.  It doesn’t totally replace a suitcase, but all the gadgets, potions, and entertainments she takes with her on trips fit in the pockets, and from the outside, she looks slick as a snake. 

Of course, she now wears it almost constantly no matter what she is doing, and probably has forgotten where such things as purses and fannypacks are.  She loves it far above its original price, and although she says it is beginning to look a bit threadbare, I’ll bet she wears it for many years rather than buy a new one.

Behavioral economists refer to rigorous experiments that show the additional value we place on products that we have owned for long periods of time and have come to love.  You have probably experienced this, if you have ever tried to sell something of this sort and been astonished at how little people will pay for it.  I now keep everything I love that I can.  A storage problem, but would you throw away one of your old pets?

Of course, this isn’t the optimal economic response for  Carhartt and Scottevest.  They now have a broad line of products (men and women) and are constantly coming out with “improved” models, which they might like Marian and me to buy.  But they keep their prices high and their profits reasonable. and as long as they keep their quality  high, everyone should be happy.  

Final post on Stanford ME314 Good Products, Bad Products course

Since my last post, the final two sets of  “good product, bad product” examples were submitted and student groups wrote summaries and gave presentations on them. The first of these was aesthetics, elegance and sophistication, and the second had to do with products that were consistent with a finite earth.  For the first, students were asked to choose a product that they thought was simply beautiful and one that they thought was unbelievably repulsive.  Also to choose a third product that they believed to be extremely elegant and sophisticated.  They were  then asked to justify their choices, and conjecture upon how they could be improved, and what the improvement might do to the cost of the product.  A student paper summarizing the products is here.  Examples of beautiful products from the 2011 course, are shown here;.  Repulsive ones are here.  Ones showing elegance and sophistication are here.

The student groups chose Cartagas (two companies of this name produce “Cuban” cigars, but only one of them is in Cuba), Tesla Motors, Ziiro watches, and Victoria’s Secret.

For the second, the students were asked to think of products that that harmed the earth's environment, and changes could lessen their negative impact .  A student summary of the responses is shown here.  And examples from the 2011 course are shown here. I missed the final student presentations, as I was out of town.  However, Professor Beach and Julie Shryne, the teaching assistant in the course, had many positive things to say about them.  And judging from the quality of the students and the preceeding presentations, I am sorry I missed them.

Speaking of Professor Beach, those of you not having taken the course might be interested in knowing a bit about him, since is not only a superlative teacher, but has been responsible for turning what were the traditional student shops into not only vastly improved facilities, but an extremely exciting and innovative center at Stanford (the Produce Realization Laboratory).  He has an interesting back ground which includes study in the liberal arts, manufacturing experience, engineering degrees, and a strong dedication to video production. He best of all, a wonderful person, filled with good spirits, high motivation, and a dedicated and hard worker.  I am proud to count him among my friends.   A good overview of David Beach and his interests can be seen here.

Update #5 Stanford University course ME 314

Two more Good Products, Bad Products topics have been covered by student presentations since the last post.  Four of them focused on Craftsmanship.  The companies chosen were Heath Ceramics, Ferrari, West Coast Classic and Customs, and Casa Na Avore.  Edith Heath founded Heath Ceramics in the 1940’s, and the company, has clung to her standards, and several of her designs, as it has slowly grown.  Ferrari is wedded to high craftsmanship for both performance and traditional reasons.  West Coast Classic and Customs is a local company that specializes in both restoration to original (or better) condition, or resto-rods.  Casa Na Avore is a Brazilian architecture form that specializes in tree houses.  

The next four groups gave presentation on companies/products that dealt with emotion and human needs.  The first two were Tone Fitness (dumbbells), Disney (Disneyland), Diageo (Captain Morgan Spiced Rum), and Phillip Morris (Marlboro cigarettes).  The group presenting Tone Fitness stressed the user support and motivational information, and did an interesting informal survey that correlated love of the product with the frequency of its use.  Apparently people who buy exercise equipment and do not use it grow to  hate it, whereas those who use it regularly become quite fond of it.  Disneyland needs no explanation.  I have had many opportunities to visit it, since when my kids were growing up I lived in Southern California.  I clearly remember how much I hated to take them to it, and strangely enough, what a good time I had when there.  People like to criticize it, its prices, its long lines, etc., but it truly is a marvel.  Even the French now like it. 

It was interesting that both liquor and cigarettes were chosen this year as examples of products that were associated with strong emotions and, for better or worse, strong needs.  I was embarrassed to realize I had devoted little attention to drugs such as nicotine and alcohol in my book.  They are both endemic to our species, and highly controversial. An interesting point brought up in conjunction with Marlboro cigarettes, is that their advertising budget continues to climb even though it is now restricted in format.  They are putting more of it into sponsoring athletic events, point of  purchase, and, of course, in countries other than the U.S.  An interesting statistic about alcohol, is that is apparently involved in one out of every 25 deaths (75,000 total, 16,000 in automobiles), 40% of suicides, and 60% of murders.  And yes, I drink it.

The presentations, as is usual for the course, were top notch and highly entertaining, complete with volunteers from the audience and costumes.  I think it fair to say that Dave Beach (and I) were quite satisfied.

I am not including URL’s for these companies and products, because your browser will have no problem in finding them, should you want to find out more. The submissions by last year's students for products showing good craftsmanship are shown here, and for products showing poor craftsmanship here.  Similarly those paying strong attention to good fit with emotions and needs are shown here.  Those doing less well at considering emotions and needs are here.

Stanford ME 314 Good Products Bad Products update #4

Since the last update, the class has continued to read my book, done the “good-bad” exercises, listened to some excellent visiting lecturers, and begun to work on their final presentations.  The first four groups, who focused on human fit, delivered their presentations a couple of days ago, and did outstanding jobs.  The first group talked about a company that produces products for people suffering from arthritis (osteo, not rheumatoid).   Arthritis is inevitable if one lives long enough, since it is simply due to the wearing out of cartilage.  I am presently two inches shorter than I once was.  When this was brought to my attention, I complained to my physical therapist daughter in law.  She happily told me that if I lived a really, really long time, I could be six inches shorter than I once was, since six inches of me were cartilage, and it would all wear out.  Nice kid!  Of course, the products of this company (who advertises ther comfort of their products for everybody, not just their target customer group), are easier to use for everyone, and therefore the company is doing well.

The second  company to be studied was a very successful maker of slot machines, and this group came up with the to me interesting conclusion that the human fit of this product was too good, since people became addicted to losing time and money to it.  They illustrated this with a chilling video of a woman who was a slot-machine addict.  The third group studied Wii, as a breakthrough in play stations, and in fact in its effect on computer game designs.  Like the first two groups, they involved student volunteers in their presentations, and I was impressed at the Wii skills of the students who demonstrated.  The fourth group talked about the makers of the Pill, a miniature speaker for digital devices that is enjoying great success, not only because of its small size and therefore compatibility with people seeking a portable speaker, but also because it was “cool”, which resulted in a fine discussion about the overlap between physical fit and emotional response.

The guest speakers provided an interesting contrast.  The first was Nancy Gioia, who is the director of electrification for Ford Motor Company.  She gave a superb summary of Ford’s plans for incorporating hybrid power, plug in hybrid power, and full battery power into their fleet.  It was impressive not only for its completeness, but for the extent to which Ford has incorporated electrification into their product plans.  She stressed not only the benefits of this, but also the necessity that it be compatible with the desired growth and profitability of the country.  A bit of information on her is here.  The next, Adam Grosser, who has had an extremely successful career beginning with Apple and now with a venture capital firm specializing in improving electricity distribution, began by pointing out that true innovation requires time and involves experimentation and failure, and may not be achieved if the sole intention of a company is to maximize income in the short term.  However, after pointing out the many areas of potential improvement in the electrical power business, he ended up captivating the class with venture capital stories.  But he emphasized at the end, that venture capital is a business seeking high returns as fast as possible.   A bit of information on Adam is here and a longer U-Tube lecture at U.C. Berkeley is here.  The final speaker of the period was David Klaus, the Director of Engineering at Proximity, a company in Myanmar producing irrigating equipment at very low costs ($15 U.S. for a foot powered pump).  Proximity’s goal is to bring affordable life-changing products to people with very low income ($1 to $2 a day).  They obviously seek enough income to not only stay in business but grow so that they can reach more people.  An interesting short video on Proximity featuring David is here. 

