James L Adams—People and Products

Management Fads and Product Quality

Looking through some of my “old books”, I found the one in the photograph, which was a summary of what was going in the area of quality in the world, collected by Business Week magazine, and later published as a book by the Professional Books Division of  McGraw hill in 1994.  It was a huge success at the time, and contained material not only on manufacturing quality, which was a major issue, but also issues of quality in government, services, and research and development.  Leafing through it reminded me of the importance of quality in the press, media, business, and in general at that time. As near as I can tell, the book is now out of print.

How important is quality to us these days?  Certainly attention to it has almost disappeared in the press and media.  How about business?  Some of the approaches of the 1980’s and 90’s have become ingrained, but it doesnt seem like the #1 issue, at least in the U.S.

We seem to have moved toward other topics.   This movement is not unusual, because people in business and industry seem to like to pursue the “next big thing” and what are sometimes referred to as management fads.

The figure below, taken by a book entitled managing on the edge, by Richard Pascale, published by Simon and Schuster in 1991 (also I believe out of print), is an indication of such fads up until 1990.  This type of behavior is still going on, but I include this particular graph, because it shows the sharp peak of management approaches having to do with product quality (mainly manufacturing quality) in the late 1980’s and the 1990’s . 

 

I imagine if the graph were extended up to the present, fads would still come and go, but those having to do with quality would be surmounted by emphasis on such things as innovation, entrepreneurship, globalizations, marketing, uses of the internet and Big Info, and lip service to such enlightened topics as social entrepreneurship and the environment.

I am feeling sorry for my Good Products Bad Products book, which is about overall product quality, because it must be feeling somewhat lonely. To give it company, I am continually collecting examples of companies making unusual efforts to produce products that are the best of their kind in the world.  If you know of any, please comment on them and include your e-mail address, so I can get back to you and perhaps find out a bit more about them.

Product or Service?

We seem to want to separate the manufacturing sector of the economy from the service sector.  As time goes on, this becomes more difficult.  Once, products were simpler to understand and easier to maintain, and one bought them with fewer directions on how to use them, and needed help less in keeping them serviceable. My grandfather usually bought his vehicles used (pre-owned?), usually without manuals, and  repaired them himself. They were products. Service referred to labor, or other intangibles that were bought on a time basis, such as  use of the telephone and electricity.

But things are changing,  partly due to the increased complexity of items we buy, and partly because of  the internet.  The photo above shows the material that came with my wife’s 2004 Acura TRX, a relatively simple car.  The manual for the “navigation system” itself seems to require almost 100 pages, although it is dwarfed by the 350 page owner's manual.  An article in the August 26^th 2012 New York Times reports on the new Cadillac XTS sedan, raving about its features and mentioning that the automobile comes complete with an i-pad loaded with a training app so that drivers can learn the CUE system which apparently accomplishes various digital miracles in the car.  It definitely sounds like one would not repair failures oneself.  Access to service is needed from initially understanding and learning to use the car, to maintaining the car over its life.

It is good business to integrate “products” with “services”.  This can be seen from the effort by software-based companies to move us from computers, dvd’s, external memory drives, and such things to the “cloud”.  Automobile ads mention, if not emphasize “leasing” instead of buying.  We own our TV sets, but are dependent on a cable company for programs, service, and use of the “box”.

An interesting mixture of service and product can be seen in medicine.  There is an article entitled Big Med, by Atul Gawande, my favorite physician/writer, in the August 13/20, 2012 edition of the New Yorker magazine.  I discussed three books Gawande  has written in  my post of Nov 11, 2011.  He feels that medical care must improve in quality, as well as in knowledge and in such things things as improved technology and medications. 

In his article he chooses a restaurant chain (Cheesecake Factory) as an example of delivering good product and service at low cost and with impressive consistency, and speculates what medical care could learn from it.  In his books he refers often to outstanding, and usually specialized clinics, and procedures that result in fewer errors and decreased cost. Not surprisingly, there is great resistance to such things from many members of the medical profession, as well as patients who prefer the traditional “family doctor” approach. 

Gawande’s suggested approaches have many similarities to the efforts made world-wide in the manufacturing industry during the 1980’s and 1990’s. which radically improved quality, while decreasing cost.  Automobiles are considered products.  Medical care is considered a service.  Clearly there are parallels that are applicable to both, including the need to integrate products and services and increase the quality of what is provided to the customer.

My blog name, People and Products focusses more on products, because that is where my experience lies, but I will certainly mention service from time to time, because the two must be integrated.       

