Compression and Sustainability
May 31, 2010Leave a Comment
May 27, 2010
Sustainability is a big umbrella term addressing a host of issues. Many writers emphasize only a few aspects of sustaining the planet in condition to support life, but the scope of concerns is so broad that it’s difficult – or impossible — to think about them all at once.
Consequently, an [...]
Natural Balance?
May 21, 2010Leave a Comment
May 20, 2010
A recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) party-pooper report estimated that 63% of all methane and 36% of all nitrous oxide (N2O) in the atmosphere is man-made. Despite imprecision, these suggest pushing nature out of balance. The National Academy of Sciences just released a report on how to deal [...]
Prepping Ourselves
May 21, 2010Leave a Comment
May 20, 2010
In a recent speech, Dick Schonberger packed a PowerPoint slide with a list of techniques associated with lean operations, a looooong list, in fine print. That’s why organizations that regard lean as a collection of techniques can never master them; nobody lives long enough. And if management “runs the [...]
Incautious Optimism
May 14, 2010Leave a Comment
Q: What do Enron, Lehman Brothers, BP, and Toyota screw-ups have in common?
A: Tunnel vision on growth, abetted by hubris, diverting concentration from quality performance. The subtle version of this is “incautious optimism” that growth will let us clean up its problems later.
In the cases of Enron and Lehman, irrational growth [...]
The New Fable of the Bees
May 14, 2010Leave a Comment
The Fable of the Bees, written by Bernard Mandeville in 1705, is a poem which observed how each bee serving its own interest contributed to the common good. Adam Smith took up Mandeville’s themes, which are the bedrock of capitalist philosophy to this day, but it does not frame systemic, collective problems in [...]
Rare Earths and Wicked Problems
May 14, 2010Leave a Comment
To actually accomplish anything complex, and which has multiple goals, the “wicked” aspects of a situation must be considered (a wicked problem is defined somewhere in the Compression Map). But work organization leaders realize that focusing groups on simple goals is easier than challenging them with complexity. “Go for it” stirs [...]
Bubble Psychology
May 14, 2010Leave a Comment
Markets wildly overvalue traded financial securities when exuberant traders balloon prices higher and higher; then reality dawns en masse. Bang. Bubble gum spatters everywhere. Global-scope bubbles like the Big Financial Pop gum up the whole world. Recent bubbles involve derivative trading, rapid computerized trading, off-balance sheet accounting, and a [...]
Energy Blowout
May 14, 2010Leave a Comment
The BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico is bringing home to Americans the risks of exploiting energy sources in difficult environments. This requires technical expertise and expenditure of energy to obtain energy. Techniques and technology employed on the Deepwater Horizon were state of the art. The cause [...]
Learning from Toyota’s Stumbles: Customers Die in Lot Sizes of 1
May 14, 2010Leave a Comment
The media circus surrounding Toyota’s tribulations seems to be fading, but plaintiff lawyers may uncover more culpability bombs in their discovery investigations. Painting Toyota as just another investor-driven corporation neglecting customer safety would balloon the cost of settlements from a billion dollars or so to 10x that much. Besides legal [...]
Fishery Collapses
May 14, 2010Leave a Comment
Fishery collapses continue around the world. Remediation is slow. Fishery collapse stories introduce many issues dealing with Compression in other contexts.
In 2006 Boris Worm (Dalhousie University – Nova Scotia) made headlines for a day. Extrapolating the rate of global fishery collapses, his curve went to zero in 2048. No fisheries would [...]