James L Adams—People and Products

Fuzzies and Techies: Deja Vu All Over Again (y.berra)

I was going to focus this post on the relationship of creativity and quality as I mentioned in my tweet of July 26, but I have been diverted by the lead article in the Sunday Review section of the July 29 edition of the New York Times, entitled Is Algebra Necessary?  I have spent a great deal of time on related issues, and I wish I no longer responded to  to articles such as this,, but I am afraid I am not strong enough to do so. I will return to creativity and quality at a later date.

In 1959, a physicist turned novelist named C.P.Snow, gave a presigious lecture (the Rede Lecture) in Cambridge, entitled The Two Cultures.  This resulted in a book (The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution), which a few years ago was named one of the 100 books that had influenced Western discourse the most since World War II.  In the lecture and book, Snow spoke of the culture of science (and mathematics), and the culture of what he calls "literary intellectuals".  He believed the split between them, and the animosity accompanying it, results in a loss of our ability to solve major problems.  A sensitive and prescient observation.

When I came to Stanford, the students had simplified this into the "techies"(engineers, scientists, perhaps social scientists who used sophisticated math), and the fuzzies (primarily the humanists and "softer" social scientists).  As Snow stated, in Western cultures, the fuzzies consider themselves perhaps more sensitive, worldly, and wise, and the techies consider themselves more powerful and perhaps are a bit more intellectually arrogant ((many physicists are quite confident they could write a novel, and few novelists (save Snow) are sure of their ability to do physics)).

Despite the blurring influence of fields such as computer science, which are neither (or maybe both), and the present emphasis on inter-disciplinary approaches to problem solving, there is still much of this around.  To what extent it is nature or nurture (cultural or in the DNA), and how much it is influenced by gender, parents, peer groups,  mentors, or tradition, we are not sure.  But I am confident of my ability to be able to have opinions about the situation for many reasons. I seem to appreciate and enjoy both cultures and have been trained and lived in both of them, and I have fought the two-culture situation professionally  in and out of the university, with support from foundations and industry and both support and resistance from the academic community.  As a final credential, I offer the  photo below.  The worn out book is my wife's. The worn out slide rule is mine. I rest my case.

There have been major activities attempting to influence/minimize this divide.  Social pressure and resources to  increase the fuzziness of the techies is built into the system.  Accreditation in science and engineering fields demands some exposure to the humanities and social sciences.  On the other side, "fuzzy" curricula usually demand less "techie" material. But during the so-called space race after Sputnik, there was tremendous emphasis  put on technology and science, resulting in a spike in enrollment in such fields.  Forces such as the woman's movement later led to a focus on "math anxiety".  Then there was the concern with "scientific literacy", followed by one on "technological literacy".  I was to some extent active in all of these.  They typically recognized the same ongoing problems and resulted in increased on focus on them, which often waned in the face of the perception of new problems, loss of interest by media, and the difficulty of doing much about them.  Now there is pressure due to the relatively pathetic mathematical performance of U.S. students in world-wide mathematics tests.

I have long been aware of the two-culture problem. In junior and senior high school students who liked science and math (me) were thought to be a bit weird.  I went to Cal Tech, and we arrived a week early to attend to "Frosh Camp", which consisted of taking us all up into the local mountains to meet each other and be told about our future college life by a number of experienced and entertaining people.  One message we were given was that by being admitted, we would be considered socially deficient, nerds geeks, whatever), and should follow certain rules.  One of which was that our dating life (The Caltech student body was then all male) would be hampered unless we refrained from discussing math, science, and engineering, and to be safe we should also avoid these topics at all parties.  We were taught to never wear our slide rules on our belts or our pencils in our shirt pockets, and perhaps to copy some of the mannerisms of popular people in our  high school classes who had not earned very high grades. Some of the more valuable advice I have ever been given.

This stituation of two cultures obviously heavily impacts product quality.  My Good Products Bad Products Book could be described as essential fuzzy material for techies.  Good Products must serve humans, perform well, and be available for reasonable costs.  This requires high sensitivity to the humans.  It also requires sophisticated knowledge of science, math, and technology. (hence the title of this blog.)