Legos: The Toy With Legs

The Lego company has been around since 1916, although they did not begin building their  iconic “blocks” until 1947.  By the early 1960’s they had reached their present design and use of material.  If you are interested, more details on the history of the company are here.

My children and grandchildren, ranging in age from 50 years old to one, have all loved to play with Legos.  In fact, when the entire family occasionally convenes, even the adults can be found digging through the now huge quantity of components we seem to own. And the whole town turns out when one of our museums invites a Lego club in to build an entire city for Christmas.

Legos seem to be ever fascinating, as they should be. They can be easily combined in limitless ways.  The photograph is of a house our ten year old grand daughter is making.  Out ten year old grandson takes the same materials and creates intergalactic raiding vessels and monsters. (Legos are a good way to view gender differences that are stronger than parental pressures).

The Lego company itself seems to be surprisingly buoyant.  It has gone through great growth, and typical downturns when they expanded too rapidly outside of their strength (theme parks, toy characters that required little if any construction, kits with parts that were not compatible with other products), but it has come back strong with its Mindstorms line of robot kits. What are its secrets?  Quality is certainly one.

Lego products can be considered expensive, especially their Mindstorm kits, but they are handed down, given away, and traded, so that they are have an almost unlimited life. The blocks neither break nor emit worrisome chemicals. To me, a major advantage is that not only do they not need repairing, but the blocks themselves do not require batteries (of course the final constructions often do - you can't escape).  Environmentally, although the blocks and other plastic components are made of a plastic that is difficult to recycle, they never reach a landfill.  If you saw a box of lego parts in a dumpster you would probably take it out and give it to a kid (or take it home and nostalgically play with them) .  

Although plans and directions are available, they are not usually needed, except for the Mindstorms line,   Legos are more fun without them.  It is satisfying to use ones imagination. The parts are beautifully made, and can be assembled into fairly realistic looking combinations.  Unlike vintage blocks, they cling together nicely.  Lego parts also go together rapidly, resulting in rapid feelings of accomplishment. What’s not to like about them?

I believe that products that have been around relatively unchanged for a long time, especially if they are successful in the market place and seem like they could be killed by knock-offs and cheaper copies, must be of high quality. Legos definitely qualify.

 

Automation, Work, and Product Quality

As I predicted in my post of  8/17/2012 , Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s book How Much is Enough would annoy some people .  As an example of such annoyance, here is a negative review from the August 19, 2012 Sunday New York Times by Richard Posner, a conservative judge who teaches at the University of Chicago .  But in the same issue of the Times, is an article expounding the improvement in productivity and quality of work from a four day week and increased variation in work.  It is here.  You will like it.  Hopefully Mr. Posner has read it.  In addition, there is a front page article on the use of industrial robots in this issue focusing on the improved capability and decreased cost of modern robots and the resulting effects on employment. I also include it here.

 I am not trying the include the entire  New York Times in my post, but the three articles represent our quandary about work.  There is no question that mechanization eliminates jobs.  It has happened in agriculture, it is happening in industry,  and it will happen increasingly in those functions we call service. And I don’t think that sound bites by politicians will remove the resulting problems. I would bet on a continued increase of mechanization in industry.  And I definitely would  not bet against a shortening of the work week.

I am happy to say that I am not responsible for solving this problem.  But I am interested in what the continued mechanization of manufacturing and assembly and use of computers in design might do to the quality of products.  In 1908 there were 253 automobile manufacturers in the U.S.  Now there are few.  Since that time, the automobile has become standardized to what we see on the road today.  Certainly a higher quality product from the standpoint of  cost, comfort, reliability, and performance.  Yet perhaps we have lost a bit in product diversity, serviceability, and aesthetic/emotional appeal.  It is classic car week in Monterrey, California, and anyone attending this or similar events can get an indication of this.

When I joined the Stanford faculty in the 1960’s, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was experimenting with a purchased manipulator and a couple that a graduate student from mechanical engineering named Vic Scheinman (later to start a manipulator company) had built.  These were primitive devices compared to those now available, but people were definitely thinking about industrial use of such things.  One topic under discussion what whether six degrees of freedom (what we have in the arm and hand) was necessary, or whether fewer would suffice if products were designed to take this into account.

Present day industrial robots can do what we can do when it comes to manufacturing and assembling products.  But will product design change to ease the task of the robots?  Will lower cost more specialized robots result in products that they can assemble more easily, but which will be more difficult for us to service?   Will computers take a greater role in design?  I can see the possibility of further standardization and concern with efficiency of production with concurrent loss of  emotional appeal of products. It would be too bad if increasing use of computers in design and robots in production resulted in products defined more by catering to the abilities of these devices than  for our use and pleasure.  Material for a science fiction book?

 

 

Product Packaging and Quality

Packaging has a strong impact on the customer’s impression of products. An extreme example is Apple, who enclose their products in a package that from a design sense, is as elegant as the product itself.  And they have done this so successfully, that they hardly even need to put their name on it.  My wife and I recently received a gift from Anna Rabinowicz, one of my favorite former teaching assistants who is the founder of Rablabs, and an associate professor of design at Parsons School of Design.  It was a large and beautiful fruit bowl,  and the packaging (for ground shipment) simply screamed “don’t even think of criticizing me.  I am at least as important than you are”.

On the other extreme are the majority of products one buys.  I am so fed up with most of them that I tend to lean toward products because the packages are minimal, easy to open, convenient to keep the product in after opening, and are not oversize advertising platforms for blaring advertising not only for the manufacturer, but for other people who clearly are willing to pay to be included.  A couple of days ago, after an attempt to open a gallon of milk wth a new cap design, I wrote the following tweet:  “Encountered new type of cap on our milk . Must be safer. Required water pump pliers to loosen. Pipe wrench would also have worked”  But then I remembered the day that I encountered a package so resistant that I went to a mat knife, which slipped on the plastic and cut my hand, and wrote another tweet:   “Hell just for packaging designers —all food is in sealed bubble packs and they have no scissors, knives, or other tools.” 

Today’s encounter was the opening of a package of four padlocks, sealed at a number of points, with the two keys that opened them loose inside the package.  I had no tools at hand.  I found on attempting to pull them apart, that although the two sides were not totally sealed together, I could not.  But I was out of doors at the time, and I did succeed in pulling them apart sufficiently that the keys fell out into a large pile of dried oak leaves.  By the time I had sorted through the oak leaves to find the keys, and hunted down a scissors strong enough to cut through the plastic, I thought much less of both the locks and the maker of same.

Of course, the package did boast a large logo of the maker, and a small one for another company, (who apparently was in charge of rust-proofing them) and a good bit of pointing out the advantages of the product.  And probably the packages were cheap and convenient to ship, run through self-checkout machines, and hang on hooks, and large enough to discourage shop lifters.  But the customer does not benefit directly from such things.

But I have another annoyance that I cannot blame on the manufacturer.  I recently ordered one hundred of  a somewhat uncommon type of small machine screw over the internet. The good news wass that they arrived in a nice cardboard box that was easy to open and close and had the type and size of the screw plainly printed on the top.  But when it arrived, that box of screws was contained in another box.  The photo above shows the two.

The rather large space between the boxes was filled with the now familiar plastic bags of gas.  The good news was that no peanuts were involved.  And of course the larger box gave plenty of area for a large label containing my name, address, and other cryptic shipping and handling information, and undoubted decreased the sender’s inventory problem by allowing the use of fewer box sizes.

But jeez!  When you receive such packages, don’t you wonder why a society as advanced as we think we are is shipping all of this cardboard and gas around?  If the size of packages is not an issue because shipping is weight constrained, smaller packages would at least permit the use of smaller trucks that it did not take so long to pass each other on the highway.

And finally, I certainly do not consider myself an environment fanatic, but when I see the empty cardboard containers waiting for our recycling pickup each week, I do feel like going out and hugging a tree.

 

 

 

Capitalism and its Limits

I recently read two books that that are getting a good bit of attention and although perhaps only indirectly having to do with product quality, are most thought-provoking and very well written.  If you are a fervent believer in capitalism and the market as being the ultimate mechanisms for fairness, both will annoy you—all the better to read them.  Click on them in the recommended books list for more details.

 The first is What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandell, a professor of government at Harvard.  In it he discusses and questions the proper role of the market in a democratic society and questions how we can prevent everything from being for sale, including those things that perhaps money should not be able to buy.

In the book, Sandel goes through a very large number of examples where money plays a questionable role, ranging from companies such as Linestanders.com, which charge for a “queuing service” that furnishes proxies to wait in line for access to functions including Supreme Court cases and Congress hearings, through paying kids to get good grades, to betting on the death of others (a controversial practice called spin-life) and the explosion of naming rights.

The other book, entitled How Much is Enough—Money and the Good Life, is by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, one a political economist and the other a philosopher,  This one is pointed toward “rich” countries and combines historical and contemporary material that indicate that we are failing to reach a higher quality of life and discusses why that might be.  They feel that capitalism is a powerful mechanism for the creation of wealth, but not especially for its distribution. They question our unquestioning acceptance of measures such as GDP and growth at all levels.  And they feel that we have an unfortunate amount of greed and acquisitiveness, which leads to unstable differences between the rich and the poor and keeps many of us spending a regrettable amount of time acquiring money and goods to the detriment of other perhaps more meaningful things we could be doing.

They approach the problem by defining what the “good life” might consist of, and remind us that the purpose of money is to acquire goods and services, not merely to acquire because it is money.  The book  has a nice mixture of fact, history,  and speculation.

The  present World’s economic problems seems to be resulting in overdue thinking about just what the World’s economy is.  Much of this, including these two books, focuses on the quality of life.  Industrially produced products are clearly part of this.

Science, Engineering, and Products

As I said in my tweet of  yesterday, engineers and technicians designed and built the Mars Science Laboratory (which includes the Curiosity rover), not scientists.  Under technician, I include those who do the hands-on work of fabricating, assembling, and testing , but I did not have room in my 140 characters to list all of the categories, nor will I here.

Is this an important distinction?  As an engineer and educator, I think so.  When I worked on the first planetary spacecraft at J.P.L. almost 50 years ago, I remember the media constantly talking about the brilliant young scientists that made these miraculous machines.  There were instruments on the spacecraft that would produce data of interest to scientists, but the people who made the spacecraft were neither scientists, nor always that young.  This bit of misunderstanding also brings us the term “rocket scientist”. Wehner Von Braun and associates were definitely engineers. Scientists search for understanding.  Engineers work to produce specific tangible products, usually according to a schedule and budget.  And in the case of products such as spacecraft, they tend to stay away from the “cutting edge” of technology in deference to such things as demonstrated reliability.  There were early integrated circuits available when I worked at JPL, but we used discrete electrical components because of lack of long-term data on the  more sophisticated devices. 

There was a pretty good book written on the difference between science and engineering, and in particular the nature of engineering, some 20 years ago (1993).  I am biased toward it, because I wrote it.  The title is Flying Buttresses, Entropy, and O-Rings, and it is published by Harvard Press. Click the book button on the right to find out more about it.  I wrote it, because I was so frustrated by the unwillingness of people to discriminate between science and engineering. The book has not done much toward solving the problem. That is understandable.  It is easier not to discriminate.  Science and Engineering do overlap, and both are important to us and to each other.  Particle physicists need big machines, and designers of integrated circuits need to  understand tunneling, and soon quantum theory.  Both scientists and engineers use jargon, acronyms, and equations. Engineers apply the knowledge of science and doing so give it economic validity.  But in general the above generalization holds.  And life designing and building spacecraft is much different than working with string theory or DNA.

Engineers and technicians tend to work on projects in groups, sometimes very large ones.  If you saw the people hugging and high-fiving each other after the success of the Curiosity landing, you were looking at part of an outstanding team of engineers and technicians —so good that they don’t need workshops on team building.  The life is one of working for a shared goal as well as individual accomplishment.  Historians may give credit for a complex accomplishment to an  individual engineer, but that is more to simplify history, than reflect actuality.  And as technology becomes more complex, there is even less of that happening.  Who was responsible for the internet, the Boeing 777, and the Tesla car?  You may get the name of the an inventor, a founder, a funder, a president of the company, or even a chief engineer, but not of the engineers and technicians who were responsible for bringing them forth.

Of course science has similarities.  You never hear of the people who do not make extraordinary discoveries, nor the people who staff the labs. But in my opinion, engineers and technicians are less motivated by individual glory than scientists, and that is good, because people motivated by individual glory are not the best of team members. Engineers and technicians definitely like to be admired, respected, given raises, promoted, noticed in their discipline and complimented on their work by their peers and managers. But success of a project carries a reward in itself, especially if it is a long and difficult one  When I saw the people jumping up and down with joy and tears when the Curiosity landing was successful, I became nostalgic for the time when I was doing that. There isn’t much of that among university faculty members.

Algebra, Math, and Products #2

 

To return to mathematics (my post of July 29), my disagreement with Mr. Hacker’s “Is Algebra Necessary” article in in that day's New York Times, is simply that Algebra is the gate to proceed past the simple arithmetic taught up until that point.  For the first time, students work with abstract symbols rather than fixed quantities, and to quote Wikipedia, study the rules of operations and relations and the concepts arising from them.  It is the entry to what I consider mathematics to be.  If you would like a more outspoken disagreement, see the following one in response to a similar article in the Washington Post six years ago. bit.ly/P4wOis

Unfortunately, learning mathematics is hard work.  But as time goes on, the cost of not being comfortable with it increases.  As life and industrial products increase in sophistication and complexity, it becomes less and less possible to be involved in the process  without mathematics. And although mathematics comes more easily to some (I was lucky in that aspect), to many it is indeed the most difficult of their subjects.