All three speakers were outstanding, and all in a sense promoting products that will improve the environment, but one as an executive in an established and very large U.S. automobile company, one as a venture capitalist backing entrepreneurs focusing on electrical power distribution, and one as the engineering director of an extremely idealistic company serving extremely low-income people.

The class is a bit behind on submitting its final good product bad product summaries, so I will include them in the next and final update. 

Cognitive limits and product quality.

Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every 18 months.  Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel Corporation,  described this in a paper he gave in 1965.  It has been a remarkably good prediction, the number rising from approximately one thousand at the time to approximately two and a half billion in 2010.  This increase in device count has been central to the amazing increase in the performance of all digital equipment and the internet in this time period.

In the same period, it is safe to say that the ability of the human brain, at least as measured in number of neurons, has not increased at all.  This leaves us in new territory, in which we are experimenting with everything from human interaction, to our ability to utilize vast quantities of data, to strains in our traditional employment patterns.  Suffice it to say, that our brains are being tested as never before.  Yet this seems to not be taken into consideration in the design of many of our industrial products.

I use computers fairly heavily, but to do rather ordinary things.  But even though I try not to, I seem often to be upgrading software and hardware.  New software often demands upgrading of old, and hardware fails, leading to both new hardware and software.  As I write this, I am having problems with a magnificently high bandwidth internet connection that Google recently installed.  How could I pass it up, since we are a beta site for a network that delivers data at a gigabyte per second, which even impresses my grandchildren, and it is free for a year.  But I have had a failure because of a new piece of hardware, one because of a server in the system, and now because of a faulty router.  Google has rapidly responded to these, and after all it is a Beta site, but I have spent considerable time on figuring out the system and switching wires around in the house (fortunately we have  kept our old service).  In fact, I am about to keep track of the time I spend learning about new software and hardware, as opposed to the time I spend using it.  I still have vivid memories of the time we switched from analog to digital TV, along with the rest of the country.  Digital is better.  But I spent a great deal of time talking to a recording of Shaq Oneal, which I guess was supposed to entertain me until I could get to the tree that switched me to a long wait until I could talk to a person, who often then arranged for a service person to visit me after a day or two.

I feel I am cognitively overloaded now, and I am not even social networking.  My old passwords and user names are found faulty, so I have to concoct new ones and figure out how to keep track of them.  My e-mail traffic is heavy, I have a blog and a web page to keep up.  Stanford just adopted a new web page format (Drupal), and I am learning it, and have just realized the incredible number of modules available, and that it is also a Beta site with sometimes marginal documentation.  Going beyond the internet and my computer, our house continues to fill with digital equipment, and our cars have increasingly complex and different electrical systems, and I both by nature and for economic reasons feel I have to be able to maintain such things.  And there is rapidly increasing access to interesting information and entertainment.  People are constantly sending me amusing written and visual material, websites, and you tube videos.  But as the internet becomes crowded with more and more information, I am finding that instead of becoming more useful, it becomes more difficult and takes more time to sort through.

My wife and I are hooked  on  the simulcasts of the New York Metropolitan Operat, the last one we saw being the six hour final sequence of Wagner’s Ring series (yes I saw the other three).  The good news is that to do this we have to drive only a mile, park 50 feet from the theatre for free, and pay $20 for a very comfortable seat with lots of leg room and lots of choice and watch a simply amazing performance with great sound and fantastic camera work, all the while nattily dressed in our levis and sweatshirts and equipped with a large bag of food and drink, in case we wanted to avoid the popcorn-to-Starbucks coffee menu in the lobby.  It is absolutely wonderful. I didn’t even know I was an opera fan.

 Of course I could avoid all of these distractions newly brought to me by advanced products of industry, but give me a break.  I don’t have the discipline to do that.  Neither do you!

Is multi tasking the answer?  Unfortunately not.  Not surprisingly to me, there is more and more evidence that multi-tasking is somewhat of a myth.  We can  think about more than one problem at a time if the solving of them is rote.  If not, the mind simply does a lousy job on both.  We are trapped into one conventional human brain.  Designers of products traditionally overestimate the ability of customers to use them, because designers, after all, understand the product very well (remember the Three Mile Island Reactor accident?  The designers understood the reactor, but the operators did not understand it well enough).  But generally, we are able to understand the individual components of the world in which we live.  Our trouble is with the sum of these components. My wife and I can easily set the time on a clock, especially if we have instructions..  It is just when we have a lot of clocks (which we do), some of them have “creative” controls (which some of them do) and it is time to switch between standard and daylight saving time, that we feel the limits of our mind.

And I already talked about remotes.  I am not looking forward to our “smart” house.

Product Quality and the Senses

Our perception of product quality has a great deal to do with the senses. Not only do we not want our products to be ugly, but we would like them to feel good, sound good, taste good, and smell good.  Sight is our dominant sense, and we have a fair vocabulary to describe our visual images.  We also have a good ability to work with visual images —look at the controls and tools on Photoshop.  But the information we get from our other senses is a bit more difficult to work with.  As an example, consider smell, an extremely important sense, in that it quickly summons up positive and negative reactions and is a strong memory stimulus. If you smell a turkey being cooked, for instance, it might remind  you of last thanksgiving.  The first exciting car I ever owned was a 1956 Austin Healy, which I acquired when I was a young and unfettered Air Force Officer.  I loved it greatly.  It had leather seats, and among its small problems (Lucas electrical system) it leaked oil.

I usually have owned a British sports car  since then.  I presently have a 1970 E-Jag sitting in my garage (Lucas electrical system again).  When I sit in it, I smell leaking oil and leather seats, and it takes me right back to my Austin Healey and  Air Force days.  Sometimes, if depressed, I go sit in my Jaguar.  It will, incidentally, be running by summer, although I must admit I said that last winter.

But most of us are much less equipped to deal with smell in the design of products.  In the case of food products, perfumes, and others where smell is a strong selling point, we are better.  Not only have the components that provide odors been carefully analyzed, but such businesses have access to "experts" who have trained their sense of smell, and a vocabulary to describe various odors.  If you have taken a wine course, you have taken the first step in such training.  But the rest of us are short on both vocabulary and knowledge of the mechanics.  Can  you describe the smell of a pineapple in words?  Do you know the  chemicals you would mix together to attain that smell?  How about the smell of oil and leather?  People have worked on such problems.  Used car dealers have spray cans of new car scent that they apply during detailing.  Real estate agents know that baking cookies in the oven before showing the house helps sell it.  But as far as I know, there are no squirt cans of cookie smell.

We are not even clear on the mechanics of smell.  We know about lenses, retinas, the mechanics of the pupil and the iris.  We know the location of the optic nerve and the area of the brain that turns impulses to images.  But what happens in smell?  If we smell dog poop, do dog poop molecules enter our nose?  If so, what happens then?  Are there specialized dog poop receptors, and if so, where does the signal go in the brain and what does the brain with it?  And our reactions vary among individuals.  I love to smell ground beef being cooked in the kitchen.  It reminds me of hamburgers, which I love, and picnics.  My wife doesn’t like to smell it.  It reminds her of unhealthy food and greasy deposits on the wall.

But even through the process of our sense of smell may be somewhat mysteriousto us,  we at least should be very careful that our products do not emit odors that are inconsistent with their nature, and offensive to us.

The students in the Stanford Good Products, Bad Products course read from Diane Ackerman’s book The Natural History of the Senses.  The link to its Amazon page is in the recommended book list on the right of the page.  It is a wonderfully written book that uses the English Language to describe the workings of, and effects of the senses.  I recommend it to all.  Writers must attempt to convey the results of sensory input to readers in words.  The rest of us have not had much practice in that.  We can measure the stimulus better than work with the response.

Stanford Good Products Bad Products course (ME 314) update #3

The students continue to read my Good Products, Bad Products book and for each chapter submit examples of good and bad products, guesses as to why the bad ones might be bad, and ideas of improving them.  Since the class is large, the amount of information is too large to include in  this blog.  But each of the student groups that will present the final summaries is reading all of the submissions having to do with their topics and giving us a short summary of them.  I will include one of the summaries for Craftsmanship here, one for Emotions and Needs here, and one for Aesthetics, Elegance and Sophistication here.

I will not include any of the good and bad product write ups from the students here, but I will include summaries of good and bad products from the 2011 class. Products showing good craftsmanship are here, and poorly crafted products are here.  Examples of good products as far as Emotions and Needs are here, and bad ones are here.  Some products considered beautiful are shown here. And some thought to be elegant are here.  Finally, here is a list of products that the students found to be repulsive!

