read MORE
Jeff Haden does not believe the tweeter who claims to be "passionate about supply chain management optimization." He thinks he is "over the top." As one with a passion for topics most others find mundane or boring, I know that the claim may be sincere. Whether in professional life or in love, passion is not rational. Novelists write and artists paint neither to feed their dependents nor for the greater good of society but because they can't help it.
Two of my 6th-grade classmates were brothers, a year part, who knew at the age of 10 that they wanted to be medical doctors. It was not a family tradition, but they had no doubt and never considered anything else. 50 years later, the eldest is a general practitioner in Burgundy, France, and the younger runs the bone marrow and stem cell transplant program at Georgia Regents University Cancer Center in Augusta, GA. I did not understand or share their passion, but I respected and envied it.
Bart Simpson's most dreaded field trip, to Springfield's box factory reminded me of one I took to a caramel candy factory at the age of 8. I couldn't get enough of the kneading machines in action. I still remember them, and don't remember any other field trip.
It would be 20 years before I would start working in manufacturing, and it wouldn't be until I saw the Simpsons' episode that I realized the significance of my selective memory. The factory is not an environment that most people I know like to spend time in. My fascination with this world is strange to them and, in the 21st century, there are many easier ways to make a living.
10 years after the field trip, when I was a confused high schooler, a teacher ignited in me another passion, for mathematics, which has never left me and is also baffling to those around me who don't share it. I spent the following 10 years working to master this subject, apply it to real problems, and add, perhaps, my own footnote.
My transition from equations to shop floors was driven by frustration with "pure math." I loved math but wanted it to be useful, not pursued for its own sake. What triggered the move, in 1980, was exposure to Japanese factories, and my first job after that was as a process engineer in semiconductor manufacturing, in Silicon Valley.
I was stepping into a world that had no use for the body of knowledge I had acquired. To communicate, I had to banish greek letters from my vocabulary, but I never stopped being a closet mathematician. In Lean Logistics, for example, I applied basic game theory to the behavior of suppliers and customers, but painstakingly avoided any explicit reference to it that might turn off readers. Some, like Pascal Dennis, immediately read between the lines and recognized the Prisoner's Dilemma.
When I finished , my editor at Productivity Press, Michael Sinocchi, remarked that the book structure was "almost mathematical," in the way it worked its way up from individual human-machine interactions to cells, production lines, and factories.
Now, in the age of "big data," mathematical knowledge and skills are valued in a way they were not three decades ago. Today's managers are no more comfortable with complex models than their predecessors, but they believe that these models hold the key to competitiveness.
Like Comment Share!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment