Category Archives: CounterCurrent

Crazy Time

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Work has been a seamless stretch of insane activity 24/7. An extended manic episode of multi-tasking and over-commitment. Nervously, we juggle chainsaws and flaming bowling balls on deck while the bow submarines into the swells. The gales of fortune tear at the spinnaker as every square foot of canvas strains to pull the ship forward.

Coworkers are mind-numb to the incessant demands of a production schedule that is absolutely fault intolerant. I’ve been on a boat in a storm for a bakers dozen of years. Rogue waves have become the norm. Reach and grasp become disconnected as you struggle to stay on the heaving deck. Yet the captain in the wheelhouse steers the steel boat into the storm again, hoping to drop the net for one more trawl.  We lash ourselves to the mast and hope for the best.

Dearly Departed

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Our next play, Dearly Departed, is in production. I play a character named Royce. This part has some pretty good lines. I’ve always played some fairly minor characters. The trick is to always do your best no matter what the part. A play is an ethereal being that lives for about 2 hours and then folds into a mere memory.

The job world is sort of like that too. You might find yourself in what appears to be a minor part in a large production. You get upstaged and your lines are walked over by the main characters.  But the main characters are carrying larger risk. If they flub their cues or mangle their lines, the effect is commensurately larger. On some projects you definitely don’t want to be the leading character. What is critically important is that you play your part the best way you can, show up for all of the rehearsals, and most importantly, pay close attention to what the other actors are saying and doing now.  The best actors are always in the moment.

Imagine a Better Microsoft

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Imagine this. Imagine having a form of payment that requires the payee to change the manner in which they receive and deposit their payment. Imagine a system in which the currency in circulation is “upgraded” periodically and that within 8 or 10 years, the previous versions are no longer “supported” by the banking system.

Still with me? Let’s continue to imagine.

Now imagine paying Microsoft for their upgraded Office platform with a banking and currency system that changes as described above. Microsoft would have to direct their employees to change out their credit cards, requisition policies, travel policies, and accounting platforms to accomodate external demands just to remain in the game.

Over the last several months I have had to adapt to upgrades to Windows 7 and Office 2007. It is very much like moving the furniture around on a blind person. The features are still there, but access to the various tools and menues are arranged much differently.

So, Microsoft, I have spent considerable time relearning how to use software that I was proficient with in the previous rev. I am not enjoying new capability- only new learning curves. WTF!!!!

Your productivity tools are having a negative effect on my accumulated lifetime productivity.  This is worth something. Where do I send the bill?

Theories X and Y

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Just for grins you should look up the Wikipedia page describing management Theory X and Theory Y. Anything look familiar?? This is what B-School faculty do. Which theory do you think Stalin subscribed to? Which theory does your organization follow?  Hey man. Sign me up for an MBA program.

Of course, these are book end theories. Most organizations are in between somewhere.  One organization up in Ft Collins has a slide for employees to zip to the bottom floor. This is Theory E for Elmo.

iChallenge

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Here is an iChallenge for the iPeople who are developing the telecommunications wonders we have today. You designers of the Kindle, Nook, iPhone, iPad, iWidget, and all of the variants spreading away from the core technology. I know you are clever and hard working people. There is no doubt.

What about developing or just relocating manufacturing processes that can be run in the USA? Shouldn’t the fabrication technology be lined out and automated to the point where it can be operated nearly anywhere? One of the things that the advance of technology brings is reduced headcount per unit of production.  How do we justify off-shoring manufacturing that is highly automated? What is the advantage if inexpensive labor is not needed? It must be something else.

If taxes are the issue, then let’s look at the numbers. Quit the handwaving. We need a company like Apple to pony up some actual numbers. Make your case like you did in B-school. Manufacturing doesn’t have to start up in the expensive SF Bay area. Plants can be built anywhere the public infrastructure already supplies utilities and transportation.  Could it be that many of the arguments for off-shore manufacturing are related to a deficit in imagination rather than rigorous calculation?

And to the iConsumers out there. By demanding these wonderphones, you are only making the trade deficit worse.  Public corporations are people, or so the thinking goes. What is with these people? Do they not have any sense of loyalty? Are they even trying to manufacture in the USA anymore?