During this time period, Peter Mondavi, the Co-proprietor of the Charles Krug Winery, was a guest speaker.  This is one of the older wineries in the Napa valley,  and is noted for the quality of its wine. The Krug home page is here. The class also read from the book Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman (Knopf Doubleday).  This is one of my favorite books, and I have added it to my recommended list to the right.    She is a wonderful writer and not only talks about the senses, but is able to convey their power through words and stories.

The class also took a field trip the Littlefield Collection of restored military vehicles.  Jacques Littlefield, who unfortunately died a couple of  years ago, was one of my favorite people.  I had the opportunity  to get to know him well because he was a student at Stanford when I joined the faculty in the 1960's, and one of the most regular customers of the student shop.  As projects, he made radio controlled model army tanks.  Upon graduation, he accepted a job in manufacturing at Hewlett Packard.  When he decided to retire in his late 20's, I realized that perhaps he had access to money, and indeed he did, being the son of Ed Littlefield, a billionaire. 

Jacques spend most of his life, effort, and quite a bit of money collecting and restoring military vehicles, especially tracked one.  By the time of his death he had put together not only the largest private collection of tanks in the world, but probably the most beautifully and accurately restored ones.  The collection consists of approximately 100 tanks, and another 100 military vehicles of other types.

The field trip was for several purposes.  The collection shows an amazing level of craftsmanship.  It also demonstrates the love of a person for machines.  Jacques had access to enough money to do anything he wanted to, and he elected to spend much of his life working on and understanding a particular tpe of industrial product.  The collection results in strong, and sometimes mixed, emotions, on the part of the students.  And finally, although brutal devices of war, the mechanisms involved often demonstrate a high degree of elegance.  Jacques also loved trains and other equipment, and his home was complete with one of the largest 7-1/2 inch gauge  model train layout on the west coast.  The San Francisco Live Steam club continues to hold forth there.  And he donated the beautiful organ in the Stanford chapel, and liked it and the people who manufactured it that he had one installed in a specially built addition to his house.  As usual, the trip was most successful.

 

 

 

Product Quality and Standardization

When I was in the U. S. Air Force, I often checked out vehicles from the Motor Pool.  I loved the standardization which allowed me to jump in and drive away.  There was usually an on-off ignition switch that was plainly marked.  There was a big red button on the dash, that if pushed would cause the engine to start.  Controls for lights, horn, etc. were plainly marked and different shapes and sizes.

 Contrast this with checking out a strange rental car at night at an unfamiliar airport.  I no longer simply head for the appropriate freeway as soon as I get the car started (not always obvious how to even do that any more).  I now carefully find and test the many controls having to do with everything from lights to emergency brake, and even throw in the navigation system, if it has one and I intend to use it.  I am tired of washing the windshield when I think I am dimming the lights, and trying to figure out the radio as I move into heavy traffic.  One could be killed that way.

Standardization seems to have disappeared.  It seems as though every team designing or upgrading a product wants to put its own improved features on or in it.  Hey, I figured out a way to combine de-fogging the windshield with opening the gas tank door!  Look, this way you can operate the horn with your foot!  Let’s make all of the buttons the same color and size and line them up in straight rows.  Oh, and let’s not have labels.  They will make the design too busy.

I have bad dreams about burning to death in the back seat of a friend’s car after an accident because I can’t figure out how to work the door handle. And speaking of gas tank doors, it’s nice to now have a little picture telling what side the door is on, but is there any reason they are not all on the same side?

The same, of course is true for many products.  Software needs more standardization.  I realize that it is a counter-capitalistic and heretical thing to say, but isn’t it about time that the operating systems on P.C.’s and Apples converged?  They are very similar now, and after all, Microsoft owns a sizable chunk of Apple.  The remaining differences just serve to further burden already overburdened brains.  And how about projector connectors?  Etc, etc, etc.

This photo shows one of the two “entertainment systems” in my house.  It is a real one, not the type featured in Architectural Digest, or Wired Magazine.  It consists of used, but highly serviceable components,  Note the remote controls under the TV.  One of them is a  “universal” remote, but of course it does not access many control functions on the individual components. We could control them manually, but for various reasons, two of the components, including the receiver, are those dark boxes on the lower right.  A close up of them is shown below:

 

These photos were taken with a floodlight.  Normally the room is quite dark, especially if TV is being watched.  In that lighting it is essentially impossible to make out the labels or the controls, or even find the manual switches, even if one is lying on the floor next to them.    I suppose the designer might have thought that the owner would use the equipment so continuously that manual operation,  when desired or necessary,  could be done by feel. 

Note the lack of clues on how to accomplish various tasks.  We keep the extra five remotes around for when we need to control components such as these without lying on the floor with a flashlight and a magnifying glass, and of course the remotes often stray. The ability to manually control components would be enhanced if I rebuilt the cabinet, but I don't seem to get around to it.  But woe be unto the visitor who tries  to operate this mess.  In fact, woe often unto us. 

The system performs well visually and acoustically, so I am not about to replace it.   It would not only cost money, but I spend too much of my time learning to use new digital stuff.   Besides, this system  reminds me of how not to design controls and labels on devices such as these that are used in normal homes such as ours.

Course Update #2 - Lecturers and Human Fit

The students in the Stanford Good Products, Bad Products course are now interacting with guest lecturers, reading  and discussing chapters of my book, and submitting examples of good and bad products on the topics of the book, beginning with Chapter 4, Human Fit. 

Recent Guest Lecturers were Dave Franchino, the President of Design Concepts, Inc, and Matt Lonoci, Founder and President of Matteo.  Franchino founded very successful design firm in Wisconsin after an equally successful career at General Motors, and is one of the more eloquent and thoughtful designers around.  Lonoci, after briefly working in the financial arena, founded a company that makes high quality fabric products, in particular bedding. He is not only a fascinating story teller about quality in a product area that stdents in the class are typically not familiar with, but also a strong proponent of local manufacturing and treating employees well.

A word about the student examples.  At the end of the quarter there will be presentations on each of the book topics, beginning with Chapter 4.  The first three chapters have been read and thoroughly discussed, but because of the time constraints of the class, the students will only submit examples for chapters 4 through 9.  Students will be giving more formal presentations in the form of media-based cases at the end of the quarter.  There will be four presentations on each topic by groups of four students.  As part of their preparation, these groups will read all of the student examples on their topic, evaluate them, and prepare summaries.

The best way I can describe the student work is to show you examples by linking  you to four pages concerning human fit.  The first one is an overview from one of the student groups on the concerns appearing in the student examples of good and bad human fit.  The second contains three examples considered to show good and bad human fit (students were limited to a paragraph on each example).  The third a list of products considered good  by the students of last year's class, and the fourth a list of the those displaying bad human fit by them.    I include last year's because I have not yet compiled the overall lists for the 2012 class.

Of course, I would expect different populations to submit different types of products.  Perhaps home owners would nominate more appliances, pieces of furniture, and yard equipment, and older people might have more concern for comfort and more difficulty in seeing tiny print from a distance and folding their bodies into small volumes.  And incidentally, we told last year's class not to include Apple products, and software of any sort, because they are so central to the life of students that they would have dominated the lists. Of course some of them disobeyed us.

The reason for these exercises is to cause the students to do some hard thinking about issues of quality—in particular to practice applying the material in the book and other readings, and that they have picked up by interacting with the lecturers.

 

Perceived Product Quality, Pricing, Sales, and Discounts

In Chapter 3 of  my Good Products, Bad Products book,  I argued that high quality products should not be insulted by the “40% off for a limited time”, or “buy one, get one free” mentality that seems to be so wide spread in the U.S.  Perhaps this mentality, that apparently causes people to line up outside stores on “Black Friday” and other such "sale" days well before the store opens, may be beginning to ebb.  J.C. Penney, a store that has had hundreds of sales per year for the past few years (590 last year), has just announced that it is going to lower all of its prices by 40 %, and offer only “monthly value” discounts on selected merchandise each month, and clearance deals called “best price” the first and third Friday of each month.  Obviously, the every-day low prices at competitors such as Walmart have hurt them, and although some shoppers seem to love the “oh boy” nature of constant sales, others (me) find this approach to shopping a real pain.  And of course, one always wonders where stores get the “full price” from which they cut.  Apparently, last year approximately 70% of Penney’s revenue came from merchandise that was discounted by 50% or more.