But mathematics is more than the ability to “get answers”.  It recommends an approach to problem solving that is both beautiful and immensely powerful.  To be uncomfortable with mathematics is to approach life with an incomplete tool kit and the inability to participate in increasingly many activities. Algebra is the commonly accepted entry.

Many people criticize the way mathematics is taught. ( I am a critic of the content of traditional calculus courses, although not of calculus).  And it is possible to approach it in different ways.  Some time ago I was involved in a major Sloan Foundation program entitled The New Liberal Arts, which was intended to help liberal art colleges better handle mathematics, science, and technology.  As part of that, we received some money at Stanford to put together a year-long sequence for our own “liberal arts” majors that could be used to fill the requirements in these areas in lieu of the traditional courses, and which would be more consistent with their backgrounds and future plans.  I talked a mathematician and physicist friend into doing this with me, and after a large amount of thinking and preparation, we taught it for five years.  All three of us were considered outstanding teachers, we were all respected in our fields, we all had administrative experience in the university, and we were eager to do this.

The results  exceeded our expectations.  We even converted a few math-haters to math majors.  But we team-taught the course with all three of us attending all sessions, used a large number of  projects, gave  a great deal of individual attention to the students, and in particular, in order to avoid presenting dumbed-down material, we focused on material that the majors in the field would not see until their later years — such things as quantum mechanics, cosmology, topology, and designing and building hardware.  And  yes we counted upon algebra.

We had planned on returning to our usual work after five years and at that time were getting a large amount of pressure to  return to our more main-line activities.

 But even though we looked hard, we could not find faculty members who seemed to have the right set of characteristics and were willing to give up what they were doing to devote the necessary time to the sequence

Three  years later, another group of faculty set forth with a different approach, but this too, fell apart after a few years for lack of the right type of teachers willing to spend the necessary time.

During the period we taught the course, we had a Sloan-sponsored meeting of some 50 people who were doing similar things in different universities.  It was a wonderful gathering, but each person was handling the problem in their own way, and much to the disappointment of the Sloan foundation,we concluded that if we tried to standardize the approach to handling the material in a way that was more effective to individual students, it would compromise what they were doing.

My conclusion is that the educational system is not set up to teach mathematics on the more individual level needed to appeal to all students at the university level.  This is probably even more true at the K-12 level.  So, Mr. Hacker, I believe algebra is necessary, and I challenge you to put together and teach material which accomplishes the goal of algebra in a better way that is consistent with the resources in the educational system.  The world needs it.  As motivation, re-watch Stand and Deliver, the film starring James Olmos, the true story of Jaime Escalante teaching Calculus in a very challenging school in Los Angeles.  It can be done, but not by most teachers.  Contact your local school and take a run at it.

 

 

Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity

 

This Weekend the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft lands the Curiosity rover on Mars.  There is  information on media coverage on the internet, and lots of information on the mission and hardware here. It is a big deal.

It looks especially big to me, since I worked on the first Mars flyby spacecraft at JPL in the 1960’s.  It was called Mariner 4 , was launched in 1964, and successfully gathered data and sent the first detailed photographs of the Martian surface home. These photographs showed that Mars was nothing like we humans thought it would be — no canals, no traces of life, just craters and desolation. I was involved with the mission from the preliminary design through fabrication, testing, , and mission control, and we kept our fingers crossed for nine months during its journey.  Nervous making.

I am at least as nervous now, even though I haven’t worked at JPL or on a spacecraft since 1966.  This mission is an incredible endeavor.  Placing a roving vehicle the size of Curiosity on the Martian surface requires a very large number of things to go right.  The Mariner 4 simply flew by the planet and returned its data at a leisurely 8.3 bits per second.  Curiosity, the size of a small automobile,  is meant to amble around the surface for two years, carrying out a very large amount of scientific experiments and relaying photographs home.  In comparison to the Mariner 4, it can communicate directly with earth at 500 bits per second, but can send information to the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter at rates up to 2 megabits per second, and to the Odyssey orbiter at up to 256 kilobits per second, for much more rapid transmission home.

Perhaps I am so nervous because when I was involved in the “space race”, there were many more failures than is now the case.  But the technical tricks necessary to get Curiosity down and running are mind blowing.  Some indication of this is in the nice little video shown here, narrated by some of the JPL engineers involved

The best of luck,  Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity.