by Gary Mintchell | Dec 27, 2012 | Leadership
There is a post on the Business Insider about a young man hired by Virgin Group and what he learned from Sir Richard Branson. I especially like the customer service points. There are so many people who are customer facing in one way or another who continue to view customers as an interruption rather than as an opportunity to serve. I have just included a couple of highlights. Check out the entire article.
When Alexis Dormandy was hired by Virgin Group at age 24, he got to work directly with Sir Richard Branson himself. By age 26, he was running Virgin Mobile, and all of Virgin’s new businesses at 28.
“I would describe the experience as, if you learn a lot by making mistakes, then I probably learned quite a lot!” says Dormandy, who secured a board seat by age 29. “But it was an incredible opportunity. I absolutely loved it, without reservation.”
Now Dormandy is the founder and CEO of a startup called LoveThis, a social recommendation curation platform.
We asked Dormandy what it was like to work for Branson, and he shared with us the best lessons he learned.
Set ridiculously high expectations.
Dormandy says Branson’s expectations for himself, his company, and his employees were very high, and that this is the way to go.
“There’s nothing more likely to get him interested in doing something than to be told it couldn’t be done. If you were to meet with someone who said, ‘Oh, that can’t be done,’ you’d probably say, ‘Okay, I won’t do it then,’” says Dormandy. “Richard would say that you wouldn’t succeed in business then. If your nature is such that if somebody says it can’t be done, and you say, ‘Excellent. If I can find a way of doing that, then we’ll make lots of money,’ then you will succeed in an entrepreneurial environment.”
Trust your employees.
Dormandy says that Branson ran his business on trust — trust in the people that he hired to do their jobs, and do them well.
Your product must be the best on the market.
“You’ve got to have the best product in the market to even be admitted to it,” says Dormandy. And to Branson, he tells us, the product was everything.
Reputation is everything.
Branson knew that when you’re running a company, the reputation of your brand is of the utmost importance, but so is your personal reputation.
You need to have a stellar attitude.
One of the things Dormandy noticed while working for Virgin was that the company had an “incredibly good attitude about things,” especially about the way the customer should be treated.
“The customer is focused on with a level of detail you wouldn’t believe,” Dormandy says. “[Richard] cared about the customer experience. And if he does, then everybody else does.”
The corporate attitude was also second to none, Dormandy says. People were engaged in their jobs, and excited to be working for Virgin. He says they “breathe the culture,” in that they are “trying to do something that nobody else has done, and helping people; it’s about the attitude of everyone there, and so you feel you’re sort of on this mission for the future, to produce something, which is very motivating.”
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 21, 2012 | Automation, Standards, Wireless
This will be the last episode of IT Conversations that I reference. I think that wireless sensor networks hold tremendous promise–not just for manufacturing and production, but also for most areas of our lives. In this episode, Dr. Peter Hartwell discusses Hewlett-Packard’s project to form a new information ecosystem called the Central Nervous System for the Earth, or CeNSE. The system will include a planetary system of a trillion nano-scale sensors and actuators embedded in the environment and connected via an array of wireless networks with computing systems, software and services to exchange real-time information among analysis engines, storage systems and end users. Applications include food safety, energy use and factory operations.
Several things continue to annoy me about the unfulfilled promise of wireless sensor networks in our market. For one thing, I’m impatient about the cost of sensors. One of the promises would be low-cost sensors scattered in many areas of a plant, for example. Think of the knowledge regarding the status of a plant with many sources of input combined with powerful analytics and visualization. But to this point, suppliers seem more interested in extending expensive sensors. Of course, they make more money. But this still limits the potential. I bet this is an area where a small, entrepreneurial company could make a huge impact.
There there are the standards. Have you ever been on a standards committee? I have, several times. There’s a company versus community attitude that sometimes crops up. Check out ISA100–a committee that is still struggling. I hear lots of back yard conversations where it’s hard sorting wheat from chaff. There are some good leaders on the committee, but not enough. More members must step up to the plate and look out for the good of the community.
When you have two sides that draw the proverbial line in the sand and refuse to compromise, you have problems–just like the fiscal cliff or gun regulation conversations. But we’re in a commercial market. The market will decide, but it could be left with multiple standards that lead to interoperability problems for users.
