April 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Knowledge, or Imagination?

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Albert Einstein

Why is it that the man known for his art and imagination reveres knowledge, while the man known for his science and knowledge reveres imagination? A quick search of the first pages of Google failed to turn up the text of the original Saturday Evening Post article (“What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck,” October 26, 1929, The Saturday Evening Post) which carried the interview with Einstein. I’d love to read the question that prompted his reply. It’s quoted everywhere; IMO, by people who could stand to invest in a bit more knowledge that supported their imagination. Wikipedia doesn’t hesitate:

In various spheres, however, even imagination is in practice limited: thus a person whose imaginations do violence to the elementary laws of thought, or to the necessary principles of practical possibility, or to the reasonable probabilities of a given case is regarded as insane.

Filed Under: Creativity 154, Leadership 303
February 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Blog Categories, Taxonomy, and the Dewey Decimal System

Ever pondered the list of blog categories any particular author uses to aggregate his or her posts?  Ever tried to categorize your own?  Easy, the first time or two.  But before you have very many posts at all, you have almost as many categories and you can’t quite remember why you put any one post in any particular category in the first place.

In an attempt to maintain some control and consistency in this website’s categories, I thought about who had been “doing categorization” longer than blogs have been around–librarians.  I spend more time in the local public library system than I do in university libraries, so the Dewey Decimal System was a natural choice.  I copied off the categories from Wikipedia and started editing the list, removing the topics I am pretty sure I’ll never write about.

The list itself makes for interesting reading:

000 Computer science
001 Knowledge
002 The book
003 Sex
004 Data processing & computer science
005 Computer programming, programs & data
010 Bibliographies

Now, I can see how “sex” and “the book” fall into nearby branches of a taxonomic tree, but I suspect a lot of people would be more likely to link “sex” and “the TV,” if they had to pick a communications medium.  Suddenly, a possible source of the idea for the movie Lars and the Real Girl takes shape.  (An aside:  see the movie if you’ve ever worked as, or near, computer programmers.  Also recommended is The IT Crowd, a comedy TV series from the BBC.)

Moving to the next set of shelves, we come to Philosophy.  While I might be seen to have a somewhat philosophical approach to some areas of my life, it’s not a topic I spent any time on in school.  The topic might well be served by deleting everything but the top level identifier.  (Missing numbers indicate the list has already been pruned.)

100 Philosophy & psychology
110 Metaphysics
114 Space
115 Time
116 Change
117 Structure
118 Force & Energy
119 Number & quantity
120 Epistemology
126 The self
127 The unconscious & the subconscious
128 Humankind
129 Origin & destiny of individual souls
130 Paranormal phenomena
135 Dreams & mysteries
137 Divinatory graphology
138 Physiognomy

But darn it, there’s “graphology” (and is “divinatory” graphology different from and shelved elsewhere than forensic graphology?) near the bottom of the list, and “physiognomy,” and that’s where librarians put the “facial analysis” books (I think), and those are both interesting areas of non-scientific reading that feeds intuition. But will I actually write about them, enough to need their own category? Would readers understand the connection if I did write a post about handwriting analysis (met someone who does forensic graphoanalysis in Linkedin Answers the other day) and then categorized it under Philosophy?

Questions like this keep taxonomists up late at night.

Religion is easy. Don’t expect a lot of posts about the topic on this website and should any appear, they can all go into the same bucket.

Social Science, which is a topic I would have said I don’t cross paths with much (my clients tend to be natural scientists), contains law, education, economics, and communications. This is going to take some thought.

Language falls like religion. Not a lot of posts (given that “communications” is a subset of Social Science, not language), and any that do get written can go into one category. (Ditto Literature. Thinking about the difference between Language and Communication and Literature makes me wonder what it was like to sit in the committee meetings when the system was originally devised… Are the minutes of those meetings available, and where would they be shelved?)

Eventually, I’ll edit the list and then print a copy for the wall next to my PC, and if I’m really on top of my game, I’ll enter the categories I decide to keep into WordPress so I don’t have to think about this every time I write a post.

