Imagine it’s a crisp and sunny fall morning. You just left your local coffee shop, ready to start your day.
Out of the corner of your eye, you catch a glimpse of something moving in the bushes. Is it a squirrel stashing acorns for the winter? A robin fattening up for migration? As you get closer, the image becomes clear and you unconsciously hold your breath.
It’s a black cat out for its morning stroll.
You pause for a second to decide your next move. Cross the street so the cat can’t cross your path? Muster the courage to walk past it, or even crouch down to pet it? Rationally, you know the idea that a black cat is bad luck is just a silly superstition … but you have an important meeting this afternoon and don’t want to jinx it.
As two biologists who focuson human-wildlife interactions, what we find scary is how superstitions, lore and myths can shape your subconscious – particularly biases toward the animals people are trying to conserve and protect.
Rarity of a solely black or white animal
Of course, animal fur, feathers and scales come in various colors across the visible and invisible-to-humans spectrum. These colorations play a significant role in the survival of wildlife by functioning as a form of concealment, temperature regulation or communication. In white-tailed deer, for instance, a flash of a white tail can indicate danger is near, while the sharp red breast of a male cardinal attracts females that are ready to mate.
Within species, color variations are found throughout the animal kingdom, including melanistic animals with more dark pigmentation and leucistic animals with a reduction of pigment. There are black panthers, a melanistic version of a leopard, Panthera pardus, or jaguar, Panthera onca. On the other side of the spectrum are white spirit bears, a leucistic version of an American black bear, Ursus americanus. There are also albino animals that lack most or all pigment.
Scientists recognize these color variations as extreme abnormalities within the natural world. Being all black or all white is a rare phenomenon, unlikely to persist in the wild because it’s a selective disadvantage. These animals often have a tougher time blending into their habitat – a challenge for predators trying to ambush their prey, and for prey trying to conceal themselves from predators. They may also struggle to regulate their temperature and to communicate with others in their species.
A suite of genes that can change in many ways is behind this rainbow of wildlife coloration. One of the most well-known and studied genes is MC1R. In animals, loss-of-function mutations in the MC1R gene can result in light, yellow or reddish coat color. In humans, redheads have up to five loss-of-function mutations in MC1R, leading to hair that ranges from strawberry blonde to copper.
Protection based on unique color
Recently, we explored how charismatic coloring, including melanistic and leucistic or albinism coloration, affects the conservation of animals in the United States. As we read through local laws and found news stories of wildlife being protected or culled, we noticed a trend: Many albinistic and leucistic animals are protected.
We also found white animals readily celebrated. Brevard, North Carolina, hosts a yearly festival called “White Squirrel Weekend.” People often release white doves at weddings and funerals as symbols of purity and peace. The California Academy of Sciences’ famous albino alligator named Claude has a whole book written about him. And members of the Olney, Illinois, police department wear a patch on their uniform with a white squirrel.
We found similar laws and celebrations do not exist in these jurisdictions for the white animals’ melanistic/black counterparts. We did identify a few cities and schools, including Marysville, Kansas, and Goshen College, that made the black squirrel their mascot.
This discrepancy surprised us because the genetic mutation that causes melanism occurs less frequently than the one that causes albinism/leucism. Pure black animals are more novel. We thought the more rare melanistic animals would pique human interest for being more unusual and trigger more protections.
Colors have long-standing associations
For many thousands of years, people have shared with each other stories, lore, tales and myths that attempt to explain the world.
Sometimes these stories provide cautionary advice about the dangers that lurk around us. As our early ancestors sat around fires, telling thrilling stories, they sought refuge together from the darkness that concealed looming threats. The partiality evident in our history can linger for significant periods of time, making it difficult to unlearn.
Many human biases developed as a survival response – one reason a darkly colored nocturnal predator would be fearsome is that it’s so hard to see at night, for instance. Modern preconceptions, though, can be based on harmful ideologies. Somewhere, way back when, white became synonymous with “good” and “pure,” while black aligned more with “evil” and “unclean.” And even now these unconscious affiliations influence how people celebrate and protect – or not – rare animals.
Perhaps more chilling than a black cat darting past you is the thought of how much in your subconscious mind goes unquestioned. Ideologies – whether detrimental or benign – permeate human society, influencing people’s perceptions of reality and informing how they interact with the world.
