Category Archives: Business

A Plague of Consultants

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Just like most heaps of dung have an ad hoc ecosystem of insects living on or in it, many companies seem to have a few consultants buzzing around feeding and laying eggs.  These creatures are attracted to the smell of budget allocations, pending or recent disaster, or the need for highly specialized skills on a temporary basis.

Consultants are almost always highly specialized critters, having highly evolved senses and proboscises for the collection of nectar from deep within the treasury organ of the corporate flower.  It is common for consultants to tap into upper level management having budgetary authority.

The infestation stage of their life cycle can begin in many ways.  Consultants are not often seen unless they are in the feeding stage of their lifecycle. When they are looking for a blood meal, they can descend on the unwary manager and dazzle her/him with their flashy appendages.

The infestation can be deleteriously parasitic or genuinely symbiotic. Some consultants plant themselves on an artery and pull blood until the host expires. I will include law firms in this savage group, since lawyers really are a type of consultant. Not all lawyers will draw down the resources of the host to a dangerous level. Many are able to sustain their relationship indefinitely through the exchange of useful services in exchange for a draw of blood now and then.

A company can become infested in many ways. Executives at trade shows are particularly vulnerable to picking up consultants on their legs as they muck around in the fetid swamp waters of business development. It is important for business development managers and executives to check one another for puncture wounds indicating the implantation of consultant larvae.

Consultants find their host organism in many other ways. Business associations, fraternal organizations, and chambers of commerce are known venues for infestation.

Having a consultant glued to your leg isn’t all negative. There is occasional need for their services. The trick to using a consultant profitably is to define the need very carefully and work with them to develop a structured plan so that their work product is well defined. Resist the temptation to turn over the keys to the company while they do their work. It is important to manage consultants very carefully since they are usually quite expensive. If executed properly, consultants can be quite useful as highly skilled temporary specialists.

Thoughts on Organizations

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The management of process development in the chemical indstry is a highly specialized activity requiring skills and experience that crosses many disciplines. Many people doing such work today are practicing in a corporate environment where management structure and support services are already in place. Organization managers have a portfolio of standard operating procedures (SOP’s) and daily operation is a relatively straightforward matter of keeping the ball rolling. Individual work product contributes to a large project where many people and large streams of cash are choreographed to arrive at a well defined goal. Degrees of freedom are frozen out and the dominoes are carefully prealigned to topple to a particular spot.

Process Development Warning: Eventually you may have to shoot the chemist and get on with the project.

(Alright, it’s a joke)

In smaller organizations where individuals have greater personal influence, where money is less certain, and where fewer operational resources may be available, the end state of a technology-push project may be less certain. Choices relating to the details and specification of a product can be changed with greater ease than may be possible in a larger organization with many layers of management.  This is both a benefit and a curse for the small business.

An organization that is not yet ossified with excessive management is one that may have the structural ability to adapt to the business environment with greater ease than one that is “over managed”.  But this is conditional. A small business responding to market pull may have better survivability if it is flexible. A technology push organization that seeks to bring a new product or service to market may actually suffer from too much organizational flexibility.

Smaller organizations have to invent and implement management structure that constrains the dominoes to topple to a defined endpoint. This can be quite difficult for Explorer-Discoverer types to set into action. The key thing for technical people to consider when starting an organization is that placing an organizational person in the founding member group is critical to building management structure from the outset.

Aldrichimica Acta, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2008.

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The latest Aldrichimica Acta is out- No. 2 of volume 41. This publication was started by a friend, teaching colleague, mentor, and former boss who spent some of his best years working for Alfred Bader. He eventually retired as a VP of something or other at Aldrich. A truly great guy. For a while, the task of catalog publishing was his job. He bought paper by the rail car. Their job was to increase the size of the collection by 15 % per year.

He also invented the coffee pot kugelrohr system that Aldrich sold for a long time. It has now morphed out of recognition. But he showed me the prototype motor assembly. It consisted of a reciprocating air motor built for automotive windshield wipers wired onto some pegboard. The air motor used either air pressure or vacuum and had a metal tube that connected the vac line from one side of the motor axially to the other.  The reciprocating motor got around the need for a sealed vacuum bearing. To one side of the reciprocating tube was connected a vacuum line via flexible rubber hose, and to the other via hose and barbed connector, a series of bulb tubes and pot. 

The coffee pot came from a West Bend coffee pot plant down the road in Milwaukee. Aldrich bought the reject pots and paid a guy to refit them for kugelrohr duty in his garage. It was a very successful product. When I went to grad school we had a Buchi kugelrohr for bulb-to-bulb short path distillation. But I still remember with some fondness having to sit at the bench twiddling the Aldrich kugelrohr by hand while feeding dry ice onto the receiver. Sometimes we would drip dichloromethane in the receiver and let the evaporative cooling do the trick. We’d use the air motor for lengthy distillations.

On wrecking your career

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It’s the end of a rotten day and I’m fuming. There are many ways to see harm to or the obliteration of your career in the fabulous world of industry. It can be self-immolation or you can catch a bullet just by standing there. Sometimes you can be removed for reasons that are never clear- your division or your job description can be rendered obsolete by the geniuses driving the boat. Industry demands loyalty and the ability to absorb abuse through many forms of institutionalized intimidation.

Sometimes working in industry just sucks. There is no way around it nor is there a better description. The trick to weathering bad times is to find a way to reign in your temper when things get stupid. Speaking for myself- a large irritable mammal- this can be really hard to do. I am a smartass with a good vocabulary and a decent imagination- a detonable configuration and am unable to keep my mouth shut sometimes.

I had to learn this temper thing the hard way. I once beared my teeth and snapped back at a senior staff member who was behaving just horribly. He had a need for dominance and used his lengthy time in service to leverage it. Skipping to the conclusion, I ended up leaving and he stayed.  Moral of the story- for long term survival, find a way to let bad characters implode through their own weaknesses.  If you want to stay, then resolve to stay.

In industry it is quite important that your “deliverables” are not just visible, but also mission critical. Industry is cyclical and companies inevitably expand the head count. When times get tough, the head count is one of the first things they want to trim. While times are good, try to remain on important projects that are highly visible and valuable to management. Try to avoid being put on invisible projects.

Be judicious in how you use email. Don’t give others a stick that they can beat you over the head with. Never compose an email while you are angry. Always be fair and generous, especially to despicable characters. Even handedness in the face of conflict will always win friends and allies. Try to avoid blind copying and excessive cc’s to upper level people. Try to settle your disputes without making a comedy show of it in front of management.

You will eventually find that one of the major problems in life is the matter of control. Many kinds of conflict and ordeals derive from the need for control. Some people harbor pernicious control issues that disrupt everything around them. They are like typhoid carriers. I have yet to find a rule of thumb for such a situation. But the thing to remember is that such people could cause you to behave badly as well.  , so a person has to be on guard when certain people are around. This sounds simple, but it can be quite hard to do. I am writing this very post as a way to process my own frustrations.

A critique on scale-up suitability

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In my quest to stimulate bench chemists to think like industrialists, I like to bring examples of chemistry from the literature to highlight a point I’m trying to make. The literature is full of transformations and research that serve as positive and negative examples of good scale-up thinking.

There are examples, however, that are less than choice in terms of green processing or good scale-up thinking. As I have said previously, green chemistry and good scale-up principles may not be equivalent concepts, but they can and often do run in parallel.

An interesting transformation is featured in the recent article entitled Efficient 1,2-Addition of Aryl and Alkenylboronic Acids to Aldehydes Catalyzed by the Palladium/Thioether-Imidazolinium Chloride System, by Kuriyama, Shimazawa, and Shirai, J. Org. Chem., 2008, 73, 1597-1600. [My apologies to the authors for their unanticipated role in this analysis.]