And then I’ll go back through what I’ve written so far and recategorize.

Filed Under: Design 745.4, Process 153
February 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Cash Register Kaizen

My corporate life was consumed by Six Sigma and process improvement.  While we rarely used the term “kaizen” (the tiny incremental changes that have been used to drive long-term improvement in factories), we nevertheless thought about the behavior constantly.  In my private practice, I support clients in the slightly more informal “Lean” office design, which is an apple that hasn’t fallen too far from the Six Sigma tree.

I was looking at my Sam’s Club receipt this morning and I noticed the sentence, “comment, continued on back…” I turned the receipt over to see: “items sold=2, the standard paragraph about doing a survey, the date and time stamp.” Although I have seen two-sided receipts before, generally they only contain standard boilerplate text that is printed before the paper is loaded into the cash register. This receipt had been printed on both sides, on the fly, as my purchases were rung. I thought about what it took to print receipts on both sides. It requires some changes in the cash register. It also required an investment in programmer’s time to write a routine that could determine how long the receipt was, then divide that length in half and print half of it on each side of the paper.

Receipts printed on two sides of paper use exactly half of the paper of standard receipts.  Sam’s Club must print an enormous lineal footage of receipt paper in the course of the business day. Halving the number of receipts they print is a guaranteed 50% reduction in the cost of receipt paper.

  • A little bit of research shows that receipt rolls cost $.40 each in boxes of 24; presumably Sam’s Club can get them, in bulk, at a lower price.
  • Additional research at my local grocery store indicated that a cashier can expect to change out a roll at least once a shift.
  • A rough estimate of register hours per business day at my local Sam’s Club yields approximately 70 hours; at eight hours per shift that’s roughly 10 shifts minimum*.
  • Wikipedia tells us that Sam’s Club had 713 locations in the United States in 2008.
  • That’s about 2 1/2 million rolls of receipt paper a year (713 stores * 10 shifts / day * *1 roll/shift * 363 days / year)
  • Allowing $.25 per roll and cutting the total in half comes to something like a $500,000 savings per year. That will buy a couple hours of programmer time**.
  • In addition to the absolute cost of paper saved, Sam’s Club would be able to save the cost of the cashier time lost to changing rolls, the customer dissatisfaction engendered by roll changing delay, the amount of paper they need to keep on hand, the cost of shipping that much paper etc. etc. and so forth.

I do what I can to be green in my life. I write on both sides of the paper. I printed on recycled paper I get from someone else’s office. I save water in the shower and I have a low flush toilet. However, it would not have occurred to me to invest very much effort at all in trying to reduce the amount of paper that goes through a cash register receipt. While I am not accustomed to thinking of the Wal-Mart empire as a bastion of traditional kaizen, I have to step back and take this little observation as inspirational. There are many tiny incremental improvements I could be making in my own life and work, things that require a small investment to get right in the first place and then reap the benefits thereafter. I will be looking harder for them.

2/2011 Update

This post was written in December of 2009.  Sometime between then and now, I met a district manager who managed 12 Sam’s Club stores.  I asked him about the value of the double-sided receipt printing.  He said, “millions.”  I have clearly underestimated all the costs of managing register tape.  One element not included in the list above is “waste.”  Clearly, register tape cardboard cores do not take up a lot of space in the trash, but Sam’s Club has made a major effort to increase the density of products they sell, thereby reducing the number of cartons they have to get rid of.  The manager told me they’d gone from twice-a-week to once-a-week trash pickup, which is a 50% reduction in hauling costs.

*Estimate derived by counting the number of registers open at the various times of day I shop.  It’s probably much higher because I will avoid the store if the parking lot is crowded, and one presumes that more registers are open when the parking lot is full.

**May we also assume the company that supplied the cash registers picked up most of the cost of making the programming change?

Filed Under: Design 745.4, Process 153 Tagged With:
January 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

On Notebooks

I started a new notebook this morning. It’s the latest of more than 50 (at last count*). This one is thoughts about business of Red Tuxedo, <> morning pages. It’s a 10×7, wire bound, 100% recycled paper sketchbook. I bought it last Friday evening at the bookstore specifically for this purpose — knowing I needed somewhere to write about business <> blog posts <> journal or diary or morning pages <> daily planner <> client meeting notebook. And now it starts. I’ve numbered the pages, to 31 so far, numbering only the odd numbers. I left two pages for a table of contents.

Active Notebook Inventory

  • 8.5 by 11 blank hardbound journals. Mostly, I use these for art. Textiles has three volumes, jewelry has two, color has two.
  • composition books with the black-and-white cover. I can count 14 on the shelf from where I sit. Mostly, they are full of written notes that don’t warrant a larger volume, often notes about websites I’m developing, or events that happen repeatedly but not very often, like my annual Penguin party or what I gave people for Christmas this year (and every year since I started the book in 1994.
  • Page per day record books–the green ones, they don’t have a year: I keep one for the garden and one for big events in my life so I can remember when it was that happened.
  • page per day record book, dated: I found a 1985 edition of the page a day record book, the oversized kind that costs $59.99 at Kmart today at the thrift shop in 2009. They wanted $1.50 for it. It had not been used very much at all, and I glued some blank paper over the entries I didn’t need to see. I think I have a smaller version of this book in stash from a different year.
  • Small blank books that I received as gifts. Some of these have lines. I them for health records, one for me and one for my animals, in separate volumes. I keep these records by month. It’s good to know when the newest dog was neutered,  when the cat disappeared, or when did I receive the rabies series?
  • 5.5 x 8″ blank books, with a glued spine. I used to keep my reading list in one of these notebooks, but this year I started keeping a list in MS Excel.
  • 11 x 14″ blank sketchbooks. I keep ideas for the bigger art in here, but carving and my furniture. I have four of them within reach.
  • An engineering notebook, with graph paper. I use this to sketch layout plans for furniture and construction projects, such as the installation of the rain barrel system at my house.
  • A record book with lined, eye–ease green pages that are numbered. I use this as my daily planner. I started this system in 2004.
  • Plastic portfolio books: a 8.5 x 11 for my formal art portfolio. I carry a 5 x 7 version in my purse all the time. I keep two 11 x 14 books, one for press clippings about my art and one for organizing magazine articles about different ways of managing ideas.
  • Engineering field record book with waterproof paper. I found four of these at the swap shed several years ago, and I keep one in my street fair backpack to record hoop sales.

Notebook Qualities That Matter

Notebook size. Binding. Flatness when open. Paper quality, feel, and tooth. Paper color. How the different pens that I use move across a particular paper. Whether the paper is lined (not as much fun), graph, or blank. Blank paper is the best but it’s hard to find.

Editorial

I sometimes have to smile when I see bold or extravagant or creative covers on the blank books section at the bookstore only to open the journal and find it full of neatly ruled paper. I can only assume the vendors have tested the sales of the product, and that lined paper sells much better. It is unfortunate, in my opinion, to be encouraging creativity by telling people to stay within the lines. Daytimer, the planner people, once offered blank calendars — each page had the day and date printed in the upper corner and the rest of the page was blank. I had planned to buy the set the year after I saw it in the catalog, but it was gone by the time I was ready to order. I suspect that Daytimer recognized that creative types wanted more freedom in their planner, but at the same time, creative types are perfectly capable of inventing their own planners.

Yesterday I purchased a brand-new 2006 planner for $.25 at the Habitat Re-store. I think my life would be smoother if I did a better job of planning out the shape of my week, and where I intend to get various tasks and projects done. I’m hoping to use the shape of the week inside this new book for that purpose. To that end, it doesn’t matter about the number on the day or the year; all I need is the shape.

I suppose I could get much the same benefits by printing out the week view onto a blank or recycled sheet of paper. However, you can’t ignore your own history. I like the feeling of a notebook as it fills up. I like the way the paper changes over time, with writing. I like the way the notebook gets thicker. I like the way I can flip through the filled pages and see what I’ve done, or not done; I simply like a notebook than a collection of sheets of paper. For a quarter, what do I have to lose?

Incidentally, a friend of mine once lost her ability to pursue intellectual property theft because she tore her notes out of a pad of paper before she went to her lawyer to discuss the case. Ever since then, I’ve been particularly careful to keep important notes about my business in a bound book with numbered pages. I could probably make the case that it’s the value of my own intellectual property that drives me to keep notebooks, but the fact is that I have kept them since I could write.  I have them all and I pay a mortgage on a house big enough to store them and as my BF says, “that’s how I roll.”

*I know this because I really did count them all, once. I read some creativity teacher encouraging students to get a special journal for a particular body of work, saying it was OK to have more than one. “More than one?!?,” I thought. “I must have 10!” and then I counted, and stopped at 51, in active use within reach of my desk, not counting the new or recycled notebooks in inventory, waiting for a brain storm, and that was several years ago.

Filed Under: Creativity 154, Process 153
December 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Your life is the average of your peers

Henry Ford: surround yourself with smarter people.
Any sport: play against better players to get better.
The Framingham heart study: you’re as fat as your friends (and you smoke as much as they do, too).

Everybody says it, but not everybody does it. Parents worry about the effects of their children’s friends on their children, but do they worry about the effect of their own friends on their life anywhere near as much? It’s just as important.

When people are initially laid off from long-term jobs, they find comfort and support in attending job clubs and classes. However some find that, should they stay unemployed for a longer time than expected, they may be better to move into groups where people are creating new work and new jobs for themselves.

Change which you can. You may not be able to stop smoking, or start exercising, just yet. You may not be able to not eat junk food. But maybe it’s possible to adjust the amount of time you spend with people who practice the behavior and enjoy the success you want. It can rub off.

Filed Under: Process 153
September 17, 2009 By 1 Comment

ICE Entries and, Your address book is a database

ICE = In Case of Emergency.  First responders are learning to find the cell phone of an unconscious person and look for an ICE = In Case of Emergency entry.  The numbers in that entry are to people who would be useful or should be notified that the cell phone owner needs help.  Help the EMT help you by creating the entry, and by making sure your friends and family members create ICE entries for their own phones.

Along the same lines, consider that most phone address books can hold more than phone numbers, especially for “smart” phones that sync to a PC and have a “notes” field for each contact entry.

I wish I could remember how the subject came up.  Someone asked when I had my most recent tetanus shot.  I pulled out my cell phone and went to “T” in the address book.  I had the answer.  My friend was astounded. (A friend recently needed an emergency tetanus shot, and went to the emergency room on a Saturday night. The total bill was $426, with only $27 of that being for the injection itself and the remainder for ancillary ER services.)

My dogs each have entries in my phone, with their microchip information and date of last rabies shot.

For that matter, the date of my own rabies series is filed under “R,” but that’s a long and different story.  (Make CERTAIN the administering nurse codes the injection as “treatment for exposure,” not “prophylaxis.”)

I know a woman who keeps her son’s preference in beer in his entry’s Notes field.  When he visits, she knows what to buy.  (I suppose, if one had enough sons with different preferences, it might be easier to create a “beer” entry, but that’s not the case in this particular family.)

I have the rental rates and minimum head counts for my favorite meeting space in the Notes field of its entry.

I’m usually pretty well prepared for planned medical visits, and I can assemble the relevant records a day or two before.  However, “tetanus” (in particular; there are others that have a similar unexpected quality) is one medical outcome that is often unexpected, the result of an unplanned trip to the ER or urgent care clinic.  I will almost always have my phone with me on that kind of visit.  Common sense note:  the notes I make are somewhat cryptic, and I don’t keep my entire medical history on a device that can be pickpocketed out of my purse.  However, I’d rather a thief find out my tetanus history than get a shot I don’t really need because it hasn’t been very long since the last one.

Filed Under: Backups 005.8, How to 680, Process 153
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