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.

Some Dam Photos

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If you pay extra while on tour at Hoover Dam, the government will let you walk through a few extra corridors deep inside the dam. Near the end of the tour you can extend your camera outside an air vent from halfway down the structure and take a picture.

View of Hoover Dam from Air vent

View of Hoover Dam from Air vent

A major bridge project is underway that will, when complete, bypass traffic from the dam. Hoover Dam provides a crossing for Hwy 93 from NV to AZ.  The hope is that this thing gets done before NASA lands on the moon again.  The bridge will allow Homeland Security to shut the dam down to traffic and tourism in case bin Laden decides to try out the latest dam buster suicide vests.
Bridge Over Hoover Dam

Bridge Over Hoover Dam

Crime Scene in Gallup

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August 5, 2008, Gallup, NM. Woke up in a cheap motel in Gallup this morning to the sound of crime scene investigators working up a scene 2 doors down. Something serious happened. Detectives milling about while 3 fellows in rubber gloves were handling evidence on the hood of their car. They had some sort of kit and were busy running their procedure. Somebody had a bad day.

Update. According to the lady at the desk, somebody expired in their room. The police were doing their routine schtick looking for signs of foul play.

Today we drove north on Route 666 491 through the Navajo Nation to a geometric point of interest where 4 states collide.

The Navajo’s charge $3/head for access to this geopolitical point. It is a remote spot where imaginary lines intersect. You can buy fry bread and refrigerator magnets in the numerous kiosks.

Things overheard at 4-Corners: The Navajo lady in the information shack was explaining (rather proudly) to a tourist from Toledo that the Utes refer to the Navajo as “Head Bashers” and “Bloody Knives”.  Hmmm. Some bad blood there.

On Holiday

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Gaussling and family are off on a motoring holiday in which our Nissan will carry us to a large city in southern Nevada. We’ll see some musicians with blue heads and visit a large chunk of concrete holding back the Colorado river. It should be a splendid time.

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.

Things overheard at the airport (IAH)

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Things overheard in the C concourse at IAH-
Yeah, I did a loan for this morning news anchor. He only made like a hundred twenty thousand.”
There was a burly guy pacing around waving his hands while he was loudly conversing on his cell phone-
“If you can get him instead of paying Moss 7 million, why not do it? ” … “The Lions were counting on him. I guess he’s not going anywhere. ” … “He was pretty happy in Minnesota until Culpepper got to him.” … “He’s the only left tackle in free agency this year.” … “If it comes to payin Randy Moss or …  Mendenhall looks pretty good. I think you have a good chance to get Turner.” … “Didn’t we draft him?”

 

 

Astronomers Vote for Revised Unit of Humility

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28 July, 2008. Malibu, California.  The annual Astronomers League meeting ended Sunday with a vote to ratify a new definition of Humility that will be sent to SI, or Système Infernal, for a vote by the international body. The annual gathering of astronomers in Malibu is a week of splashing in the surf by day and bowling and darts by night.

In recent years there has been a dispute as to the actual definition of the Sagan, a unit of professional humility. Some astronomers had claimed that it is measured on a linear scale while others have insisted upon a base 10 logarithmic scale. 

A plenary meeting of delegates from around the world deliberated on this matter during the week and voted by a slim majority to define the scaling of the Sagan as logarithmic. Dr. Skip Thurne, Official Parliamentarian and Grand Nite Astronomer said “We feel it is appropriate to define this most important measure of professional respect and humility for the cosmos based upon an exponential measure. The unbounded wonders of the universe are so vast, and we humans are so infinitesmally small, that an exponential scale signifying our insignificance is most meaningful.”

Mathematicians Discover New Digit

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26 July, 2008. Sznorkl, Hungary. Officials at the Hungarian Institute of Advanced Enumeration revealed today that a new digit has been discovered. Director of the Institute Prof. Edvard Glomjardocz and expeditionary mathematician Stanislas Malu announced that the new digit would be named “számjegy” and would remain where it was found, between digits 7 and 8.  A Roman character representing the new digit has not been decided upon as of this date.

“The impact of this discovery is only just beginning to dawn on the science and mathematics community” Dr. Malu said. “Of course, many tools in our daily world will have to change. We’ll need to devise new keypads for cell phones, calculators, and computers. Rulers and speedometers for our automobiles will have to be modified as well” Malu said.  “We’re going to have to recalculate pi in base 11. This will keep us busy for a while,” he added with an impish grin. 

“Counting with our fingers will no longer work,” Malu cautioned, “but mathematicians have never liked that habit anyway.”

The news was not uniformly welcomed, however. Wolf Farkas, President of Bandwidth at Intel was troubled by the development. “As of this time we are not sure of what this means for our binary and hexadecimal logic operations. If we have to retool, this will get very expensive. Investors are going to take it in the shorts,” Farkas warned. “We’ll have to see how this plays out.”

Stock prices jumped at the news, however. Those with the most to gain from this discovery are manufacturers of tape measures, calculators , and computer keyboards. Both Wal-Mart and Home Depot stocks jumped 6 % in anticipation of upcoming rush to upgrade. Landfill operators and trash haulers expressed concern, though. Lars Erickson, Director of Plastic Waste at Rubbish Management Systems said “Somebody is going to have to pick all of those little calculators out of the trash.”

Scientists in Search of Disease for New Cure

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25 July, 2008. Drainsville, Ohio.  Scientists at the Institute for Chronic Insolence at The Ohio Philistine University published a landmark paper in the upcoming August 1, 2008 issue of Science. The paper reportedly reveals a series of drugs thought to be active against an as yet unknown condition.

Dr. Anandathujana McDivitt, research director of the Petulance and Peevishness Therapeutics Division and coauthor of the paper, explained to the press on Thursday that the new agents have many built-in features that should make them active against something. “These new drugs have as many as twelve pharmacophores each. For heavens sake, they should inhibit or activate something. Early indications suggest that chronic chafing may be treatable with the new medicines,” McDivitt stated. But she cautioned that they are looking for “more interesting diseases” to treat with their new medicine.

Dr. McDivitt said that collaboration with some of the major pharmaceutical houses has revitalized their interest in a treatment for petulance and peevishness.