In this article a bond forming reaction between 1.5 eq of a boronic acid and 1.0 eq of an aldehyde is described affording a secondary alcohol. The transformation is catalyzed by 0.5 % Palladium allyl chloride dimer with 1 % of a custom imidazole carbene precursor in the presence of 2 eq CsF as base. The reaction mixture is heated to 80 C in dioxane and the chemistry is reported to be over in ca 20 minutes.

I am somewhat reluctant to be critical of chemistry that is done catalytically and is high yielding. But this transformation, solid science though it may be, would be difficult to justify taking to scale-up without an examination of alternative schemes.  Let me explain my thinking.

First, on the basis of atom efficiency alone, this process requires that a lot of different elements find their way into the pot. The tally is C, H, N, O, Cl, B, Pd, Cs, F, and S to just make a C-C bond to produce a benzyl alcohol. A scale-up chemist would have to ask, why not use a Grignard and the aldehyde? Granted, there may be incompatible functional groups on either Ar1 or Ar2 that would not tolerate a Grignard reagent. However, it is worth pointing out that the conventional way of making boronic acids is by addition of a boronic ester or fluoride to RMgX or RLi followed by hydrolysis. Compatibility is an issue there as well.

One might object that many of the diverse atoms used in the reaction are at a catalytic level and as such may not constitute a major cost or environmental insult. True enough for the user of the process. But the metal complex must be manufactured somewhere at a larger scale for distribution. Pd mining and beneficiation requires energy inputs and generates wastes. The same idea applies to the imidazolinium salt.

The reaction does seem to require 1.5 equivalents of boronic acid and 2 equivalents of cesium fluoride. Boronic acids are specialty synthetic intermediates whose manufacture generates its own waste stream. Furthermore, boronic acids can be on the expensive side. The use of a boronic acid as a latent nucleophile for a straightforward addition to an aldehyde seems somewhat extravagant.

Cesium fluoride residues (2 equivalents) will find their way into the aqueous waste stream and possibly to an incinerator where the solids may end up in roadway pavement or a landfill. While fluoride is an efficient base in this case, common sense suggests that carbonate may have a more benign fate in the environment owing to the fact that it decomposes to water and CO2. Unfortunately, the best yields are with cesium as cation.

Chemists seeking to apply this kind of coupling chemistry would be well advised to be extra careful in their IP diligence. The use of metal catalyzed coupling reactions may already be patented or applications may be pending for patents. The same comment applies to the use of imidazolinium carbenes. Industrial chemists would be well advised to look deeply into the carbene species for process and composition of matter claims. Ever since the Bayh-Dole Act, university patents have been popping up like dandelions.

I do not want to be too critical of this chemistry. It is an interesting transformation and certainly may be of use for some kind of product. But for scale-up, at first pass it seems too far from earth, air, fire, and water. I would say that for maximum profit, this process is more of a Plan B or Plan C scheme.

Verbund Manufacturing

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German manufacturing culture does many things very well, but a few things particularly stand out. One of these items pertains to the concept of verbund manufacturing. Verbund simply means “integrated” or “linked”. Verbund manufacturing sites are clusters of manufacturing units that take advantage of proximity. Clustering can offer certain logistic and energy advantages if done intelligently.

A cluster of manufacturing sites can operate and share a co-generation plant for the distribution of steam, waste heat, and electricity. Large capital items like steam plants can be shared so funds can be plowed into larger scale for better economy. Rail operations and other transportation resources can be shared as well. Clustering also provides for the possibility of vertically integrated manufacturing on site and a reduction in transportation costs.

Clustered manufacturing may also have the effect of concentrating the supply of skilled workers for the labor pool. A manufacturing nexus can attract community colleges and other vocational opportunities for the next generation of employees.

The USA has many manufacturing sites where similar industries congregate. Look at the Gulf coast with all of the refinery locations. But the extent to which there are synergistic interactions between companies is unclear.