I will continue this with my next post on Thursday, in which I will reply to Mr Hacker's comments on algebra, which cover most math courses, and are not only old, but simplistic.  A great number of people have different opinions on how to better attain the goal of algebra (and other math) courses.  Few want to carry out their ideas, and few agree as to the details.  But I personally think that to drop the goal itself is nuts.  I will say a few things about what has been tried, and what it would reqire to better solve Snow's  two culture problem (and Mr. Hacker's algebra problem) both in and out of schools. Among other things, it will take better realization of the nature and extent of the problemand the limitations of the resources we have available. 

"New Math" was a heroic attempt.  In my opinion it failed  partly because many teachers were uncomfortable with the material, many parents could not quite understood it without studying hard and were unable to help their children with their homework, older people thought kids should run the same obstacle course they had, and the public in general did not have much of a clue about what was going on.  It was creativity once again underestimating tradition.

 

Products and Personality

This is a photo of my 1943 Ford Jeep being driven around by one of my kids and family a few years ago. I acquired it about 35 years ago from a farmer friend. It had definitely paid for itself. It was stripped of everything that could be removed, had elements of many different colors of paint on it, and came complete with drainage holes made in the floor with a pick, no brakes, and a cracked block. But it ran!

Happily, all parts were and are available for it, and it was built to be easily maintained. If you have ever wondered, the side handles are to enable four people to lift the body off after removing a few bolts, thus exposing everything. My oldest kid was approaching driver’s license age, and the others were feeling strong car envy, so my plan (successful) was to make it into a kid driving machine.

It was easy to find the necessary replacement parts and I used the time-honored crack treatment of inserting screws into overlapping tapped holes until they broke off – no further problem. Despite the lack of seat belts, turn signals, and most other now-required safety devices, I licensed it, and we were in business.

Despite the fact that it is slow, noisy, hard to steer, hard to stop, open to wind and rain, and without any sign of effort to provide comfort, I love it, even though it would seem to violate many of the “essential” elements of product quality that I talk about in my Good Products, Bad Products book.

It simply drips with personality, and I have had it apart so many times that we know each other well. I have slowly replaced the parts that were missing when I acquired it, and during its life with me it has been in good mechanical shape, A few years ago I spiffed it up and gave it the paint job of the fighter squadron my aging Air Force boss had been a member of in World War II in order to give him a chuckle. Oddly enough, when many people see it for the first time, they are torn between not understanding why I have it, and thinking maybe they would like one.

I wonder whether any products I am purchasing now will be loved in this manner 35 years from now. Somehow I doubt it.

Another Innovation Wave

It seems we (or at least the media) are again into the fond hope of returning to our rightful position at the top of the heap through creativity and innovation. This has happened before — in the 1950’s when we thought we were boring (Man in the Gray Flannel Suit), the 60’s (the cold war and space race), the 70’s (OPEC and energy), the 80's (Toyota and the Japanese), the 90’s (digital hardware and software), etc. etc. etc.  The reason for our present interest is probably the state of our economy,  our ability to make money through software and associated start-ups, and the general displacements due to the "information revolution". 

But although creativity and Innovation are wonderful, they are not magic.  Or do they necessarily result in things that are good for us.  An article in the last Economist discusses software allowing people to easily make their own computer apps, with the appealing possibility of making money from this.  But the article admits that Apple’s App Store already has 550,000 apps, and Google offers 450,000 for its Androids.  Do we really need a lot more, and what will happen to their value as the number continues to soar?.  It seems that when numbers reach a certain level (self-published books, social networking contacts, blogs, web pages) the impact, and therefore the value becomes less – partly because of an inability to sort the good from the bad.

The Sunday July 22 New York Times has an Educational Supplement entitled Thinking-Inventing-Learning.  Can’t beat that.  And there is no doubt that the internet and increasing power of computers will have a huge impact on education in the future.  But I am biased toward the  present talk about the “value” of higher education, and its tendency to  define “value” as getting a job, ignoring the other gains of bright people spending a few years together figuring out life, their values, their options, the nature of intellectual disciplines, the opposite sex, and of course absorbing “culture” (sound snobby?  I am after all a creature of higher education, although I served my time in industry).  And there are high risks to dropping out.