I for one, am delighted to see this move at Penney’s happen, whether it works or not.  It is time to experiment with rational, constant, and simpler pricing (I am also tired of prices ending in 99 cents).

But Penny’s is certainly not the only merchandiser in this “sale” mode.  The last time I bought a vehicle, I had found what I wanted, which although relatively low cost, had the high reliability, decent fuel mileage, and lack of feature creep that I wanted.  To me the quality for the price was high. Armed with all the pricing information I could glean from various sources, and awareness of all of the strange and arguable fees that appear on window stickers, I approached a sales person at a dealer that had been recommended to me.  He was, in fact, both knowledgeable and reasonable, and after dealing with the questionable nature of invoice prices, installed extras I did not want, and various items that were actually kick backs to the dealer, we  arrived at a price I thought reasonable. I did not want to finance the vehicle, so I would have happily paid the amount and left with the vehicle.  But, at that point, after telling me that it was too bad that I had just missed a sale which would have lowered the price $1500, he told me he could give me that “discount” if I financed the vehicle.  I told him again that I did not want to finance it, but now I was not as happy with the price, even though I know that much of the profit in the automobile business is from financing, so it was not surprising that they were trying to talk me into financing the purchase.

 He then told me that if I financed it for the minimum loan (also $1500) there was no charge, and I could go right home and send in a check for $1500 and pay off my loan, thus saving $1500 on the vehicle  At that point I realized that the U.S. approach to sales was going to triumph, even though the vehicle was a foreign brand .  I filled out the forms for a $1500 loan, went home and mailed in my check, and soon got many e-mail messages from many levels of the company thanking me for paying off my loan, buying from them, etc.  But a month or so later I started getting letters from banks informing me that I did not qualify for the loan. 

After many phone calls and e-mail messages I found out that the company was seeking to sell my loan at a lower rate than I was to pay (standard procedure) and somehow the letters that were supposed to go to the company refusing to buy the loan at the terms the company was proposing were coming to me.

Obviously the negotiation between the company and various banks did not affect me much, since I had already “paid off” the loan. It was due to lags in communication within the system, obviously acceptable if I had taken years to pay off the loan, and confusion between my name and address and that of the dealer.  But after I purchased the vehicle, I was also overwhelmed by a tsunami of obviously automatic e-mail messages from the dealer and many levels of the company thanking me for my purchase, asking me to use their service and parts centers,  asking me to fill out detailed questionnaires on my satisfaction with my treatment while buying the car and with the car itself, and attempting to sell me more cars. 

Did this behavior decrease my perception of the quality of the product?  Sure.  It took my time and tried my patience. And despite the excellent work of the sales person,  I felt that if the dealer and company were playing this strange game with apparent, but not real financing, were unable to channel letters from banks to the right parties, and were unable to do a reasonable job of controlling their promotional e-mail, maybe there might be something wrong with the vehicle also.

  Fortunately, it is behaving well.  Thankfully, the people who design and manufacture the vehicles have different DNA from those who try to talk you into financing, can't control their correspondence,  and send you automatic and unwanted love letters that add to your e-mail load.

 

Global Quality

Pardon my lack of posts, but I have been helping my publisher make people aware of the Good Products, Bad Products book and drowning in the examples of good and bad products flooding in from the students.  In a few days  I will hopefully be in control and begin forwarding some to you.

But I  have just had another indication of active searching for quality from abroad.  Since I am not one of the population that includes names like Danielle Steel and Jim Collins, my books take a while to become known.  My publisher (and I) are just now working on this problem.  It used to be that publishers did all of the work, but now that there is so much information on the internet,  so many self-published and other types of "books" available, and perhaps less tendency to read books anyway, publishers are asking for all the help they can get.  But a couple of weeks ago, shortly after the book hit the stores and while I was still feeling that no one had noticed yet,  I received notification that a Korean publisher had bought the rights to it in Korea.

When people in the U.S. began to accept the fact that Japan was beginning to produce higher quality products than equivalent ones from some U.S. companies, that were a large number of reasons given, including the influence of W. Edwards Deming, and Joseph M. Juran.  Obviously the fine hand of U.S. citizens at work.  When we read of the high quality of Apple products designed in China, we visualize U.S. Apple employees closely overseeing the workers and the process. But what are we to make of the products of Samsung, Kia, and Hyundai?  More difficult to give credit for their rapidly improving and often excellent quality to U.S. people.  To me the evidence is overwhelming that the understanding of the importance of high overall product quality is global, and companies in all countries who are spending more thought and effort towards achieving it will win.  But I admit to being biased.

Marc Newson and update on Stanford Good Products, Bad Products Course

There is an article on Marc Newson in the magazine section of the January 29 New York Times. He is presently one of the world’s most visible designers.  We have not talked much about individual designers, but you should find it an interesting read and we will talk more about designers later. 

To date, the course ME 314 has been involved with several things.  The students have read the first five chapters of my book and each student has submitted examples of products that show outstanding human fit, poor human fit, outstanding  craftsmanship, and poor craftsmanship, along with a paragraph justifying each choice. Courseworks, the software used at Stanford and many other universities to allow internet communication and discussion between all parties, now shows some 400 examples and comments by the students and the teaching staff on these examples. This activity will continue through the remaining chapters of my  book.   I will mention some of the conclusions from this exercise in a future post.

The students have been divided into a number of small groups who will  give presentations on the book chapter topics at the end of the term.  These groups have been also asked to read the pertinent product examples from the students and react to them. The purpose of all of this is obviously to stimulate  deeper thinking and more discussion about the topic of product quality

The course utilizes a number of speakers from outside of Stanford presenting  work and thinking that is pertinent to the quest for high quality.  David Beach, the person responsible for the course these days, is particularly interested in imagery not only as a component of good presentations, but also as an aide in evaluating the quality of products.  Therefore the first two speakers were professional media people, one, Jonathan Edelmann speaking on creating stories, and another, Scott Doorley, discussing video.  The next two were typical of the remainder of the speakers, in that they represented companies that they had founded that are particularly noteworthy as far as high quality is concerned.  The first, Peter Dreissigacker,  was co-founder of Concept II, a company that produces oars for competitive rowing and the favored ergometer among rowers.  Their success depends on producing the best.  The second, Steen Strand, was a co-founder of ICON Aircraft, developer of a an amphibious sport aircraft.  A glance at the company URL’s gives a sense of what they are up to.  Obviously quality is key to both of them.  Competitive athletes buy the best, and low-quality airplanes are clearly not desirable.  Concept II is here, and ICON Aircraft is here.

Product Quality and Work

On Sunday, Jan 2, the New York Times ran a large article entitled “How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, beginning on the first page of and ending with a two page spread in the middle of the first section.  The verbiage from the article is here.  But the original article also included some very interesting information having to do with employment in the U.S.  

There was first of all, a graph of the percentage of workers in the service sector of the U.S. economy vs. the manufacturing sector since 1960.  As you probably know, the percentage in the manufacturing sector has fallen to about half of what it was and is now 14%, the service sector having risen to 86%.  So as of now six out of every seven U.S. workers are in the service sector.  Another graphic that took my eye was a comparison of the fifteen largest employers in the U.S. in 1960 and in 2010.  In 1960  only three of them were classified as service providers.  Now all but three are.   The only company showing up for both these times was General Electric, but its largest unit by revenue is GE capital, which provides financial services.  Apple, of course, although it ranks among the top companies in the world in capital value, does not show up on the 2010 list, because its worldwide employment is only 63,000, well below Walmart, the leader, at 2,100,000, or even CVS Pharmacy, at 280,000 the smallest of the fifteen.   In fact, none of the present “hot” internet companies (Facebook, Amazon, etc.) show up on the 2010 list. 

But hopefully, you are following this change, because it is an important one not only for the U.S., but other “developed” countries and ones following the same path.   Another interesting set of numbers from the article compares the additional jobs created in various other areas from 1000 new jobs from each.  According to these, 1000 additional jobs created in retailing result in 240 additional jobs elsewhere.  For hospitals, the number is 670, for computer systems design services 1,190, for motor vehicle manufacturing 4,710, and for steel product manufacturing, 11,890.  Seems to me that as far as job creation, we in the U.S. are not exactly going in the right direction. 

I admit, that I have a visceral reaction, in that I personally would have found being employed in most of the companies listed for 1960 challenging and rewarding.  I would not like to work in many of the ones listed for 2010.  I would consider most of them great big stores and I am an engineer!  But I do admit that I perhaps have an age problem, because I was having a wonderful time building spacecraft in 1960.  Maybe if I was just beginning my career now, I would find great challenge working for Walmart or Bank of America.

