Tag: precision

An Ode To Japan

On March 12, 2011

A Familiar View From a Familiar Land

I was deeply moved by the events in Japan over the last several days. I have spent many weeks over several years in that country from my work supporting All Nippon Airways with Boeing. I have also experienced several earthquakes in Japan, obviously nothing like the most recent.

Throughout many of my writings, I talk about the integration of of knowledge assets, the integration of markets, and the integration of communities. Yet here I reflect that there is likely no country as tightly integrated as Japan. This is the reason why they are so resilient and will arise successful despite any adversity that they encounter.

Several years ago, I was in downtown Tokyo during a magnitude 5.4 Earthquake. The central subway loop closed down and the feeder trains kept pouring people into the station – the streets filled to standing room only.

As the account manager for All Nippon Airways, I was amazed at the astonishing reliability that they achieved with the aircraft fleet. Reliable airplanes are essential because transportation is tightly integrated; if the plane did not leave on time, the trains would keep dropping people off at the airport and it would quickly fill up to, again, standing room only.

I have worked with dozens of Japanese engineers. They are an amazing group in themselves – they design for two or three levels of fault tolerance in all of their decisions because when things go wrong in Japan, they go very wrong. Their airplanes are impeccable throughout despite severe service requirement. Airplanes leave on time or they are replaced, but they always deliver on their promise of safety and security. Many of the buildings are sacrificial; meaning that they may may no longer be useful after a big quake, but they will not fall. The train station may fill up, but the trains won’t crash.

This mindset has permiated into all of their products. Where Americans may see obsessive compulsive drive to higher degrees of quality for no apparent reason, the Japanese see solutions to problems that don’t yet exist. They take deep personal responsibility for failures that are two or three levels deep in unlikely probability.

It is not surprising that the casualty numbers so far, while deeply tragic, are not what one would expect given the magnitude of the event – the Earth was knocked off it’s Axis by this temblor, but the Japanese were not.

I extend my deepest condolences to my many friends and colleagues of Japan and stand ready to help in any way that I can.

Social Currency And The Innovation Bank

By Admin

On February 13, 2010

In General Information

The real estate market is trashed, money markets are unstable, commodities are in the tank, the banking system is corrupted to the core, inflation is looming around every corner, and the politicians are engorging themselves in a game of Cerebral Gridlock.

Literally, there is no safe place to put your money. Instead, people are investing their productivity in social media – social media is simply a storage device for knowledge assets. Soon it will become a stock exchange for knowledge assets. Investors should not take this lightly – the best place to store your money is in the real productivity of real people.

People are trading knowledge assets in social media. This exchange is denominated by a conversational currency. If we consider the structure of conversations and compare that to both the structure of social networks AND the structure of our financial system, we see a huge opportunity to develop an alternate financial system that can capitalize and securitize knowledge assets in social media.

Ingenesist.com

Music by Phil Felicia

Social Enterprise; Can Innovation Be Manufactured?

By Admin

On October 28, 2008

In General Information

Manufacturing is the use of tools and labor to make things for use or for sale. When I think of manufacturing, I see images of machines spinning out high precision components into colored inventory buckets that are transported to clean areas to be precisely combined with other precious components creating some magnificent device such as an aircraft, computer, or medical CAT scan machine. Each device is a product of countless human interactions.

Each little piece is designed, discussed, and depicted with great care and precision so that it fits perfectly with the next piece. Everything about each part is planned long in advance; the composition of the material, the tolerances of all dimensions, and the strength/weight/wear characteristics. However, each piece alone has little value without the other pieces. Yet, if one piece fails the whole machine can fail. When the machine has completed its service life – those beautiful, intricate, and worthy creations of human interactions are simply discarded.

Since the invention of the cotton gin, the economic growth resulting from the human interaction involved in precision component making (literally and figuratively) is undeniable. Until the era of Social Networking, however, few could envision that human interactions are themselves components of an invisible inventory. Each element of human interaction is precisely honed from some invisible raw material by social machinery and deposited into colorful garments and transported to clean areas where they combine with other precious components creating some magnificent device such as an airplane, computer, or medical CAT scan machine. When the machine is scrapped, the product of those human interactions lives on…but where and how?

The greatest constraint to the emergence of an innovation economy is the invisibility of knowledge assets; social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital. We have an inventory of every nut, rivet, and panel on an airplane, but not the knowledge asset that created things. It is like society is keeping a big secret from itself. This is the great opportunity for Social Media.

People are still asking “where is the money in all of this social media stuff?” The answer is “everywhere – the door is unlocked, but the lights are off”. The irony regarding the visibility of knowledge assets is that they lay right in front of us but we refuse to see the obvious. All we need to do is switch on the lights. Until we can inventory knowledge assets outside the construct of a corporation, social networks cannot themselves become the corporations of the future.

Can innovation be manufactured? Of course, with the right tools, innovation can do whatever it wants.

The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: precision

An Ode To Japan

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