 

Stupid Tricks with LN2

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One of my favorite tricks with liquid nitrogen (LN2) was to pour some onto a chalk tray at the bottom of a chalk board. The skittering, madly boiling liquid would entrain the chalk dust from the tray and transport it to the end where it would plummet to the floor making that wonderful muffled popping sound. The chalk dust would be splatted onto the floor where it would lie as a thin, mysterious white cake. I suspect the janitors were rather less delighted by this than I was.

Today’s youthful chemists, these tender shoots, probably think that dry erase white boards have been around since the time of the pilgrims. That’s OK.  I’ll not speak of squealing chalk, long leatherbound erasers, and chalk dessicated hands. The use of blackboards and chalk will remain our little secret.

Business and Government

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There is a common conceit out there that business people are in possession of some kind of skill set that makes them uniquely suited to occupy congressional and executive seats in government.  While business folk have organizational experience in general, it is hard to reconcile why the citizens of the USA would want the autocratic style of business lorded over them. Business serves the interest of shareholders primarily and stakeholders a distant second. Government serves at the interest and pleasure of citizens.

The imperative of business is to grow for the profit of the shareholders. Given this basic reality, I fail to see why a businesslike template should be applied to governance. We do not want government to grow for it’s own sake. 

Business, in principle at least, has better command and control feedback. Or so goes the thinking.  Have you ever tried to get an answer or some kind of satisfactory resolution to a problem from a very large company? As an individual with average cash resources, your singular pull is usually not very large.  If we are going to let market forces have control of national and state governance in the manner conceived by hard-right political candidates, what of the individual?

The marketplace is a kind of 24/7 professional wrestling match. It is a Darwinistic contest of the strong vs the weak. Do we really want to be governed by this kind of system? Do we really want every single aspect of our lives to be a dog-eat-dog competition? I thought the purpose of civilization was to buffer some the harshness out of our lives.  Do the proponents of 100 % laissez-faire really want the system to snuff out the weak and those of lesser means?  That would be those who occupy the opposite side of the bell curve from those of means.

The notion that we should let market forces freely influence governance is popular among those of means.  The privatization of government services will immediately benefit those who are already flush with resources. Because only those with current resources will be able to step into such a position.  It would represent a transfer of power to those who already hold commercial power. Power is in the ability to allocate resources.

Why low and medium income republicans favor privatization of government services is a complete mystery. The loss of control over the influences in their lives to unrestrained market forces is contrary to the common self-perception of rugged individualism.  Money and power tend to accumulate into the hands of a few. Examples are all over the place.  This is the lesson from the age of monarchy and of robber barons. 

Privatization in and of itself is not the answer. It is just another type of concentration of power that favors corporations and individuals who already have the resources to buy a seat at the table. Why would citizens of ordinary means want this? 

Well, they wouldn’t want this ordinarily. But if you create a stampede of frightened citizens, it is possible for a small group of highly motivated demagogues to steer a frightened herd in whatever direction they want. This is precisely what is happening today.  The overthrow of the prevalent system by such means has many examples on history.  Just look around.  The manufacture of consent is a thriving business.

A most unlikely question

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Saw Apollo 18 at the cineplex last night. It is filmed in a rough documentary style with “recovered” footage. My recommendation? It’s worth seeing on a big screen. Probably not a good date flick, though.  But that depends on your date.

While at a brew pub in Denver Friday night, I was summoned to a table of 20-something ladies who were obviously celebrating a girls-night-out before a wedding.  The bride-to-be, decorated with a pink faux veil, gestured for me to come answer a question. I walked over and bent down to hear her. It was then that she looked me in the eye and asked a question that most fellows rarely ever hear: “Can I pat your booty?” she said.  I looked at the table of a dozen well coiffed lovelies watching me for some sign of a reaction.  The guest of honor had a list of items in her hand that she needed to check off.  Seeing this, and noting the urgency with which she needed to complete the task, I grinned and “relented”.  At least she asked first. So I stood up, turned around and bent over a few degrees in supplication, and received the pat. With my brief role completed, I turned back around and bid them a farewell. Moments later I found my dinner party and sat down with them, satisfied that I had just participated in an important cultural rite of passage.  Hours later the wife unit assured me that this happened only because I appeared harmless. So it goes.

Eat Venter’s Dust

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I gave a talk in a morning I&EC session last thursday at the Denver ACS National meeting. During an interlude provided by a no-show speaker, a member of the audience began to quiz down a hapless speaker who earlier presented on the filtration of plasmids. The gentleman’s concern was this- We are continuing to develop conventional processing technology while fellows like Craig Venter are devising step-change techniques for genomic analysis and synthesis. People like Venter have their names mentioned in the same sentence with “synthetic biology”.  Why do we bother with the more primitive methods of research when the real action is with folks like Venter?

The inquisitive fellow was asking a rhetorical question to all of us. But the point he skipped over was the matter of intellectual property. He kept asking why don’t “we” just switch the paradigm right now and use such technology? Why continue with highly manual R&D?  The problem with his question was in the assumption that Venter’s technology was something that “WE” have access to. Venter’s technology does not automatically translate into a community tool. It is more like an item of commerce. In reality, this will likely represent a major uptick in productivity to the financial benefit of the intellectual property owners and licensees and their stockholders.

How the scientific workforce will fare is a different matter. Increased productivity usually means reduced labor per unit of output. I suspect that Venter’s technology represents a higher entry barrier to those who want to be in the market.  It may be that the outcome will be a broader range of diagnostic and treatment services available to a shrinking pool of insured people able to afford it.

Is this as good as it gets?

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I’ve had this notion (a conceit, really) that as someone from industry, I should reach out to my colleagues in academia in order to bring some awareness of how chemistry is conducted out in the world.  After many, many conversations, an accumulating pile of work in ACS activities, and a few visits to schools, what I’ve found is not what I expected. I expected a bit more curiosity about how commerce works and perhaps what life is like in a chemical plant. I really thought that my academic associates might be intrigued by the wonders of the global chemical manufacturing complex and product process development.

What I’m finding is more along the lines of polite disinterest. I’ve sensed this all along, but I’d been trying to sustain the hope that if only I could use the right words, I might elicit some interest in how manufacturing works; that I could strike some kind of spark.  But what I’ve found is just how insular the magisterium of academia really is. The walls of the fortress are very thick. We have our curricula firmly in place on the three pillars of chemstry- theory, synthesis, and analysis. In truth, textbooks often set the structure of courses.  A four year ACS certified curriculum cannot spare any room for alternative models like applied science. I certainly cannot begrudge folks for structuring around that reality.

It could easily be argued that the other magisteria of industry and government are the same way.  Well, except for one niggling detail. Academia supplies educated people to the other great domains comprising society.  We seem to be left with the standard academic image of what a chemical scientist should look like going deeply into the next 50 years. Professors are scholars and they produce what they best understand- more scholars in their own image.  This is only natural. I’ve done a bit of it myself.

Here is my sweeping claim (imagine the air overhead roiled with waving hands)-  on a numbers basis, most chemists aren’t that interested in synthesis as they come out of a BA/BS program. That is my conclusion based on interviewing fresh graduates. I’ve interviewed BA/BS chemists who have had undergraduate research experience in nanomaterials and AFM, but could not draw a reaction showing the formation of ethyl acetate.  As a former organic prof, I find that particularly alarming. This is one of the main keepsakes from a year of sophomore organic chemistry.  The good news is that the errant graduate can usually be coached into remembering the chemistry.

To a large extent, industry is concerned with making stuff.  So perhaps it is only natural that most academic chemists (in my sample set) aren’t that keen on anything greater than a superficial view of the manufacturing world. I understand this and acknowledge reality. But it is a shame that institutional inertia is so large in magnitude in this and all endeavors.  Chemical industry really needs young innovators who are willing to start up manufacturing in North America. We could screen such folks and steer them to MIT, but that is lame. Why let MIT have all the fun and the royalties?  We need startups with cutting edge technology, but we also need companies who are able to make fine chemical items of commerce. Have you tried to find a brominator in the USA lately?

The gap between academia and industry is mainly cultural. But it is a big gap, it may not be surmountable, and I’m not sure that the parties want to mix. I’ll keep trying.