What does this have to do with product quality?  If countries like the U.S. desire to remain in manufacturing and provide jobs for all of the other people like me who do not want to work in stores, it becomes more and more important to continue to improve the quality of our products, and improve our market share.

Maybe we should be proud that Apple can make a profit of $400,000  per worker through their competence at globalization (also from the Duhigg-Bradsher NYT article).  And people like me do have the freedom to move to Shenzhen and work for Lina Lin (in the article) if we like the process of designing and manufacturing products, except that our families would not be pleased to join us there. 

Perhaps we are somewhat ambivalent about globalization an using the wrong quantities to measure our success.  What do you think?

Automobile Quality

If you are interested in opinions as to the quality of 2012 cars, now is a good time to look at the web.  One of the older and perhaps more thorough series of rankings is that done by Motor Trend Magazine.  A good explanation of their thinking behind their award for the  2012 car of the year is here.  Their winner was the Volkswagen Passat.  As the article explains, they put 35 cars through various hurdles, and relied on the opinions of a panel of judges.  Reading through the article gives you an idea not only of their relative rankings of the cars, but also of the biases of the judges. You will undoubtedly disagree with them, as one of the major entertainments  of automobile fans is to do so, usually by means of extremely insulting letters to the magazine.

This competition was described in the magazine as the "biggest ever", and "a level playing field of greatsmall, midsize, sporty, and green cars from around the globe.  Wow.  A changing ball game?

There was a time when U.S. car magazines, such as Motor Trend, seemed to be biased toward "U.S." cars (G.M., Ford, Chrysler) except for occasional interest in overseas "sport" or "racing" cars.  They were focussed toward acceleration, speed, and size, and seemed less taken by such things as mileage, handling, and interior details.  Happily that has been changing.  The 35 cars in this competition represented a global group varying in size from the Fiat 500 to the Chrysler 300, and in mileage from the Chrysler 300 to the 100mpg+ equivalents of the electrics. To me, the most wonderful thing was the overall diversity among them. Diversity means experimentation, which means creativity, which is bound to lead to better products.  Diversity also means that it will be possible for individuals to choose cars that  are better suited to them.  The automobile industry seems to be awakening.

Consider the traditional "U.S." companies (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler).  Although their products were certainly in the minority in the Motor Trend competition, there are very encouraging words being written about their future products.  One would hope so, since they should have been thoroughly awakened by their recent economic histories, rising fuel prices, increasing traffic congestion, the spectre of increasing government regulation, and global competition. 

Not only the products, but the nature of the automobile industry continues to change.  Outsourcing is so widespread, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to absolutely correlate cars with nations.  Some companies, such as Volkswagen, tend to design and build their automobiles in their home country.  But the Passsat, the winner of the Motor Trend 2012 Car of the Year contest, is manufactured in Tennessee, and will only be sold in the U.S. and China.   Clearly a German company, but a German car?   And how about Chrysler, a traditional U.S. company now owned by Fiat.

An interesting article on the internet written by Craig Howie and entitled Is Your Car Made in America is here.  It gives a peek into the industry, which has truly become global. This is at present causing great concern about balance of trade, employment, and other such important considerations.  But the good news is that the products cannot help but benefit from the increased competition, insights, technology, broadening customer pool, and sophistication. 

Too Tall Pickup?

If you are in the Good Products, Bad Products class right now at Stanford, you can skip this post, because I complained a bit both in class and in my book about the size of my “full sized” 2011 pickup. But I want to put this post in my blog because I am fascinated about how products such as automobiles in the U.S. seem to grow in size until they become too big, and digital products seem to shrink until they become too small.  Then there is usually a great break-through, and U.S. automobile manufacturers discover smaller cars and people making smaller digital products discover larger ones (pads?).

My pickup, a 2011 Toyota Tundra, is shown here backed up to a 1966 Chevrolet – both l/2 ton pickups with 8 foot beds.  All mid 1950's full-size pickups were approximately the same size, as are all 2011 full size pickups.   The growth is obvious, but the reason for it is not.  On first glance, the larger door might be convenient, except that the seat, being positioned by the steering wheel, is far toward the front of the door opening.  If one tries to use the door when parked next to other cars, the door cannot be opened far enough to provide as much space as a smaller door would.  True, there is more room to put stuff behind the seat than in the older pickup, but this room is useless for most people I know (including me), because the space rapidly fills up with miscellaneous objects, which one forgets are there, and which are very difficult to find and remove if one does not.

But my chief complaint is the height of the pickup.  The bed is deeper, the clearance is greater, and the suspension looks like it allows a larger amount of movement.  The distance between the top of the rear tire and the body work gives an indication of this and can be seen in the photo above.  The result is a very long step to get into the back, difficulty in reaching objects in the bed from over the side, and even a long step  get into the passenger compartment.  I had to add an aftermarket running board to make it reasonable for my wife to get into and out of the truck, and in fact, to make it reasonable  for myself.  And I cannot reach small objects in the middle of the bed from standing on the ground beside the truck, and I am 6’2”.

Why is this a problem?  Because I use the truck to haul things, and that is what pickups were for.  This picture shows a 2011 Ford F-150 that a farmer friend of mine owns.   He became so annoyed at not being able to reach things in the bed that he removed the box and put a flatbed on the frame.  The next picture shows a typical load – the kind of stuff that farmers haul around.   I could go on for some time -  On modern pickups there are inadequate load tie-downs and the body acquires and shows dings enthusiastically.  This picture shows a  tail-light assembly on my truck.  The other one is broken.  This assembly shatters easily and it is so large and protruding  that it is difficult to avoid breaking and replacing it, for $100 or so ($200 from a dealer).  The Chevrolet tail light and back up light are below—adequate, harder to hit, and cheaper to replace. But I will not go further.

There are many good points about my 2011 pickup.  It has high reliability and for a good sized pickup gets reasonable mileage.  I was able to acquire it with minimum bells and whistles of the type that begin failing over time.  My plan is to lower it, (because I —like most pickup owners— have no intention of racing it to the tip of Baja California nor driving it off-road through mountains) and drive it until I rebuild the Chevrolet!

As I say in the book, modern pickups, are somewhere between a car and a truck –  compromise vehicles.  I want an honest 1/2 ton truck with an eight foot bed to haul miscellaneous things around and that provides decent mileage, wears scratches and dents proudly, is easily serviceable, has a long life, and  fits me.  I do not need one to help me look tougher, or either cooler or hotter.    I am not looking for fights, I am cool enough, and I don't need to hit on  cowgirls.   I would think that there are enough people like me that there is a potential quality product out there that could make some company some money.

 

 

Week 1, the Good Products, Bad Products Course

The Good Products Course is on its way.  I linked a schedule to my last post, and in this one I am including the reading assignments from my book here, in case you are interested.  They are very similar to the ones at the ends of the chapter of the book, only more limited in extent because they need to be read and commented upon (private school, high tuition, feedback required).

The first meeting was devoted to organizing and describing the course, figuring out who the students were, etc.

At the second meeting, Bonnie Wan, the CEO of The Way We Live, gave an excellent presentation of non quantitative marketing research and what can be done with it.  She gave several interesting examples, my favorite being a study performed for a computer game company that wanted to find out more about the culture of street and canyon racers so that they could improve a racing game they sell.  As in most social science research, this required that the people doing the study become accepted by the drivers (young, male, car-freak thrill seekers).  This was unusually difficult, because street and canyon racing, although definitely existing late at night in areas such as Southern California, are illegal.  But they succeeded in the study, and an interesting part is that street racing (city streets) and canyon racing (mountains and the opportunity to go over a cliff if you make a mistake) attract very different people.  Street racing is apparently all about cars, and canyon racing all about drivers. Street racers are into macho, and canyon racers skill.  There are, of course similarities.  For instance, members of both cultures require extremely high adrenaline levels.  Sounds like another version of the different values of drag racers and of  sports car racers.   The reason for her talk was to discuss methods of better understanding cultures and emotions and their relation to products.

I also said a few words about the course and the book, and dropped in a few examples.  I will show you a few photos I used in my next post.  If you are in the class and reading this, you have seen them.  But in the future I will include more photos in my posts because of the lack of same in the book, and will not be showing them in the class.