This Halloween, rather than the spooky proposition of goblins and ghouls, consider whether the more horrifying specters are the unacknowledged and dangerous biases we humans possess.
BIO: PROFESSOR CARLEN
I am a Living Earth Collaborative postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis working with Dr. Jonathan Losos and a former National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow. My postdoctoral research focuses on the impacts of urbanization and environmental racism in Eastern Gray Squirrels.
I received a PhD in Biological Sciences from Fordham University in New York City, where I worked in the Munshi-South lab. My PhD work, on how urbanization affected the evolution of feral pigeons in the Northeastern Megacity (Boston, MA to Washington, DC), was featured on Saturday Night Live and led The New York Times to refer to me as the “Pigeon Stalker”. In addition to my dissertation research, I am a co-founder and editor of the urban evolution blog Life in the City: Evolution in an Urbanizing World.
BIO: PROFESSOR TYUS
My research takes an exciting approach by looking at the intersections of human-wildlife interactions and species competition (resulting in interspecific killings or intraguild predation) under human-dominated landscapes and how these two are mutually exacerbated due to the stressors within these environments. With the world rapidly changing it’s crucial that we ask questions about the role anthropogenic influences play on wildlife communities around the globe to understand how human-wildlife conflict issues and species competition will unfold in the future and what these implications ultimately mean for human-wildlife coexistence and ecosystem stability.
My current research for my first chapter examines the effectiveness of shoreline exclusion zones on mammalian mesocarnivores in East Bay Regional Shorelines to understand how varying mesocarnivore species are utilizing these diverse landscapes as corridors to their advantage and what that implies for temporal overlap between species, avoidance behavior, and habitat utilization for species potentially occupying these shoreline locations.
During its current revision, the Baldrige Excellence Framework®, the core document of the Baldrige Program, is undergoing revolutionary change—being reorganized, simplified, and refocused—to make it as easy to use as possible and to expand its value and reach. The revision aims to provide clear guidance for organizations of all types and at all maturity levels, including more value for organizations beginning to establish processes and activities to help them achieve a competitive edge and long-term success.
Change takes time to ensure proper reviews, the correct content, and the intended product. Given the significance of the proposed changes, the Baldrige Program is building in additional opportunities for review by and input from key stakeholder groups.
Goal of the Revision
As part of the Baldrige Reimagined effort, the Baldrige Program refocused the award process on its primary purpose: evaluate high-performing organizations to identify role models from which others can learn. Award process changes included streamlining the award criteria and evaluation rubric—both derived from the framework. These changes have created the opportunity to similarly focus the framework on its primary purpose: guide organizational development and performance improvement.
The goal for this framework revision is to clearly articulate the progression of process maturity in all areas addressed by the framework. The content will be presented in a way that will be easier for an organization to (1) understand, (2) recognize its level of maturity, and (3) determine the next steps to improve and progress. Another important goal is to revise the framework to be not just a tool for organizational improvement but also a tool for organizations to achieve world-class results and identify their paths to Baldrige Award recognition as U.S. role models.
Evolution of the Framework
Since 1987, the Baldrige Criteria booklet served as both the Baldrige Award application and as a guide for overall organizational improvement. For 37 years, new concepts and themes were added to remain current with proven leadership and management practices that enable high performance, and the Baldrige Criteria booklet became the Baldrige Excellence Framework.
During this revision cycle, more than 75 contributors have offered detailed feedback, and multiple focus groups have provided recommendations that focus on both content and structure. In addition, leadership trends and challenges have been studied and vetted for relevance. All feedback was added to other suggestions, including from Baldrige advisory bodies, on ways to improve the framework.
Whole-Organization Assessments
The revised framework will still be the best resource of proven leadership and management practices for organizations seeking a comprehensive tool that speaks to wide ranges of best practices. Use of the framework for a systems approach to performance improvement and organization-wide assessments will lead organizations to resilience and long-term success.
For more information on any of the framework publications, contact the Baldrige Program at baldrige@nist.gov or (301) 975-2036.
Persuasion is the centerpiece of business activity. Customers must be convinced to buy your company’s products or services, employees, and colleagues to go along with a new strategic plan or reorganization, investors to buy (or not to sell) your stock, and partners to sign the next deal. But despite the critical importance of persuasion, most executives struggle to communicate, let alone inspire. Too often, they get lost in the accoutrements of company speak: PowerPoint slides, dry memos, and hyperbolic missives from the corporate communications department. Even the most carefully researched and considered efforts are routinely greeted with cynicism, lassitude, or outright dismissal.