It is worth looking through this supplement (education life ), but one article I found of particular interest was entitled Drop Out, Start Up.    It talks about a program started by Peter Thiel, a Stanford graduate (A.B. in Philosophy, J.D. in law) and a wealthy Silicon Valley investor (founder of Pay Pal, hedge fund manager,etc.), to encourage more young people (according to the article) “to chase break-through technologies instead of wasting their time and money in college”.  Give me a break. Winners of a competition get  $100,000 grant for two years to develop their idea.  The article admits that not everyone succeeds.  As examples they mention a person who was awarded a fellowship to develop a company to extract minerals from outer space, and another who intends to build fusion reactors.  The article mentions that the would-be fusion reactor entrepreneur built his first working reactor at the age of 14.  A fusion reactor? How did the media miss that?  A company to extract minerals from outer space for $100,000?  Enough said.

It takes an unusual person to succeed at a start up, and then three out of four fail.  Granted that digital electronics and the internet have made it possible to start companies with lower funding and many opportunities, the competition to work magic on the internet will increase.  And what do the Fielding Fellows do it they fail or want to go deeper into technology? There is more than software and digital electronics involved.  You don’t build fusion reactors in the garage - take a field trip through the Livermore lab. 

I wish Peter Thiel success in finding other people like him, but hope he doesn’t pick the wrong candidates for his fellowships.  And I can’t help but wonder whether going to college was really a waste of time for him. Or whether his education and added maturity weren’t somewhat beneficial in his career, as well as  his overall life.

Made in America?

 

There is the beginning of a Made in America “movement” which may become a wonderful opportunity for America to prove that it makes great products. An article reflecting the feelings behind this movement is here.

Many of the businesses advertising that they are manufacturing totally in the U.S. are small companies, who knowingly or  unknowingly are carrying the U.S. quality flag because of the attention being given them.  If their products are of unusually high quality for their price (perhaps the best in the world), the world will notice (as will we who live here) and we will all benefit,   If they are not of high quality, the world (and we) will also notice.

 These products will receive some boost from the present attention to unemployment and outsourcing in the U.S., but global business is here to stay, and no matter how patriotic we are, in the long run we are not going to be impressed by the label if the products are not at lest competitive with those taking advantage of outsourcing and overseas manufacturing (or imported).  Hopefully those products aligning themselves with the Made in America label will be outstanding and recognized as such.  Making sure that they are is a good goal for those involved.  If I were 20  years younger I would seriously consider joining such a company.

On Creativity and Copying

For your information, I am going to post two time a week, on Mondays and Thursdays.

In a previous blog, I commented on a book that I had heard about entitled Copycat, by Oded Shenkar (Harvard Business School Press, 2011 – see the button to the right). The subtitle is How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge. I had not read it at the time, but  the existence of this book pleased me, since I seem to be surrounded by people excited mostly about new things, different things, break throughs in technology, and revolutionary insights, and I am a bit of a contrarian.

 I read the book, and am still pleased by it. Shenkar does not cover what might be called “illegal” imitation (patent violations, etc).  He warns against  imitating products of companies so strong that they can damage you through nuisance suits, and he promotes improving upon the original.  In fact he (perhaps unfortunately) coins the word “imovation” (imitation plus innovation) to describe the hoped for approach to copying.

It is a practical book.  He begins by pointing out the key role of imitation in product development and company success, how the majority of products owe a debt to products of other companies, and the many peripheral benefits of imitation (such as increased knowledge on how to protect products from other imitators}.  He points out the now-recognized centrality of imitation in human  learning and problem solving,  and the neglect of copying in business books, even though it a subject of interest in the top layers of management in all successful companies. 

He then goes into a business book approach to the topic, with cases, summaries, and take-aways at the end of the chapters.  He includes many examples of successful companies, including many leaders in their fields, who have profited greatly from imitation, and points out that in general, the originators are sparsely rewarded compared to the imitators.  He emphasizes the lack of attention paid to the strategy and tactics of successful imitation (or imovation), and emphasizes that there are right and wrong ways to copy, and little attention paid to them in most business schools.

Since I seem to live in an area (Stanford University and Silicon Valley) where innovation. breakthroughs, and entrepreneurship have the glamor, and since I have devoted a great deal of attention to creativity and innovation, I found the book to be an excellent reminder of where the money is.  It is clear that the U.S. has a bias toward invention and innovation rather than towards copying others.  We did so in our successful run on manufacturing quality in the late 20^th century, especially in the automotive and electronic industries.  The Toyota manufacturing system and other Japanese approaches were enthusiastically accepted, and we benefited from them a great deal.  Hopefully our eyes are still open and we aren’t counting on our ability to ride on “the next big thing” forever.  

Morals and Products, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt, Part 2 and 3

The subtitle of the Righteous Mind book I mentioned in my last post is “Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”.  Sound topical?  As I said, the first part of the book is devoted to making the point that we are highly motivated by “automatic” thinking instead of reasoning.  The second part of the book is entitled “There’s More to Morality than Harm and Fairness”.  He begins by emphasizing that morality is culturally based, and that there are many moralities in the world, none particularly “better” than the others.  As examples, he mentions the morality of autonomy, commonly found in western cultures, the morality of community, in which the individual is subservient to larger issues, and the morality of divinity, in which the individual is even less the main issue. He then discusses a number of foundations of morality, and their reason for existence.  He finishes the section by talking about the morality of politics, and the foundations that they are based upon.  In particular, he brings out that conservatism has a broader base of morality than liberalism, and therefore has an innate advantage in the long run.  (Don’t argue with me—read the book and argue with Haidt.  I am a middle of the road person, which is one reason I like his book).

The final section, which I of course liked the most, is entitled “Why Morality blinds and binds”.  It is about out strong allegiance to groups (tribes), and why we are wiling to accept beliefs that we might ordinarily question in order to belong to our group.  Why, for instance, do Catholics accept the ban on contraception, even though their members routinely take advantage of it.  And why do the Tea Party members argue for things that will adversely affect them?  Why can’t Congress seem to agree on how to balance the budget?  And what’s with this Christian—Moslem thing?  Haidt’s concluding words are “Morality binds and blinds.  It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle.  It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say”.

This is in fact, pretty much the state of the world right now.  But what does morality of the type Haidt is discussing have to do with the quality of industrial products?  I am sure you have noticed that discussions about such things as pollution and the environment, petroleum usage, the relative advantages of various motorcycles and automobiles, outsourcing, and the advantage of technology that sustains life beyond a certain point, are based on the ideals of the people involved, and often approach religious arguments in fervor and attempts at conversion. We stand with our group, rather than compromising.  Because, after all, our group is moral, and others are not.  As proof, they are (in favor of/not in favor of) regulating firearms—or spending tax money on developing alternate sources of energy.

Doing things fast vs. doing them very well

 

I spent today catching up on my reading, and found an unusual  amount of attention paid to the costs of sometimes attempting to accomplish things more rapidly than perhaps we should.  Hence the name of this post.

In the Sunday New York Times, there was an article entitled Beyond the Blink which is here.  In the last Economist, the Schumpeter column was named No Rush, and is here.  Perhaps some of this attention is a backlash against the present pace of life, and perhaps some of it is due to the popularity of Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, which goes into detail on the differences between our more automatic response based on past experience and perhaps our gene pool, and what we call reasoning (see my posts of Dec. 4 and 15, 2011).  We rely heavily on the first, but our species is somewhat unique in our ability with the second, and we are rightfully proud of this ability—especially those of us from Western cultures who hang around commercial, educational, and legal institutions.  We still venerate the scholars of classical Greece, even though the majority of the people were fighting wars, making money, and acquiring slaves, and their descendents seem to be having a bit of trouble with their economy.  And we push “theory” in education.

At present there is a run of interest in brain function that does not involve much conscious reasoning—Kahneman”s “fast” thinking, Ariely's  irrationality, Thaler and Sunstein’s  Nudge, Gladwell’s Blink.  One of my reading tasks was to finish an excellent book entitled The Righteous Mind, by Janathan Haidt, a psychologist who studies morality (Amazon button to right).  The book  applies not only to morality, but to problem solving in general – even to the design of high quality products. The book is divided into three sections, but here let me make a few comments about the first section, entitled Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reaasoning Second – a provocative title.

In this section of his book, Haidt uses a nice metaphor which he used in a previous book (The Happiness Hypothesis).  He describes what he calls automatic processes (intuition, emotion, etc) as an elephant, and controlled processes (reasoning) as the rider.  The elephant lives life quite well, but the rider with its ability to learn things, see into the future, and rationally make decisions, can help the elephant. And also, the rider can use language and associated cognitive skills to explain and justify the elephant’s actions (and of course take credit for them).

In dealing with creativity, one runs into these two types of thinking, and often gets into arguments.  I have always used the words habitual thinking, since the term unconscious thinking used to get me into trouble with a few psychologists who seem to be wedded to the idea that if it isn’t conscious, it isn’t thinking.  I find Haidt’s metaphor most useful, because it distracts people from such arguments.  Elephants are big and reasonably smart, and since  most of their decisions have precedent, they make them rapidly.  The rider can simply take care of overall directional decisions, and the elephant will handle the details.  Perhaps a bit like General Motors in the 1970’s

      In order for the rider to solve problems that are unprecedented to the elephant, and plan new and risky moves, he/she will possibly do better by stopping the elephant, or slowing it down, to allow more time for reasoning.  Creativity and response to change are in this category, as is quality.  More time and effort may be necessary requiring increased design and development times (or alternately increased parallel R and D efforts) to think more clearly about responding to change,  increasing creativity and improving product quality. Heresy?  Perhaps, but who sets the pace?  Marketing?  We do make money from promoting the new, but will lose in the long run by producing inferior products.  “Competition?  Maybe, but suppose we in the U.S. all move so rapidly to compete wiith each other that we produce low quality products and lose to overseas competition (Japanese cars in the 1980’s and German cars now.)  Or pick up bad habits like software people who deliver as new products as soon as possible and fix them later with “updates”.

I will return to Haidt’s book (part two and three) and this issue in my next post.

Andrew Blum and The Hardware of the Internet

I  just read an excellent book (Tubes, by Andrew Blum, published by ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins) that addresses the physical nature of the internet .  It is about the author’s global journey through everything from  hubs, interchanges, cable stations, and data centers to the tiny glass fibers and the lasers that must pulse thousands of billions of times per second.  It has characters, narrative, and even a bit of travelogue as well as information about the hardware - a book by a good writer and journalist whose specialty is technology. My historian wife has even agreed to read it, and I predict she will love it.  It will add depth to her ever-present iphone and ipad.

A subject of great attention these days now seems to be “the cloud”, and since I am an engineer, my friends occasionally ask me about the nature of  this cloud to which computer people refer .  I realize that people who use the term are speaking of information, but to most people, clouds are the white things in the sky, and this cloud is not like water vapor.  It is the use of the internet by companies to provide more services to us, and as this book explains, the internet consists of a very large collection of sometimes messy looking hardware, most of it under ground, on the ocean floor, or in huge, often anonymous, buildings in low-rent districts.

One of my missions in life is to help people understand modern technology, and I think the adoption of  “cloud” is unfortunate.  It is good for the internet service providers, because it lends an air of mystery and god-like importance to them and to the internet, and allows them to provide further services in the form of software and data storage,   But the providers want us in their particular "cloud", and maybe don’t want us to realize that not only is this not a revolutionary concept, but much of the cloud is located in locations such as old rusty tubes next to the sewer under New York streets,  and in hot ugly buildings dominated by the loud noise of cooling fans and cursing technicians splicing glass filaments.  Nor the fact that an estimated 8% of the electrical power in the U. S. is already consumed by the internet.  Real clouds don’t utilize coal for fuel.