 

 

 

The Good Products, Bad Products class, ME 314, Winter Quarter, 2012, Stanford University

Classes for Winter Quarter begin in two days, January 9^th, this year.  That has made for a long vacation, so everyone will either be unusually ready to go, or unusually ready for more vacation.  David Beach has been teaching the  Good Products, Bad Products course since I retired in 1999, and has changed it in many ways, although he has kept the intent of the course the same.  He has continued to use my notes, and now that they have been published as a book, he is using it as a text in the course.  It is listed as a graduate course in the school of engineering, but will include students from other parts of the campus as well.  As of now, there are some 80 students signed up for the course on campus, and another 40  part-time students who will be taking it remotely over the internet.  A good sized crowd.

An idea of what occurs in each meeting of the Good Products, Bad Products course is here.  The students will be reading my book and doing exercises similar to the ones listed at the end of the chapters.  They will write short papers on each, and I will talk about them and include some of the more interesting ones on this blog.  They will also read two other books.  Classes will involve guest speakers representing companies and individuals concerned with and producing high quality products, lectures from David Beach, and discussions of the reading material, the speakers, and whatever other product-quality related concerns arise during the quarter.  The schedule of the course may change in deference to such concerns. 

I will also be making comments in the blog on various aspects of quality, probably at times going beyond the material in my book.  I will from time to time give you updates on the course.  You are encouraged to comment on my posts, and I will forward the comments to the class, should they fit the activities that are under way. The more diversity in input to the students, the better.

The class concludes with a series of consistently impressive presentations on the material in my book.  Groups of students select the topic areas, do appropriate research, and being a bright and talented bunch with a love of media, come up with presentations that are entertaining as well as educational.  I obviously cannot deliver the entire course to you in a blog, but I will keep you in touch.  Stay tuned!

Why the Good Products, Bad Products book?

Since my new book is officially to be available January 13^th, I will be talking about product quality for a series of posts.

A reasonable question would be “why did I write the book?”  For many (60?) years I have been interested in what makes some products of industry “good”, and others “bad”.  I have been involved in designing them, making them, selling them, buying them, and using them.  I guess I wanted to say some things about product quality.   I have not heard many arguments against striving for higher quality in products.  I have heard many people argue for low prices, and there certainly are  valid arguments for them.  One of the more successful courses at Stanford is entitled Extreme Affordability, and focuses on designing and producing products for people of very low income level (people-powered pumps for African villagers, etc.).  But cheap and good are not necessarily opposed.  products can vary in quality – why not make them as “good” as possible for their price?  In fact, in pursuit of manufacturing quality, many have found that products cost less to manufacture as their quality improved. And since quality is an overall measure of value, prices may be more elastic than we think.  From my viewpoint, improving product quality is the only feasible long term success path for those of us who furnish products to our growing populations constrained by finite resources and subject to rising expectations.

One of the difficulties in attaining higher quality, is that the people involved in designing, manufacturing, selling, buying, maintaining, and disposing of industrial products see aspects of quality that pertain to their own function, experience, values, and sensitivity, but not always the overall picture.  Engineers are sensitive to performance, but sometimes have to be reminded about cost, aesthetic appeal, and human fit.  Business people are sensitive to profit,  especially in the short term, and are comfortable with marketing and promotion, but sometimes less sensitive to  the importance of such things as advanced product development, continual improvement, reliability and serviceability, and “truth in advertising”.  Buyers and users are sometimes suckers for features they will never use and often overly-influenced  by promotional material, fad and fashion, and short-term experience (the bounce on the mattress in the store). They are also often not as concerned with the lifetime and dependability of the product as they might later think they should have been.

The Good Product, Bad Products book is based not only on my experience and thoughts, but on a series of courses I have taught at Stanford, beginning with courses in the Product Design Program, then a cooperative program between the Mechanical Engineering and Art departments, continuing with a Course entitled Aesthetics and Technology, taught in the Science, Technology, and Society program, and culminating in the course I began some 25 five years ago in the Engineering School that has the same title as the book and still lives on, using my notes. The book is based on the notes, and focuses on a number of aspects of quality that I believe to be very important, but that for a number of reasons receive less attention than they should.  These topics are shown in the table of contents of the book here. 

 

A Christmas Book

I just received a preliminary copy of the Good Products, Bad Products book from McGraw-Hill.  To me the cover looks fairly Christmasy, so I will send it on to you (the cover,  not the book).  MERRY CHRISTMAS. 

 I will be busy next week helping my wife clean up the residue of Christmas day and desperately trying to conduct my end-of-the year personal business.  I will begin posting again about overall product quality after New Years Day.  HAPPY NEW YEAR ALSO.

Organizational Change and Product Quality

Improving overall product quality requires the efforts of the entire organization.  Organizations often want to both change (more creativity) and stay the same (no more risk).  I have consulted for a large number (over 100) of organizations of all sort, and there often is hope that if one function or group changes (engineering becomes more creative) the rest of the organization can remain the same.  But the rest of the organiztion will retain the old values and approaches to problem solving, and in all probability strangle any changes in the newly "enlightened" function or group. 

In my many years teaching at Stanford,  I always taught a course on creativity and innovation.  Initially I would give the students various creativity techniques, and problems to solve to let them practise using them.  But I realized that I was assigning them problems  designed so that the technique under discussion would work well.  I was also consulting and realized that the creativity techniques were much more difficult to  put into effect than the students might think.  So I began assigning the students into groups, and having them act as consultants to outside groups who believed that they wanted to become more creative and innovative.  This worked very well, because the students were generally able to help the outside groups reach their goal (assuming they were willing to do the work to get there), and also experienced the difficulty of influencing a group of experienced professionals.  Of course, my teaching ratings dropped, because the material I was presenting in the course did not seem as slick when applied to real situations, but I was happy to make the trade. 

In my consulting I used a check-list to remind me to cover various important issues.  I would give it to the student groups to remind them to do the same.  One of the main purposes of this was to ensure that they looked at the organizational environment in which their client group operated. You might be interested in seeing it.  I called it an innovation check list and here it is.   

Conceptual Blockbusting

I will shortly start writing  posts about the “Good Products, Bad Products” book being published by McGraw Hill and which has just left the bindery and is scheduled to be in stores and on sale over the web by January 13^th.  But first I would like to write a couple more posts about creativity, innovation, and change, because the book argues for more emphasis on product quality, in particular on a number of aspects of quality that in my opinion receive too little attention.  Increasing quality requires creativity, innovation, and change. 

In this post I would like to say a few words about a book I wrote entitled Conceptual Blockbusting.  The success of this book has amazed (and obviously pleased) me.  I wrote it in 1974 at the request of the Stanford Alumni Association, which was beginning a series entitled “The Portable Stanford”.  The idea of this series was to give alumni a quarterly opportunity to buy a small and readable book by a Stanford faculty member.  The book was based on a three or four hour mini-workshop that Bob Mckim, a colleague in the Design Division at Stanford, and I gave to a number of alumni gatherings.  I was willing to play, but Bob was busy on another book, so I wrote it. As I remember, I wrote it in rather short order, since it was based on material that I used in teaching courses in design and in creativity, and I had an extraordinary talented editor/designer named Cynthia Gunn.

Here we are almost 40  years later, and it is still selling and gathering favorable comments not only in the U,S., but in a number of other countries.  Why?  At this point I think I can guess, although when I wrote it I doubt if I would have.  Its timing was good.  There weren’t that many books on creativity at the time and the world seemed to be in the process of change.   It describes a number of inhibitions (blocks) to creativity and innovation that are common among homo sapiens. In fact it is good that they are, because creativity is combined with control in life, and if we were without any inhibitions to creativity, we would probably not be here as a species.  The book is intended to get the reader to think about these inhibitions and question them.  It includes reasons for their existance and strategies to decrease/ get around them.  Along the way it discusses a bit of theory that is pertinent to understanding creativity and gives many exercises and problems that allow the reader to experience these inhibitions.  I have given a very large number of talks and workshops on this topic, and it turns out that people generally enjoy thinking about creativity in this format and find that it gives them often valuable insights into the way their mind works.

I have written four editions of this book, and although flatteringly I have often been asked when I will do another, I do not know if I will, because creativity and innovation are receiving much more attention now than when I wrote the book.  In short, there are creativity books, symposia, games, educational programs, and people who consider themselves experts all over the place. But I am mentioning the book here, because it is an indication of the way I think about creativity (in terms of blocks) and I will refer to it from time to time. I guess also because over these many years I have been convinced that it must be a good book. 

As you may know, if  you click on the book descriptions in the side bar of this blog, you will be rapidly transported to the pertinent page at Amazon.com, where you can learn more about the book pictured.  Conceptual Blockbusting is among them.  I will add a description for books I review and have found helpful as I write posts. I am also including  a brief outline showing the blocks discussed in Conceptual Blockbusting here.

An aside

I have been posting about thinking and creativity and am heading toward talking about applying such things to improving the quality of industrial products.  But I would like to clear up a bit of confusion as to why I seem to be called James L. Adams on books and in the internet, even though I always go by Jim Adams in my personal life.  It is simply because there are so many people named Jim Adams, and especially on the internet I end up in the bottom of a long queue.  But I can't always win even with James L.  I include a  photograph I took off of the internet to make my point.  This is a man named James L. Adams, who for a while far outranked me on the internet because he is a sexual predator who I guess was wanted by the police.  Fortunately I am not,  so we are easy to tell apart.  His hair is also longer and he looks meaner.

For my upcoming Good Products Bad Products book, I had a wonderful editor at McGraw Hill named Zachary Gajewski. I envied him his name.

Habits, change and creativity

 

So how do we change habits?  Let’s say we want to stop smoking, or lose weight, 0r decrease our triathlon time.  We first of all need to want something strongly.  The win (or avoidance of loss) must be worth the effort needed to get there – and incidentally we almost always underestimate the effort.  Then we have to consciously change our habits – with attendendant lapses and discouragement mixed with satisfying but sometimes slow and only occasional gains.  With adequate attention and discipline we can over time change, or develop new habits, and be better for it.  This applies to increasing creativity as well as improving our tennis game.

We all know that increasing our creativity would result in more risk, complexity, and failures in our life.  We probably know that we are pretty safe and could tolerate a bit more of this risk.  But life might be more difficult, because we are wired to avoid risk and failure and because societies, especially big ones, do not happily tolerate too much deviance from the pack.  A little bit makes for interest and excitement.  But too much?  What does the word insanity signify?  It is more behavioral deviance than a society wishes to deal with.  A great read is A Wonderful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar,, the biography of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who won the Nobel prize in economics (there is none in mathemtics).  It is a tale of someone living on the social mental edge – rightfully called a genius, but suffering from schizophrenia.  Most of us wouldn’t want to go there. And we won't, because we are generally risk avoiders.

For a good read on the tremendous amount of effort it requires to achieve and maintain creativity at an extremely  high level, read The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp, a revolutionary choreographer.  It is about the tremendous commitment and discipline required to lead in her field.  She sacrifices many things she might like to do in order to focus on dance.  I once gave a talk at a meeting at which she also spoke.  She was having severe knee problems, but continuing to coach her dancers by going through the movements she wanted from them.  Obviously pain was involved.  But her comment about all of this was “Gotta dance”.

I used to teach a seminar on freshmen on different intellectual disciplines.  Freshmen have no business committing to a major yet, because they don’t know what’s out there.  But Universities insist on pushing early choices.  I would bring in high visibility members of the faculty (Nobel, Pulitzer, McArthur Prize, Pulitzer Prize winners, etc.) and let the students talk with them about how they achieved what they had done.  They all spoke of the work involved  and sacrifices they had made.  But they also all loved what they did, and were at least at one point obsessed with doing it. They all had the creative habit.

But how about the majority of us who are neither as focussed, motivated, or obsessed with a single field or direction and would like to become more creative and/or change?

My method of dealing with creativity has among other things concerned with seeking to understand  habit and response to risk by trying to understanding brains on an operational level (not mechanical).  Why are they so resistant to change? (medical care).   Or why do they sometimes fall so in love with new things?  (social networking).  That led me originally to the Conceptual Blockbusting approach – understanding individual, group, and organizational inhibitions to creativity and attempting to help increase creativity by addressing these.  I will talk a bit more about this in the next post.

THE BRAIN AND CREATIVITY

The need for habit becomes obvious if we think a bit about the human brain.  It is a rather  ugly three pounds of meat. It consists of many neurons (100.000.000.000, which is a very large number, but not infinite.  In fact, now that we are used to computers, it is no longer all that impressive—100 giganeurons. not even a teraneuron).   It is also limited in speed, capacity, and channels.  My now venerable book Conceptual Blockbusting has several small tasks in the first chapter that demonstrate the first two, and as for the last, if you have invested a lot in multi-tasking stock, you should be considering lightening up.  Experiments are showing  that multi tasking is thinking with a background noise of rote activities.

So how does this mass of cells control our body, scan and sort our sensory inputs, record and recall information, maintain our consciousness, and still have the ability to deal with the unknowns of daily living?  Although we are in the midst of great breakthroughs in the mechanics of the brain through sophisticated instruments such as fMRI and PET scanners, we still don’t know.  Our brain wisely does not linger on how it works.  One of my favorite somewhat facetious models for vision is that including the homunculus.  We all know about the optics of the eye—the lens, retina, rods, cones, optic nerves).  Signals travel through this system into the brain, of course.  But then what happens to create our visual images?  My favorite model simply replaces all that by hooking the optic nerves directly to a very small TV set viewed by a tiny person - the homunculous.    Sometimes models are to escape dealing with reality.

Look up Visual Cortex on Wikipedia, and you will see many words with which you can impress your friends.  But for thinking generally about creativity, we don’t need to know about such things as Brodmann areas 17, 18, and 19.  Nor do we need to know where the oxygen goes when we are being creative.  We do need to realize that our thinking is dependent on past experience and information we have acquired, real-time signals from the senses, and a large amount of inherited programming concerning how to stay well, compete for resources,  and spread our gene pool.  Our mental cake is constructed of habit built from what we have learned in our past, and on evolution.  Creativity is the frosting, albeit an extremely important one.  But unlike a real cake, our mental cake does not like to be modified.  To belabor the metaphor, our frosting and our cake are often in conflict.

Kahneman, Tversky and Thinking Fast and Slow #2

In my last post I raved about Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow book. Let me give one reason for my reaction.  Kahneman's "fast" thinking is based upon inherited and learned approaches and causes us to respond to situations immediately and with little consciousness of activity going on in the brain.  As examples he offers such things as orienting toward the source of a sudden sound, creating a disgusted look when shown a horrible  picture, and coming up with the answer of 2+2.  I use the word "habit" to cover such responses, and am grateful for them, because they guard us against danger and allow us to do things at a much more rapid rate than our brain can work.  They have something to do with Malcolm  Gladwell's "blinks"and often take advantage of things our brain has learned through past successes.  We might use such words as instinct, hunch, and intuition in describing this type of thinking.

His "slow" thinking requires attention and make use of such things as our ability to analyze, plan for the future, and use thinking strategies we have learned in school and at work.  Examples might be comparing two automobiles for overall value and searching our memory to place a familiar face.  Calculating our income tax or optimizing an aircraft structure would certainly quality.

My approach to trying to help people increase creativity and innovation and deal with change is to consider such things as an attempt to stretch old habits, many of which result from previous success.  This is certainly possible, because we are capable of "slow" thinking, which can affect our "fast" thinking.  But it is not easy nor is there a miraculous formula for doing so.  I often talk to people who have been swayed by a book or video promising great improvements in creativity through a simple procedure.  They would not be swayed by a book or video promising to quickly make them competent musicians with an instrument they have never played.  That obviously takes effort.  The same is true of change and creativity, especially in a large organization. 

I will talk lots more about creativity and change in future posts, because I have been interested in it for years.  But I believe the Kahneman's book makes a great case not only for the importance of "fast" thinking, but also the importance of changing it through "slow" thinking and the difficulty of doing so. To me, General Motors is a terrific example of a company with a successful history that has caused them to often make  "fast" (habitual) responses, that should perhaps be subjected to some"slow" thinking. Perhaps they could have avoided bankruptcy by thinking ahead a bit more.

Unfortunately, as problems become more difficult to solve,"slow" thinking becomes less rewarding (difficult), and we lean more on time-honored (and perhaps no long valid) responses.  The upcoming political campaigns will be a good example.  On my way home from visiting a friend in the Sacramento valley in California I passed a large rather crudely painted sign reading "You can't fix stupid, but you can vote it out.  Vote conservative".  I'll bet many, if not most, people reading the sign had a "fast" response, either positive or negative.  But our representatives in congress seem to often have "fast" responses, and it seems that they are not resulting in much  change - or creativity for that matter.  "Slow" thinking is needed to solve our problems, especially as they become more difficult.  Many of our national habits are based on slow and limited communication and transportation, smaller population, a long lasting period of unusual economic growth, a frontier mentality, global dominance, lower expectations, and no-longer needed occupations.  Such habits may have to be modified in the future.  That will take effort.

KAHNEMAN, TVERSKY, AND THINKING FAST AND SLOW — A super book

I met Amos Tversky shortly after he joined the Stanford faculty in the late 1970’s.  I was at the time the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Engineering,  I was acting unofficially as a link between the school and the rest of the University (because they both needed it), and extremely interested in creativity and human problem-solving.  Because of this interest, I was  talking to psychologists quite often.  After several  of them suggested I get to know Tversky, I did, and was so impressed by him and his work with Daniel Kahneman on decision making, risk, and uncertainty, that I actually considered switching my allegiance from Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and design, to psychology and Tversky.  I didn’t because I was happy with what I was doing, not sure I had the patience to do the type of work they were doing,  and not looking for a new career at that point in life.  But I become a groupie of Tversky’s work, and therefore of Kahneman’s, since intellectually they were an inseparable duo at that time. Their work has had a great influence on that part of human psychology that bears upon human problem solving (rather than the anatomy and mechanics of brains).  In fact, it has probably been instrumental for the emerging field of behavioral economics and the present increased interest in the less logical aspects of  human thinking  (an example being Predictably Irrational, Daniel Ariely, 2008, Harper Collins, New York, NY).

Unfortunately, Tversky died in 1996.  But Kahneman has more than kept going, winning the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for his/their work.  And best of all, this year Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY) released Thinking Fast and Slow, an extraordinary book that he has written.  This is simply one of the very best books on human problem solving I have ever read. It is packed with important insights into the workings of the human mind and is definitely not a trivial work.  It is on the New York Times list of the best books of 2011, and , at the time of this writing, well up in the popularity list of business books.  To quote an endorsement on the back of the book by Richard Thaler, a well known Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, “This book is a tour de force by an intellectual giant: it is readable, wise, and deep.  Buy it fast.  Read it slowly and repeatedly.  It will change the way you think, on the job, about the world, and in your own life."

I am particularly beholden to Kahneman and this book, because I have been fleshing out an idea for a book with the working title of “Homo Demi Sapiens”, that would essentially try to make the message that although we humans are certainly intelligent, we are not nearly as smart as we think we are.  I have been collecting stories, theory, and exercises, to make my point. Kahneman’s book has released me from the pressure to work on this book, because his book  is so much more thought- provoking, entertaining, surprising, and grounded on research, than any book I could ever produce.  In addition it is replete with questions and short exercises that make a believer of the reader.  I may return to my Homo Demi Sapiens book eventually, but I appreciate the breather, because I just completed one (Good Products, Bad Products, to be released  January 13th) and am in the "never again" phase of writing.

I will  often be talking in my posts about the process of human problem solving, and Thinking Fast and Slow makes my task much easier.  Thank you, Daniel Kahneman. 

Read the book.  You will not regret it!  

CREATIVITY, INNOVATION, AND QUALITY #2

 

A few more comments on the relationship between these three words that one hears all of the time these days.  I first became interested in creativity in college (Caltech, home of worshippers of Nobel Laureates) and still am, because it is certainly a critical quality of our species.  But the word, as I said in an earlier post, is usually associated with concepts and prototypes.  It was not until I began practicing what I had learned in college, that I realized the huge gap between ideas and successful implemention (the two together now called innovation).  Not only do our minds desperately want to keep us safe, but our fellow humans are ambivalent about change.  They are in favor of it only if they are sure that the concept being considered will improve their individual lives, or at least not impair them.  If  you think about it, a reasonable stand.  So naturally I became interested in innovation.

Right now, there seems to be sufficient concern about our lives, economic and otherwise, that we are eager to support innovation and at least like to think we are open to change.   But now I have become interested in how to implement things well.  And as I said in the previous post, that requires not only creativity in defining products and process, but commitment to extreme attention to details, which is sometimes seen as more boring and perhaps plebeian than generating  brilliant ideas and producing products that will revolutionize the world through their originality and advanced technology.

That is why I loved three books by Atul Gawande, that are not only beautifully written, but have to do with increasing quality through attention to detail. You may have read them, since they have been best sellers.  They are not directly about products of industry, but I think pertinent to making things well.   Gawande is a surgeon.  The first of these books,  Complications – A surgeons’ Notes on an Imperfect Science, contains stories about the aspects of surgery that are risky, either because of imperfect knowledge, inadequate drugs and devices, or the nature of surgical training, and finally, human frailties that can harm the patient.  Great stories, and insights into surgery and medical care that everyone should have.  The second book is entitled Better – A Surgeon’s notes on Performance.  In this he makes the case that there is a sizable variation in the performance of surgeons, clinics, and hospitals, and medicine would improve if the statistics were made available and the resulting competition created a motivation for those working in medial care to improve.  He makes his case well and is very aware of the problems (surgeons don’t like to be graded).  And he stresses the importance of eliminating mistakes.

In his third book, The Checklist Manifesto – How to Get Things Right, he prescribes checklists as the solutions to improving many aspects of medical care and reports upon impressive improvements in medicine as well as other fields, and fierce resistance among medical doctors to their use (their belief that they are above having to be reminded to wash their hands and make sure the patient is adequately draped).

Gawande obviously feels that even highly educated and trained professionals (surgeons) benefit from being reminded of the necessary  details to do outstanding work.  He also feels that paying attention to details/not making mistakes offers more potential for short-term  improvement than improved drugs and devices. 

His approach to higher quality reminded me somewhat of the very successful campaigns to improve manufacturing quality in the 1970’s and 80’s.  Many people thought them to be not all that creative, but they sure were successful.  In a sense the book I have been working on, Good Products, Bad Products, which will be out in December, is a sort of a checklist on aspects of quality beyond manufacturing quality.  I didn’t see it that clearly when I began writing it, because hey, red hot engineers and business people don’t need checklists.  Gawande has changed my mind.

Inidentally, he recently wrote an article in the New Yorker Magazine (October 3, 2011) promoting that surgeons could benefit from coaches.  Do you think engineers and business people should have them?

 

 

CREATIVITY, INNOVATION, AND QUALITY

I have been away from this blog a long time, because I have been writing a book on the overall quality of the products of industry.  But it is far enough along that I am no longer constantly being besieged by the publisher, so I will restart the blog.  Working on the book has forced me to think about creativity and innovation in the context of attempting to improve product quality.

Creativity and Innovation are now all the rage.   Too much the rage?  Depends on their focus.

When many of us think about creativity and innovation, thanks partly to the media, we tend to think about revolution, not evolution.  I know a lot of students who want to invent the next big thing- the clean energy source, the hydrogen producing bacteria, a method of prolonging life, or at least a killer app, a better corkscrew, or a package that can be more easily opened.  Most of them probably won’t.  And if you ask them what they will do after they succeed, many of them assume they will go on to the next, next big thing, or maybe retire on the immense wealth they have amassed, or at least go to Patagonia.

Creativity and innovation are critical in increasing product quality.  But quality is in the details and often the result of a great deal of iteration.  Jonathan Ive, the Apple Vice President of Industrial Design, is rightly gaining a lot of attention for his contribution to the Apple Product line.  I think most people would agree these are high quality products.  An interesting insight into the Apple design process is here.

At one point the article states that by the time he graduated, Ive was already something of a legend in British design circles. Clive Grinyer, his first business partner, apparently visited him once in his flat and was amazed to find it filled to the rafters with hundreds of foam models of Ive's final student project, a microphone and hearing aid combo that teachers could use to communicate better with kids with hearing problems (not surprisingly, in white plastic). "I'd never seen anything like it: The sheer focus to get it perfect," recalls Grinyer.

Both the original i-pod and the Segway personal transportation vehicle were certainly innovative.  But the i-Pod and its successors have become increasingly sophisticated in performance, well matched to the user, and pleasing in appearance. And it has captured the market in an amazing way.  In 2010 the iPhone had only 4% of the cell phone market, but was raking in 50% of the profit.  It continues to win acceptance and devotion from its users.  Meanwhile, the Segway company, has gone on to the P.U.M.A. prototype and the EN-V prototype in conjunction with General Motors, but not had nearly the impact that Apple has had from a flood of high quality products.  Innovation alone does not guarantee outstanding product success, and high quality requires constant attention to details—perhaps creativity with a small “c”.