Why is persuasion so difficult, and what can you do to set people on fire? In search of answers to those questions, one of the world’s best-known and most respected storyteller, at his home in Kanata, Ontario. An award-winning writer and director, after studying for his Ph.D. in Occupational Safety & Health at Aston University, Dr. Bill Pomfret, then taught at McGill University, before forming his own company, Safety Projects International Inc, to take his lectures on the prevention of accidents and ill-health through storytelling worldwide to an audience of senior executives, directors, producers, and boards of directors.
Pomfret believes that executives can engage listeners on a whole new level if they toss their PowerPoint slides and learn to tell good stories instead. “fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living—not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.”
A big part of a CEO’s job is to motivate people to reach certain goals. To do that, he or she must engage their emotions, and the key to their hearts is story. There are two ways to persuade people.
The first is by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most executives are trained in. It’s an intellectual process, and in the business world it usually consists of a PowerPoint slide presentation in which you say, “Here is our company’s biggest challenge, and here is what we need to do to prosper.” And you build your case by giving statistics and facts and quotes from authorities. But there are two problems with rhetoric. First, the people you’re talking to have their own set of authorities, statistics, and experiences. While you’re trying to persuade them, they are arguing with you in their heads. Second, if you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve done so only on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are not inspired to act by reason alone.
The other way to persuade people—and ultimately a much more powerful way—is by uniting an idea with an emotion.
The best way to do that is by telling a compelling story. In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener’s emotions and energy. Persuading with a story is hard. Any intelligent person can sit down and make lists. It takes rationality but little creativity to design an argument using conventional rhetoric. But it demands vivid insight and storytelling skill to present an idea that packs enough emotional power to be memorable. If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story, then you get people rising to their feet amid thunderous applause instead of yawning and ignoring you.
What is a story?
A career story is a narrative of your professional journey. It includes details about you, such as your work experience, skill set, values, and goals, to help prospective employers and industry professionals get to know you better.
Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes. It begins with a situation in which life is relatively in balance: You come to workday after day, week after week, and everything’s fine. You expect it will go on that way. But then there’s an event—in screenwriting, we call it the “inciting incident”—that throws life out of balance. You get a new job, or the boss dies of a heart attack, or a big customer threatens to leave. The story goes on to describe how, to restore balance, the protagonist’s subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality.
A good storyteller describes what it’s like to deal with these opposing forces, calling on the protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make difficult decisions, take action despite risks, and ultimately discover the truth. All great storytellers since the dawn of time—from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare and up to the present day—have dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective expectation and cruel reality.
How would an executive learn to tell stories?
Stories have been implanted in you for thousands of times since your mother took you on her knee. You’ve read good books, seen movies, attended plays. What’s more, human beings naturally want to work through stories.
Cognitive psychologists describe how the human mind, in its attempt to understand and remember, assembles the bits and pieces of experience into a story, beginning with a personal desire, a life objective, and then portraying the struggle against the forces that block that desire. Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.
Businesspeople not only have to understand their companies’ past, but then they must project the future. And how do you imagine the future? As a story. You create scenarios in your head of possible future events to try to anticipate the life of your company or your own personal life. So, if a businessperson understands that his or her own mind naturally wants to frame experience in a story, the key to moving an audience is not to resist this impulse but to embrace it by telling a good story.
What makes a good story?
You emphatically do not want to tell a beginning-to-end tale describing how results meet expectations. This is boring and banal. Instead, you want to display the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastiness.
For example, let’s imagine the story of a biotech start-up we’ll call Chemcorp, whose CEO has to persuade some Wall Street bankers to invest in the company. He could tell them that Chemcorp has discovered a chemical compound that prevents heart attacks and offer up a lot of slides showing them the size of the market, the business plan, the organizational chart, and so on. The bankers would nod politely and stifle yawns while thinking of all the other companies better positioned in Chemcorp’s market.
Alternatively, the CEO could turn his pitch into a story, beginning with someone close to him—say, his father—who died of a heart attack. So nature itself is the first antagonist that the CEO-as-protagonist must overcome. The story might unfold like this: In his grief, he realizes that if there had been some chemical indication of heart disease, his father’s death could have been prevented. His company discovers a protein that’s present in the blood just before heart attacks and develops an easy-to-administer, low-cost test.
But now it faces a new antagonist: the FDA. The approval process is fraught with risks and dangers. The FDA turns down the first application, but new research reveals that the test performs even better than anyone had expected, so the agency approves a second application. Meanwhile, Chemcorp is running out of money, and a key partner drops out and goes off to start his own company.
Now Chemcorp is in a fight-to-the-finish patent race. This accumulation of antagonists creates great suspense. The protagonist has raised the idea in the bankers’ heads that the story might not have a happy ending. By now, he has them on the edges of their seats, and he says, “We won the race, we got the patent, we’re poised to go public and save a quarter-million lives a year.” And the bankers just throw money at him.
“If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story, then you get people rising to their feet amid thunderous applause instead of yawning and ignoring you.”
Aren’t you really talking about exaggeration and manipulation?
No. Although businesspeople are often suspicious of stories for the reasons you suggest, the fact is that statistics are used to tell lies and damn lies, while accounting reports are often BS in a ball gown—witness Enron and WorldCom.
When people ask me to help them turn their presentations into stories, I begin by asking questions. I kind of psychoanalyze their companies, and amazing dramas pour out. But most companies and executives sweep the dirty laundry, the difficulties, the antagonists, and the struggle under the carpet. They prefer to present a rosy—and boring—picture to the world. But as a storyteller, you want to position the problems in the foreground and then show how you’ve overcome them. When you tell the story of your struggles against real antagonists, your audience sees you as an exciting, dynamic person. And I know that the storytelling method works, because after I consulted with a dozen corporations whose principals told exciting stories to Wall Street, they all got their money.
What’s wrong with painting a positive picture?
It doesn’t ring true. You can send out a press release talking about increased sales and a bright future, but your audience knows it’s never that easy. They know you’re not spotless; they know your competitor doesn’t wear a black hat.
They know you’ve slanted your statement to make your company look good. Positive, hypothetical pictures and boilerplate press releases work against you because they foment distrust among the people you’re trying to convince. I suspect that most CEOs do not believe their own spin doctors—and if they don’t believe the hype, why should the public?
The great irony of existence is that what makes life worth living does not come from the rosy side. We would all rather be lotus-eaters, but life will not allow it. The energy to live comes from the dark side.
It comes from everything that makes us suffer. As we struggle against these negative powers, we’re forced to live more deeply, more fully, So acknowledging this dark side makes you more convincing?
Of course. Because you’re more truthful. One of the principles of good storytelling is the understanding that we all live in dread. Fear is when you don’t know what’s going to happen. Dread is when you know what’s going to happen and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Death is the great dread; we all live in an ever-shrinking shadow of time, and between now and then all kinds of bad things could happen.
Most of us repress this dread. We get rid of it by inflicting it on other people through sarcasm, cheating, abuse, indifference—cruelties great and small.
We all commit those little evils that relieve the pressure and make us feel better. Then we rationalize our bad behavior and convince ourselves we’re good people. Institutions do the same thing: They deny the existence of the negative while inflicting their dread on other institutions or their employees.
If you’re a realist, you know that this is human nature; in fact, you realize that this behavior is the foundation of all nature. The imperative in nature is to follow the golden rule of survival: Do unto others what they do unto you. In nature, if you offer cooperation and get cooperation back, you get along. But if you offer cooperation and get antagonism back, then you give antagonism in return—in spades.
Ever since human beings sat around the fire in caves, we’ve told stories to help us deal with the dread of life and the struggle to survive. All great stories illuminate the dark side. I’m not talking about so-called “pure” evil, because there is no such thing. We are all evil and good, and these sides do continual battle. Dr. Bill Pomfret says wiping out people’s jobs and life savings was unintentional. Hannibal Lecter is witty, charming, and brilliant, and he eats people’s livers. Audiences appreciate the truthfulness of a storyteller who acknowledges the dark side of human beings and deals honestly with antagonistic events. The story engenders a positive but realistic energy in the people who hear it.
Does this mean you have to be a pessimist?
It’s not a question of whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic. It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic—someone who believes nothing at face value. Skepticism is another principle of the storyteller. The skeptic understands the difference between text and subtext and always seeks what’s really going on. The skeptic hunts for the truth beneath the surface of life, knowing that the real thoughts and feelings of institutions or individuals are unconscious and unexpressed.
The skeptic is always looking behind the mask. Street kids, for example, with their tattoos, piercings, chains, and leather, wear amazing masks, but the skeptic knows the mask is only a persona. Inside anyone working that hard to look fierce is a marshmallow. Genuinely hard people make no effort.
So, a story that embraces darkness produces a positive energy in listeners?
Absolutely. We follow people in whom we believe. The best leaders I’ve dealt with—producers and directors—have come to terms with dark reality.
Instead of communicating via spin doctors, they lead their actors and crews through the antagonism of a world in which the odds of getting the film made, distributed, and sold to millions of moviegoers are a thousand to one. They appreciate that the people who work for them love the work and live for the small triumphs that contribute to the final triumph.
CEOs, likewise, must sit at the head of the table or in front of the microphone and navigate their companies through the storms of bad economies and tough competition. If you look your audience in the eye, lay out your scary challenges, and say, “We’ll be lucky as hell if we get through this, but here’s what I think we should do,” they will listen to you.
To get people behind you, you can tell a truthful story. The story of General Electric is wonderful and has nothing to do with Jack Welch’s cult of celebrity. If you have a grand view of life, you can see it on all its complex levels and celebrate it in a story. A great CEO is someone who has come to terms with his or her own mortality and, as a result, has compassion for others. This compassion is expressed in stories.
Take the love of work, for example. Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I worked as an insurance fraud investigator. The claimant in one case was an immigrant who’d suffered a terrible head injury on a carmaker’s assembly line. He’d been the fastest window assembler on the line and took great pride in his work. When I spoke to him, he was waiting to have a titanium plate inserted into his head.
The man had been grievously injured, but the company thought he was a fraud. Despite that, he remained incredibly dedicated. All he wanted was to get back to work. He knew the value of work, no matter how repetitive. He took pride in it and even in the company that had falsely accused him. How wonderful it would have been for the CEO of that car company to tell the tale of how his managers recognized the falseness of their accusation and then rewarded the employee for his dedication. The company, in turn, would have been rewarded with redoubled effort from all the employees who heard that story.
How do storytellers discover and unearth the stories that want to be told?
The storyteller discovers a story by asking certain key questions. First, what does my protagonist want to restore balance in his or her life? Desire is the blood of a story. Desire is not a shopping list but a core need that, if satisfied, would stop the story in its tracks. Next, what is keeping my protagonist from achieving his or her desire? Forces within? Doubt? Fear? Confusion? Personal conflicts with friends, family, lovers? Social conflicts arising in the various institutions in society? Physical conflicts? The forces of Mother Nature? Lethal diseases in the air? Not enough time to get things done? The damned automobile that won’t start? Antagonists come from people, society, time, space, and every object in it, or any combination of these forces at once. Then, how would my protagonist decide to act to achieve his or her desire in the face of these antagonistic forces? It’s in the answer to that question that storytellers discover the truth of their characters because the heart of a human being is revealed in the choices he or she makes under pressure. Finally, the storyteller leans back from the design of events he or she has created and asks, “Do I believe this? Is it neither an exaggeration nor a soft-soaping of the struggle? Is this an honest telling, though heaven may fall?”
It’s not a question of whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic. It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic—someone who believes nothing at face value. Skepticism is another principle of the storyteller. The skeptic understands the difference between text and subtext and always seeks what’s really going on. The skeptic hunts for the truth beneath the surface of life, knowing that the real thoughts and feelings of institutions or individuals are unconscious and unexpressed.
The skeptic is always looking behind the mask. Street kids, for example, with their tattoos, piercings, chains, and leather, wear amazing masks, but the skeptic knows the mask is only a persona. Inside anyone working that hard to look fierce is a marshmallow. Genuinely hard people make no effort.
So, a story that embraces darkness produces a positive energy in listeners?
Absolutely. We follow people in whom we believe. The best leaders I’ve dealt with—producers and directors—have come to terms with dark reality.
Instead of communicating via spin doctors, they lead their actors and crews through the antagonism of a world in which the odds of getting the film made, distributed, and sold to millions of moviegoers are a thousand to one. They appreciate that the people who work for them love the work and live for the small triumphs that contribute to the final triumph.
CEOs, likewise, must sit at the head of the table or in front of the microphone and navigate their companies through the storms of bad economies and tough competition. If you look your audience in the eye, lay out your scary challenges, and say, “We’ll be lucky as hell if we get through this, but here’s what I think we should do,” they will listen to you.
To get people behind you, you can tell a truthful story. The story of General Electric is wonderful and has nothing to do with Jack Welch’s cult of celebrity. If you have a grand view of life, you can see it on all its complex levels and celebrate it in a story. A great CEO is someone who has come to terms with his or her own mortality and, as a result, has compassion for others. This compassion is expressed in stories.
Take the love of work, for example. Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I worked as an insurance fraud investigator. The claimant in one case was an immigrant who’d suffered a terrible head injury on a carmaker’s assembly line. He’d been the fastest window assembler on the line and took great pride in his work. When I spoke to him, he was waiting to have a titanium plate inserted into his head.
The man had been grievously injured, but the company thought he was a fraud. Despite that, he remained incredibly dedicated. All he wanted was to get back to work. He knew the value of work, no matter how repetitive. He took pride in it and even in the company that had falsely accused him. How wonderful it would have been for the CEO of that car company to tell the tale of how his managers recognized the falseness of their accusation and then rewarded the employee for his dedication. The company, in turn, would have been rewarded with redoubled effort from all the employees who heard that story.
How do storytellers discover and unearth the stories that want to be told?
The storyteller discovers a story by asking certain key questions. First, what does my protagonist want to restore balance in his or her life? Desire is the blood of a story. Desire is not a shopping list but a core need that, if satisfied, would stop the story in its tracks. Next, what is keeping my protagonist from achieving his or her desire? Forces within? Doubt? Fear? Confusion? Personal conflicts with friends, family, lovers? Social conflicts arising in the various institutions in society? Physical conflicts? The forces of Mother Nature? Lethal diseases in the air? Not enough time to get things done? The damned automobile that won’t start? Antagonists come from people, society, time, space, and every object in it, or any combination of these forces at once. Then, how would my protagonist decide to act to achieve his or her desire in the face of these antagonistic forces? It’s in the answer to that question that storytellers discover the truth of their characters because the heart of a human being is revealed in the choices he or she makes under pressure. Finally, the storyteller leans back from the design of events he or she has created and asks, “Do I believe this? Is it neither an exaggeration nor a soft-soaping of the struggle? Is this an honest telling, though heaven may fall?”
Does being a good storyteller make you a good leader?
Not necessarily, but if you understand the principles of storytelling, you probably have a good understanding of yourself and of human nature, and that tilts the odds in your favor. I can teach the formal principles of stories, but not to a person who hasn’t really lived.
The art of storytelling takes intelligence, but it also demands a life experience that I’ve noted in gifted film directors: the pain of childhood. Childhood trauma forces you into a kind of mild schizophrenia that makes you see life simultaneously in two ways: First, its direct, real-time experience, but at the same moment, your brain records it as material—material out of which you will create business ideas, science, or art. Like a double-edged knife, the creative mind cuts to the truth of self and the humanity of others.
Self-knowledge is the root of all great storytelling. A storyteller creates all characters from the self by asking the question, “If I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do?” The more you understand your own humanity, the more you can appreciate the humanity of others in all their good-versus-evil struggles. I would argue that the great leaders Jim Collins describes are people with enormous self-knowledge. They have self-insight and self-respect balanced by skepticism. Great storytellers—and I suspect, great leaders—are skeptics who understand their own masks as well as the masks of life, and this understanding makes them humble. They see the humanity in others and deal with them in a compassionate yet realistic way. That duality makes for a wonderful leader.
Bio:
Dr. Bill Pomfret of Safety Projects International Inc who has a training platform, said, “It’s important to clarify that deskless workers aren’t after any old training. Summoning teams to a white-walled room to digest endless slides no longer cuts it. Mobile learning is quickly becoming the most accessible way to get training out to those in the field or working remotely. For training to be a successful retention and recruitment tool, it needs to be an experience learner will enjoy and be in sync with today’s digital habits.”
What happens when a product you produce fails? You customer may call and return the product. They may expect you to provide a replacement or refund. Does it matter if the failure was due to a capacitor or motor that you didn’t design, just purchased?
No.
Does it matter if a supplier’s supplier made an error that directly lead to the failure?
No.
You customer experienced a failure and since the purchase was from you, you are expected to make it right.
How deep is your supply chain?
You probably don’t know just how many suppliers are involved in converting raw material into your final product. Mining and processes, transportation, forming, assembling, Everything from the instruction manual copy (outsourced to professional writers?) to the packaging material use to ship the product to the customer (do you make your own cardboard from your own trees?), comes from one or more suppliers.
One way to visualize the complexity of your supply chain is to select one component and trace back to raw materials the location and distances involved. Something as common as a ceramic capacitor has maybe a 5 to 10 raw materials from metal layers to ceramic composition, to insulation, and marking. Maybe 50 different companies in an informal and changing chain create the capacitors you use on your circuit boards.
Cadmium Question
Years ago while working with HP I received a call from a customer. She asked if the HP desktop computers used any cadmium from specific mines in Africa. I had no idea, nor any good way to find out.
Sure cadmium is used in inks, electronic components. It was most likely in one or more locations within a desktop computer.
The exercise of just finding the source or likely sources for one element became educational at the complexity of modern supply chains.
Impact on Reliability
Unlike Henry Ford, we do not have iron ore mines, ships, smelting equipment, etc.
We don’t control our product from raw material to final product. We rely on each vendor the supply chain to optimize their product for their own good, which includes that their product works as expected for their customers.
Just like us looking back over the supply chain, vendor look forward wondering where and how their product is used. The miner’s of cadmium may have an idea of some of the uses of the material, yet are likely just as unable to answer the question about the cadmium content in a HP desktop as I was.
The result of this system is a breakdown in understanding concerning what is important concerning the quality and reliability along each step in the supply chain. Sure, we use specifications to communicate material purity or capacitance, for example, yet, that is what is supposed to happen.
It’s when a element in the process is not as it is expected that reliability problems occur.
Process Capability
No every vendor is able to consistently produce products within the specifications. We use process capability studies to measure the ability of a process to create product within specifications.
In some cases the impact is of little consequence. If the capacitance is 21% below the specification and we expected it to be within 20%, we most likely will not notice. If the capacitance is at 50% of the expected value, the circuit will likely not behave as expected, and most likely caught as when first assembled and tested.
It’s the changes that change the rate of change of the component, say capacitance drift or polymer creep, that go undetected until a short time in the customers hands. A small change in the material purity, or a change in process parameters, or an alteration of assembly steps, may initially seem fine.
It’s when the change causes a rapid deterioration of performance that we feel the impact of supply chain variation as a reliability problem.
We cannot control everything
So, what can we do? The supply chain is complex and includes many potential paths for reliability issues. Yet, there are a few things we can do, as reliability minded professionals to minimize the impact of supply chain generated failures.
First, establish clear reliability goals for each subsystem or major component. Know how long the parts of your product should survive and what is expected to fail. This increases your ability to communicate what is important to you supply chain, plus increase your ability to detect unwanted variation as it occurs.
Second, estimate or isolate the components from your supply chain the the highest risk. FMEA or other methods apply. So does engineering judgement. Consider the consequence of an individual component or a batch or all failing after 1 month, or after 6 months (exposure is important too.)
Third, determine the process capability for critical parts. While you should know Cp and Cpk for every part, we often have to prioritize. Use the results of the risk step (which is regularly updated as you learn more about the product design and the supply chain).
Forth, establish rigorous monitoring methods to insure the critical and high risk parts remain in control, stable, and as expected. Expand the monitoring to as many components as you can afford to manage.
Finally, for those process that are crucial to you products success, fully understand them. If this is your supplier’s supplier’ process – take the time to become an expert. Plus, for each failure encountered with prototypes and early production, again learn about the processes and materials variation that led to the failure. Root cause analysis should include understand the capability of the processes involved.
Your supply chain will significantly influence your field failure rate. You cannot inspect in reliability, so working to minimize variability and risks will support you goal to create a reliable product.\
BIO
I am the reliability expert at FMS Reliability, a reliability engineering and management consulting firm I founded in 2004. I left Hewlett Packard (HP)’s Reliability Team, where I helped create a culture of reliability across the corporation, to assist other organizations.
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Gardens too have similar traits albeit the temporary nature of some gardens is relative. An overseas visitor to the United Kingdom once asked a gardener of the late Queen how long it took to make Windsor Castle gardens look like royalty…the gardener replied, “about 900 years”. Continue reading →