It’s time to get over the stubbornness and provide leadership to move the community forward.
It’s also time for innovative engineers to work on sensor design so that cool, new smart sensors can come to the market and help us realize the vision.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 20, 2012 | Automation, Commentary, Operations Management
I meet some of the most intelligent and interesting people in the world of automation. Passionate about their work. Trying to make manufacturing–and the world–a better place.
Dining alone on a recent evening in Sidney, a man seated nearby started a conversation. It got around to what I do. He said, “You obviously enjoy what you’re doing.” Guess it shows.
Experience and studying results teach me that automation and controls people have contributed mightily to making manufacturing and production safer, cleaner, more efficient, more profitable. But are there undesirable side effects?
Andrew McAfee studies the impact of IT on the economy. He teaches at MIT. Met him once. Brilliant guy. I’ve referenced him (and colleague and co-author of “Race Against the Machine,” Erik Brynjolfsson) several times. Here’s one on Data-Driven Manufacturing, and Myths of Manufacturing, and Jobs in Manufacturing.
McAfee wrote on his blog last week about The Great Decoupling of the US Economy. In this post he discusses how by the mid-1980s wages and employment began to be decoupled from labor productivity and real GDP. In other words, while the latter two were still growing, the former two were not. In fact, by 2011, the median household income was actually less than any time since 1996.
You need to study his entire argument. But he sent a copy of his book to Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman who referenced it in his own blog.
The problem seems to be application of digital technologies that displace unskilled workers. McAfee and Brynjolfsson discuss potential solutions to the problem which include education.
I agree that it’s crucial that we encourage every young person with whom we interact to study. Try to whet their curiosity about science and engineering. But I think that as we become leaders and managers, we need to consider how we deploy labor, too. Labor is seldom the biggest cost factor in production. Lean manufacturing extols the value of people. Are we doing justice to the people in our plants–soliciting ideas, providing meaningful work, helping them grow?
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 18, 2012 | Operations Management, Software
I recently had a conversation with a manufacturing manager who was looking for a new CMMS / EAM software package. His current maintenance management / asset management application is old and cumbersome. His comment was that he surely wished that there was at least one CMMS that was interoperable with other plant systems.
This is a common theme. Interesting that I heard this yet again. Interoperability comes up all the time. A search of this blog revealed 115 citations over 8 years or so. Recently I discussed the Open O&M Initiative demonstration, a PLCOpen activity and reported on a conversation about the Open O&M Initiative. I’ve been writing about the value of OPC UA for interoperability for more than five years.
I have also brought this up to industry CEOs and CTOs.
The major suppliers are all playing a balancing game between making all their products work together well and opening up their systems for some level of interoperability. I don’t think they are cynical and evil about it. It’s just that if one supplier develops all the components of a system, then it can assure that they will all play together at the most foundational level of technology. It’s the Apple argument against the Microsoft/PC argument.
But there comes a point in an automation system that different systems must coexist at some level. This is interoperability. We need those connectors where information gathered in one application can be shared by another application.
There is much progress in many automation technologies. Sharing information seamlessly among applications has great value to this manager–and thousands like him. But the CMMS people are lagging. Time for them to get with the program.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 13, 2012 | Operations Management
It’s not every day you get to write about building a new refinery in North America. In fact, not every year or even every decade. But the North West Redwater Partnership is building a bitumen (not crude) refinery in Canada to take advantage of the tar sands there.
I’ve often talked with Cliff Pedersen, who is Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the North West Redwater Partnership. He has been an integral part of the Open O&M interoperability work that I’ve written about at Automation World and on my personal blog.
This is significant in many ways. First, just building a new refinery is amazing. And it can take advantage of technological advances developed over the past 20 years. Then, it should be able to incorporate the interoperability advances that Pedersen, Alan Johnston and others have been developing for several years. The proof will be at the handover from the EPC to the owner/operator with what we hope will be current and usable information about the equipment and processes in the plant.
We’ll keep our eye on the project and see how it goes. And congratulations to the far-sighted management that sees possibilities and does something about them.
