Carbon Fibre, 3-D Printing and Manufacturing

This brief video from The Economist discusses Carbon Fibre, 3-D Printing and Manufacturing and provides interesting food for thought.

In the Australian public sphere, manufacturing is associated with a pessimistic outlook, seen as uncompetitive (high local wages and a high Aussie dollar) and an eventual decline as manufacturing is moved offshore. This perception is generated by high-profile press stories concerning government subsidies of car manufacturers and that the success stories quietly achieve their results quietly, relatively unnoticed.

I am currently straining my eyes, looking deep into my crystal ball for the combinations and left-field factors that will make the trend transformative and permanent (at least for the time being).

Hummingbird: a new musical notation technique

Sheet-music with traditional notation fills many apprentice musicians with fear.  Learning to read  music notation competently requires lengthy practice.  As competent musicians demonstrate, the skill can be mastered, but many fail to commit sufficient time and effort to the journey and fail on the way.

Alternative methods of notation have been developed which are easier to read and therefore faster.  These, such as tabulature for guitar, are criticised by "proper" musicians.  Firstly, tabs work on a monkey-see, monkey-do basis.  They enables you to play the notes required, but does not reflect music theory or the instrument.  You can copy but not create.  The player becomes the guitar's equivalent of a pianola music roll.  Tablature is not a sophisticated language, so the author is unable to adequately express musical ideas.

The requirement of a notation method would be one that would be easy and fast to read but without dumbing down what is being expressed (or capable of being expressed).  It can be done, because "clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information" (Edward Tufte).

Check out Hummingbird Notation for a new technique at: http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com

The Art of Deliberate Success by David Keane

I recently agreed to review books for a leading publication in the Australian training industry. It was an easy decision, as I frequently write reviews for my personal use as a learning tool. Below is my review of The Art of Deliberate Success:

The Art of Deliberate Success has the subtitle: “transform your professional and personal life”.  David Keane has drawn on his own experiences and that of over one hundred self-help management books to write it. He has synthesised the material succinctly (the book is just over 300 pages long) and presents in his easy-to-follow style throughout.

The reader gets the benefit of a lot of material, without the cost, preamble, selling hooks and filler that buying and reading each book would entail. Of course, you can read further in specialist areas if you wish and, for this purpose, Keane provides a book list with useful sketches of what each title covers and how you might use it.

The “deliberate” in the title is an acronym for the chapter titles of the book: decide; eliminate; language; information, beliefs, energy, responsibility, action, time and evaluate. I am cynical when it comes to acronyms, believing they are more often concocted to benefit the author with the “TM” suffix and royalties, than for the reader’s benefit. In this case, my cynicism was misplaced. The acronym works well and it provides a logical, right-sized segment for each of the areas covered.
 
The book starts by discussing definition as of success, followed by a questionnaire that takes about 20 minutes to complete. When you buy the book, the price entitles you to subscribe to www.theartofdeliberatesuccess.com. This means you can complete the questionnaire online (it adds up your scores), access useful worksheets and print out your results in graphical form.
 Other aspects about the online resources:

• The e.u.l.a. for the site was, in my opinion, reasonable and did not grant the provider extraordinary rights. Your privacy will be respected and your e-mail address will not be sold, transferred or bartered.
• While the site does have an option to increase your subscription if you want, this is not necessary for the average reader. The result is you get genuine support to help you get the most from the book, not a hook for the author’s business model.
• You use a linear slider to indicate your answer the questions. These sliders were not numbered, which eliminates the thought process of “I gave a two for question five and a three for question six, so can I give a one for question seven” type. I liked it.

The results for the questionnaire reveal the areas you should focus for effective change. Who is the book for? People who want to achieve personal and professional success. Trainers, coaches and facilitators who want to refresh their material. The latter groups will have heard some of the stories, anecdotes and quotes before, but will get some new ones too. To achieve personal change requires commitment over time. Sensibly, Keane recommends that you run short “campaigns”, to do this. In other words, focus on one thing at a time rather than attempt (and likely fail) wholesale changes at once.

Readers who want to use the book of achieve transformation will need to be committed to reading, enacting, reviewing and re-reading the book for a period of time. As a guide to the process, this book is an appropriate companion.

How to find your passion

Charles Handy from his book, The Hungry Spirit:

"I spent the early part of my life trying hard to be someone else. At school I wanted to be a great athlete, at university an admired socialite, afterwards a businessman and, later the head of a great institution. It did not take me long to discover that I was not destined to be successful in any of these guises, but they did not prevent me from trying and being perpetually disappointed with myself.

"The problem was that in trying to be someone else, I neglected to concentrate on the person I could be. The idea was too frightening to contemplate at the time. I was happier going along with the conventions of the time. I was happier going along with the conventions of the time, measuring success in terms of money and position, climbing ladders which placed in my way, collecting things and contacts rather than giving expression to my own beliefs and personality."