In the US, corporations tend to behave as the Republic of Exxon or the Republic of the Union Pacific. This kind of a fragmented confederation of corporate states is becoming obsolete as we go up against nationalized business entities that control key resources and trade. The key to future vitality is greater efficiency with resources. Synergistic cooperation is one model that is available. But to do this requires trust and the desire to cooperate for mutual benefit. Competition begets gamesmanship and posturing which works against the verbund model for US businesses.

US corporations have much to learn from this business model.

“60 Minutes” and Dust Explosions

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Sunday evening on 60 Minutes on CBS there was a segment on dust explosions. For the most part, it was an expose on the failings of OSHA. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that OSHA is lead by a bunch of dullards who are under the enchantment of an administration reluctant to impose new regulations on industry.

The thrust of the program was that OSHA is completely unable to recognize incipient dust hazards on their site inspections, partly due to a lack of training and partly due to a slack-jawed lack of direction.  It wasn’t pretty.

As a dramatic backdrop, numerous instances of major plant explosions were trotted out for all to see. The message is that plants keep blowing up from dust explosions, but OSHA isn’t holding companies to higher standards- because there aren’t any.  The Secretary cited OSHA’s housekeeping requirement as broad enough to cover the dust explosion scenario. It was less than convincing.

I couldn’t help but notice that the subtext was that there can only be safety if more regulations were written. I didn’t see any company officials grilled in the same manner that the Secretary was grilled.

In fairness to OSHA, someone needed to clarify just what that agency is free to do in regard to rule making and what must be done by the Congress.  I know there are smart people in OSHA, but being federal employees, there is little incentive to champion new regulations. Between institutional inertia, lobbyists, and an antagonistic executive branch, who wants to charge ahead of the parade on new rules?

 

Poorer Living from Better Things

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I’m not an apologist for the chemical industry. Chemical industry has a checkered past in many ways. The pesticide, petrochemicals, and mining industries have left a deep and abiding foul taste in the mouths of many communities. In a previous era, heavy industry has fouled rivers, lakes, air, and ground water. It has lead to illness, death, and loss of livelihood to many people.

But in the modern era much of this wanton issuance of hazardous industrial material into the air and waters has been halted or greatly diminished. At least for the US, Canada, and the EU. And it is not because industry suddenly found religion. The “regulatory environment” became so compelling a liability cost factor that industry set its mind to engineering plants into compliance. 

I would make the observation that today, the major chemical health issues before us are not quite as much about bulk environmental pollution by waste products. Rather, I would offer that the most important matter may have to do with the chronic exposure of consumers to various levels of manufactured products. High energy density foods, particularly, high fructose corn sweeteners; veterinary antibiotic residues, endocrine disrupters, smoking, highly potent pharmaceuticals, and volatiles from polymers and adhesives to name just a few.

Modern life has come to require the consumption of many things.  A modern nation must have a thriving chemical industry to sustain its need for manufactured materials. It is quite difficult and isolating to live a life free of paint and plastics or diesel and drugs. Choosing paper over plastic at the supermarket requires a difficult calculation of comparative environmental insults. Pulp manufacture vs polymer manufacture- which is the least evil? I don’t know.

Our lives have transitioned from convenience to wretched excess. Our industry has given us an irresistable selection of facile ways to accomplish excess consumption. Individualized portions meter out aliquots of tasty morsels that our cortisol-stressed brains cry out for. These same portions are conveniently dispensed in petroleum- or natural gas-derived packages within packages within packages. These resource depleting disposable nested packages are delivered to our local market in diesel burning behemoths because some pencil-necked cube monkey decided that rotund Americans needed yet one more permutation of high fructose corn syrup saturated, palm oil softened, sodium salt crusted, azo dye pigmented, extruded grain product on Wal-Mart shelves.

Enough already.

All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008.

Synthetic Chicken- Regular or Extra Crispy?

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While the rest of us were wasting our time sleeping or soaking in the spa, our ambitious food scientists have been steadily beavering away on the cultivation of chicken tissues. The goal is toward the mass production of chicken-like food.  Poulterer and Kentucky Colonel Harlan Sanders will be transformed into tissue farmer Dr. Sanders in a lab coat and goggles.

