James L Adams—People and Products

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.