If the approach Handy wrote about resonates with you and you would like to know how to find your passion, Scott Berkun's blog has an excellent article here. Scott included this post with others in his book Mindfire which is a a thoughtful outline of answers to some interesting questions.

Good luck with your search!

Getting distracted online

A paper written by Joseph Ugrin and Michael Pearson on cyberloafing found that, of the time spend online at work, American workers spend 60-80 percent on things that are unrelated to work.  I don't think it is a problem in the US alone.  In one office I worked in, some colleagues theorised that to get a particular employee to do some work, you had to place a targeted ad on eBay.

The finding is unsurprising, given the Internet is a place that has a lot of interesting stuff, where you can do many different things, and it isn't that hard to get to.  For these reasons, many people become distracted online.  It is like trying to get schoolkids to concentrate when the fairground sets up next door.  A search for an item online fires up the synapses of your mind, creating interest, stimulating connections and promising chemical rewards that make it hard to resist the click away from...from...whatever it was I was doing.

Personally, I think that the best antidote is to take regular breaks, get up from your desk, move and change your environment. Breaks help you stay fresh and, as a habit, they disrupt what may be involuntary behaviour.

Distractions become attractive when you are mentally fatigued, bored and under-stimulated.  Regular breaks mean you can section your day and review how you went so far. If you went well, great.  If you didn't, you haven't wasted the day.  Unfortunately, in some (many?) offices, breaks are unfashionable.

Other techniques involve setting alarms, some use specially designed software, and yet others filter the available sites.

How do you overcome a tendency to distraction?

Financial education - does it work?

An article in this week's Economist discussing the meager results achieved by financial education programmes.

The Economist's article starts: "Here is a test. Suppose you had $100 in a savings account that paid an interest rate of 2% a year. If you leave the money in the account, how much would you have accumulated after five years: more than $102, exactly $102, or less than $102?...A survey found that only half of Americans aged over 50 gave the correct answer. If so many people are mathematically challenged, it is hardly surprising that they struggle to deal with the small print of mortgage and insurance contracts."

The majority of people who could not answer the question correctly were probably mathematically not competent. That said, there may have been some who were looking for an answer that was not there. For instance, no mention is made of bank fees and charges.

But is it valid to suggest: "If so many people are mathematically challenged, it is hardly surprising that they struggle to deal with the small print of mortgage and insurance contracts"?

The small print is, by definition, a struggle. How is making the text smaller going to make it easier to read? Many intelligent, literate people struggle with the small print and the voluminous terms of contracts. They are not prepared to invest the cost (in terms of time and effort) to understand the fine print.

And let's face it, if you did read the fine print and disagreed with a particular clause, what ability would you have renegotiate the contract and sign an amended version? Instead, people use proxies, such as the brand and reputation of the provider, what their friends and their communities are doing. If there were a problem, these proxies will point it out.

Is it about intellect anyway? Even large organisations who had the incentives to read the fine print and could do their sums, failed to read it when they invested in securitised mortgages. Most people failed to understand the implications of the bigger picture* and many of these were not in the "stupid" category (see The Big Short by Michael Lewis gives an entertaining explanation of what happened).

Financial education is more than acquiring knowledge about products and the ability to manipulate data mathematically. It isn't really about finance at all, but about behaviour, habits, heuristics and the recognition of arbitrage and opportunity.

Knowledge that credit card borrowing is an expensive form of debt and that "rewards" are an illusion (you are rewarding yourself with your own money) do not muscle up to the real opponent: that same person's inability to delay gratification.

Likewise, knowledge that a lottery ticket and a leaf are merely different versions of wood, does not prevent day-dreaming how you will spend the money when you get it and dissipating your effort to achieve more realistic ways to make money.

Financial education comes with practice and learning from mistakes, some of which are financial and some which are not. It comes from understanding behaviour, both your own and others. It comes from the ability to ask questions to cut through the guff that accompanies the sale of financial products. Acquiring the principles and practices that will help you not to get wiped out. A mathematical calculation is a useful aspect, but only a small aspect of what is required.

*  Including me.

"Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information."

The subject of this post is a compelling film: Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See.

The 38 minute film is a beautifully presented outline of design thinking. It is worth viewing, for this reason alone.

In the last third of the film there is discussion of the relationship between design and information. Druckrey talks about her work with Edward Tufte, executive producer of the film and former student.

Tufte has written: "What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be "boiled down" and "simplified"? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information."

It is right and proper that design is left to the designers, but there would be enormous benefits if the principles touched on in the film, and extensively covered in Tufte's books, were more widely known.

When presenters believe that clutter and confusion are attributes of information, they dumb it down and over-simplify. The result does not enlighten and serves to confuse when the recipients of the presentation are faced with real-world complexity. Designers, on the other hand, enable the presentation of massive amounts of information, but with clarity and ease of access.