The mass production of tissue cultivated meats won’t happen anytime soon. However, it is something that is being investigated by serious workers in the field.

I have to admit that my unquestioning embrace of Progress is weakening. Nonetheless, interesting things are happening. Consider the work of Vladimir Mironov, Director of the MUSC Bioprinting Center at the Medical School, University of South Carolina in Charleston.  In an effort to get around the engineering problem relating to the construction of 3-D structured tissues, the idea of layering cells by ink-jet deposition was developed.

Who knows where this is going?  Mironov’s technology will be very expensive initially, so its application to the production of $4.59 pork tenderloin sandwiches at the local diner is some distance into the future. More likely than not, it will be used for the cultivation of designer transplant organs.

Eventually, some company with deep pockets will attempt to market engineered meats. I would venture to say that the marketing problem is nearly as big as the technology challenge. Wide acceptance into the marketplace will take a while. I wonder how the first ad campaign will take shape? PETA approved Beef-Like Steak Food. Marbling and tenderizing is already engineered into the “cut”. Marketing may eventually be its undoing.

Synthetic chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and synthetic gravy. Genetically modified Roundup Ready corn on the cob boiled in reverse-osmosis purified water. HEPA filtered air in a kitchen cleaned with anti-microbial soaps. Mouths freshly gargled with hydrogen peroxide and bellies full of nutritional supplements. Lordy. Where are we going with this?

All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008.

Spacely Sprockets

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A commentor recently pointed out that Th’ Gaussling was sounding off in a nationalist/socialist way. While I’m pretty sure I’m not a socialist, I must admit that I’m on a nationalistic bender at the moment. And by nationalistic, don’t think for minute that I get weepy and sentimental over Kenny Rogers flag waving ballads. I don’t.

But I do believe that, in the short and bloody history of humanity, this North American culture of ours has produced or advanced some truly amazing things. Like space exploration and antibiotics. Airplanes, transistors, synthetic chemistry, and cinema. We’ve had some low points as well. But in spite of our war-like behavior, much good has come from our industriousness. 

And, I am anxious to keep it much of it running. There is no return to a pastoral life in the Shire. We are electric hominids whether we like it or not. The very existence of life itself leads to disorder. Highly ordered organisms that we are, we create vast amounts of disorder to energize life and hold our molecules together in cellular membranes.  Practically by definition, we cannot help but leave a carbon footprint. The trick is to avoid adding carbon faster than the cycle can accomodate.

It is plain as day that the USA is trending in a bad economic direction. I’m not talking about economic indicators or some political movement. I’m talking about our business culture. I believe that our manner of doing business has gone astray.  We have come to value the wrong people and unhealthy organizational behavior. We have come to admire those who appear to generate wealth by the manipulation of financial contrivances and accounting machinations. Strangely, the notion of manufacturing as a desirable activity has become nearly obsolete.

We don’t need Grand Theft Auto IV or Microsoft Vista or better cell phone gimmicks. We don’t need more gadgets to give neurotic, hyperactive, workaholics 2X better web connectivity.  Somehow, we have become intoxicated with computer technology to the point where we feel we need to fill terabytes of disk space with junk data rather than going outside and planting a garden or talking to the neighbor.

The greedheads in banking, finance, and real estate have helped to construct a business finance machine that few understand. Greed as a virtue is the norm. The right to petition congress has come to mean a docking port for electronic funds transfer to the military-industrial complex. If gaming the system is possible, then it is manditory.

We don’t have to abandon the basic principles of laissez faire markets. Markets work. Even the Chinese communists realize this. But we don’t have to shut our brains off either.

We do need a comprehensive mass transit network covering most of the continent. We need better ways to generate and transfer electric power. We need to find ways to make sure that people in Honduras have clean drinking water.

We don’t need a better version of Excel or SAP. We need Spacely Sprockets. We need people to continue to go into the trades and build things. We need welders and electricians and machinists, millwrights and longshoremen.  This country needs to get back to the fundamentals of manufacturing tangible products.