I don’t like ruthlessness, not in personal life, not in business, not in sports. I believe in fair play, ethical behavior and sportsmanship.
When I see an egregious example of ruthlessness, it causes me to become irate.
Cause and effect.
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For another example of cause and effect, let’s consider American industrial history towards the end of the 19th century.
Factories and mills were becoming the dominant workplace as distributed power and innovations allowed for mechanization of many previously manual tasks. Workers became easily-replaceable unskilled cogs in huge machines rather than craftspeople who produced whole products.
Working conditions were dismal and perilous: working ten hours a day, six days a week was the best you could expect; if you were male, you might make $1 a day (far less if you were non-white, female, or a child); workplace safety regulations were not widespread, and deaths and crippling injuries were not rare. The response of some businesses towards complaints about these workplace circumstances was ruthless. Profit was their motivation and their goal.
These were the causes. And the effect?
The creation and rapid growth of labor unions, to address the bleak workplace conditions where individuals had no voice, little recourse, and were treated as chattel.
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Shifting to current events, China, and more cause and effect.
I’ve written a fair amount about China over the last couple of years, including chasing cheaper labor within China and the problem China faces.
A recent article in the New York Times paints a picture of Chinese worker conditions that seems to be a modern-day duplicate of the conditions faced in the American factories of the late 1800s – mind-numbing, uncaring, dangerous.
The motivation behind the actions that cause such working conditions? The pursuit of profits (see this Washington Post article and take note of Apple’s 116% increase in profits). It’s not just Apple, but they are a current prominent example.
Where does the ruthlessness come into play?
This series of graphs shows Apple’s suppliers’ compliance with Apple’s Code of Conduct. The issue is not that Apple has poor Codes of Conduct, it is that they are meaningless. A few data points to consider from those graphs:
- Occupational Injury Prevention – it was worse in 2011 than it was in 2007.
- Working Hours – less than 40% of their audited facilities are meeting Apple’s corporate rules, which is an improvement from 2007, when it was less than 20%.
- Prevention of Involuntary Labor – worse in 2011 than 2008, and that’s involuntary labor.
Here’s the simple cause and effect:
Cause: miserable compliance with own Code of Conduct
Effect: unmatched profits
That would seem to be a modern-day definition of ruthlessness.
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Back to history.
In the late 1800s, terrible working conditions caused the rise of unions to protect individual workers, which led to decades of labor strife before conditions significantly improved.
We can see a similar cause at work in China right now.
But what will the effect be?
Perhaps Chinese workers will successfully organize, and working conditions and pay will improve. If so, that’s a good outcome for them, but the cost of goods manufactured there will almost certainly rise.
Perhaps another effect, though, will be that due to those rising costs, some manufacturing could be brought back to the United States in a cost-competitive manner, as part of our industrial renaissance.
That’s an outcome I believe we should be working towards.
I have a question for you: what makes someone an inventor?
What picture comes to your mind when you think of an inventor?
Why a sponge?
“Because I readily absorb ideas from every source – frequently starting where the last person left off – I am sometimes accurately described as ‘more of a sponge than an inventor.’”
Who said that?
A recent article about Steve Jobs in The New Yorker makes the point that Jobs could be considered more of a tweaker than an inventor. (BTW, I highly recommend this article.)
I think that an inventor lurks in all of us.
Some of us are true geniuses who leap to concepts with a bolt of mental lightning (Archimedes’ “aha!” moment, anyone?), others tweak their way to fame and fortune, some absorb what others have done and take it just that one more (brilliant) step further, while most of us use our inventiveness to adapt and modify things around us to suit our needs.
That inventiveness was crucial for America’s success as a growing industrial power in the world, and will be again as we begin our industrial renaissance in this coming decade.
My message today? Encourage inventiveness wherever you see it – whether that someone is 8 or 80.
Oh, and the sponge above?
Thomas Edison.
Pittsburgh Steel Mill, late 1800s
If you follow my Twitter feed you would likely know that I regularly tweet links to intriguing and potentially significant developments in scientific research. I tend to think of industrial innovation as applied science, which leads me to equate new science with opportunities for new innovations, hence my interest in scientific research.
Let’s take that thought and go in the direction of steel-making.
Steel mini-mills (making steel products primarily from recycled scrap steel) were a significant innovation in the 70s and 80s. We have one here in Knoxville. They are far, far less capital intensive to build and operate than a basic integrated steel mill that produces steel from pig iron.
But what about those integrated steel making facilities? Any innovations there?
Nope, not really. It’s still pretty much the same process that was first developed at the end of the 1940s.
Now let me throw a big number at you:
According to the World Steel Association, that number represents the percent of the world crude steel production for the first ten months of 2011 produced by China.
Yes, indeedy, nearly half of the world’s steel production comes from China.
Number 2? Japan, at a far, far distant 7.2%.
The U.S.? A faded third at 5.7%
Ouch.
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I have been of the opinion for some time that we (the U.S.) need to be prepared to make for ourselves more of the things that are currently produced in China (that’s where all that steel goes…). One main reason is that I believe China will inevitably have to turn from being an export economy to one based upon internal consumption, and have written about this many times (here are links to one blog entry and another).
What that means, in this context, is that a great deal of that steel currently made in China and shipped around the world will be made in China and…. stay there.
Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, Aliquippa, PA circa 1970s - (Courtesy of Charles Fluharty from the book Portraits of Steel)
There’s no doubt that’s a real problem, but what does that have to do with scientific research and industrial innovation?
Here’s my answer:
Our integrated steel industry was last a world leader in the 1890s. Our remaining integrated steel mills are for the most part dinosaur-like relics, representing a shrinking percentage of US steel production (now considerably less than half).
It seems to me that’s an industry that is crying – and dying – for a huge dose of innovation, both to recover as a meaningful supplier, but to also prepare us for when we’ll need to make more new steel instead of just recycling it through mini-mills.
How does innovation like that come about? Someone pays for the research, of course, and sticks with it until research becomes applied science.
This is where, I believe, it is in our country’s best interest to fund basic scientific research into how we can make a step-change in steel-making technology.
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If I were U.S. President, I’d fund that research for five years, ten years – long enough to create a breakthrough, treating it as a matter of significant national importance.
We’d then have a technology to build upon, cheaper/better/local steel to build with, jobs to be created, and an eventful recovery to a leading position in steel-making in the world.
Scientific research can lead to industrial innovation, and our integrated steel industry is an example of where it’s needed.
I’m a member of several online manufacturing/industrial forums, and I get email updates on the topics being bandied about, books being read, systems being implemented, many apparently representing salvation to the implementers.
Sometimes, when I read these forum postings, I feel that I’m old school in the sense that I try to keep things simple. For example, baseball can conceptually be reduced to throw the ball, hit the ball, and catch the ball. Do those three things fundamentally well, and you have the foundation for baseball success.
Having been on many sides of the manufacturing world as well as the consulting world, I have seen quite a number of system improvement concepts arrive and depart. In my experience, among those folks destined to work with the new systems, there were typically references to the new system being “the flavor of the month,” given its potential for a short lifespan.
Some of them were ridiculous matches for their environment.
Some of them were notably excellent and sensible – I was a long-term practitioner of a couple, and still promote their concepts when doing consulting work.
In my years of observing these systems being implemented, rarely do they yield the expected results – good results, in many cases, just not the business-changer they were anticipated to be.
Why is that?
The root cause, I believe, is that the foundations upon which these systems were installed were frequently not fundamentally sound.
In manufacturing, systems meet the real world in the hands of its people. Those hands need to be fundamentally skilled and expert at what they do – operate, maintain, inspect, administer – in order for the business to succeed and prosper. If they are not fundamentally skilled…
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Let’s say your business needs a shot in the arm, some step-change of improvement, and you’ve read exciting things about a new system that seems sure to get you improved results… Think twice before you spend time, energy and financial resources on that system.
If your employees are not fundamentally skilled to begin with, the results of placing a new system on top will be shaky at best, and doomed to failure at worst. If your employees are unable to properly implement simple fundamentals, how will they suddenly manage to do so with a new process system on top?
A new system is not the answer; helping your employees to become fundamentally skilled is.
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Spend your money first on making sure your people are fundamentally skilled.
When that’s achieved, then consider new systems, if it’s still needed. It’s amazing what improvements can come just from having employees with high levels of fundamental skills.
And if you do decide to implement a new system, it’ll be easier to implement and provide better results because your foundation is sound.
It’ll be a hit – not an error.
You know the old saying: “There’s Liars, Damn Liars, and Statisticians”? I wrote a blog entry about it. Well, treat this as a warning – data analysis to follow. But please follow anyway!
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Here’s a graph, courtesy of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data.
This is the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the period of 2001 through the third quarter of 2011. It works out to roughly a 2.5% increase (inflation) each year.
Not bad, year-to-year, but over enough years it becomes fairly substantial. One hopes that income increases commensurately.
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Taking a different tack for a moment, I’ve written a good bit about skilled industrial jobs going unfilled for want of qualified candidates. One would hope in our free market economy that un-met demand would, over time, cause individuals and technical schools to respond, with the effect that these jobs would be filled by qualified individuals.
The current situation is that many aren’t being filled.
Why don’t we have enough qualified candidates? Partly because of the cultural perception that industrial jobs are not a desirable career – everyone should aspire to graduate from college and get a job worthy of their degree. Statistics, however, of high school and college dropout rates support the idea that college is not the best or most appropriate place for some to work towards a career.
We need individuals to seek these skilled industrial jobs, to seek the proper education, and we need to provide the proper education for people who want to work with their hands while exercising their brains.
But do we as a society value these kinds of jobs?
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Here’s another graph, again from BLS data.
This is a graph of real hourly wages in manufacturing, from the period of 2001 through the third-quarter of 2011.
From 2001 to 2011, on the average, real hourly wages increase very slightly more than 1% per year.
Inflation (CPI, at the top) – 2.5% increase per year.
Industrial Hourly Wages – 1.1% increase per year
I know this is cherry-picking (Liars, anyone?), but if you look at wages from 2004 to 2011, they averaged an increase of only 0.5% per year. In fact, it decreased from 2004 to mid-2008.
If you work in an industrial job, you are losing ground.
Why?
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One reason may be that industrial companies have tended to think, over the last several decades, that increased automation can replace skilled people in operating and maintaining complex industrial processes. There is a lack of real growth in hourly wages for those jobs because the expectations of these positions has decreased over time to where they have, in some cases, become what I call “remote control” operators that just respond to error codes. In short, they have become less valuable. The downside of this trend, however, is that salaried technical staff assumes the troubleshooting and technical support role that previously was provided by the hourly workforce. In spending their time keeping the plant running, they end up with little time for process improvement and innovation.
I believe, in contrast, that there is no substitute for highly skilled hourly employees running our industrial systems, and that the contributions of skilled, dedicated workers are essential to our long-term industrial success.
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It makes good business sense to return to the structure where hourly operators and maintenance employees are experts on their processes. While this industrial renaissance would increase the hourly employees’ value and compensation, it also would free the technical staff’s ability to focus on improving their processes – a far more lucrative change.
It’s hard finding skilled candidates for many industrial and manufacturing jobs.
Hard enough, and for long enough, that I’ve been pushing the idea of a “Plan B” to my clients – taking semi-skilled employees who are motivated to learn and training them to become the fully-skilled employees that are needed. And yes, we do create customized training curriculum and provide online all-shift instructional support, in case you were interested…
Sometimes, though, creativity can be your ally in either expanding your candidate pool or improving the fit between candidates and job.
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Let’s say you know someone who worked for a company in industry “A” but lost their job. They would probably be more comfortable looking for another job in industry “A” rather than industry “B”, even if there were more jobs available in industry “B” that were a good fit for them.
Why? Most people are more comfortable with their decisions when they involve something they know about. They know about industry “A” – it’s the unknown part of industry “B” that makes them uncertain and keeps them away.
When faced with something unknown, one response is to stay away. Another is to look for someone you trust who does know about it.
Personal, trusted, word-of-mouth recommendations help make uncertain or uncomfortable decisions more comfortable and therefore easier to make.
An example: hundreds of homes were damaged in our area by a fierce hailstorm earlier this year. Like the rest, we needed a new roof. Suddenly, there were seemingly hundreds of roofers advertising their work. Our previous roofer, who we trusted, was unavailable until late fall because of his backlog. Who, then, in that huge group of unknown suppliers, could we trust to do a proper job?
We didn’t know. Because of that level of uncertainty, we didn’t respond to any of those advertisements. Instead, we asked people whose judgment (and technical competency!) we trusted for personal recommendations of roofers who had done good work for them. These word-of-mouth recommendations were what we responded to.
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So, what would it take to make that person who lost their job in industry “A” more comfortable about industry “B”?
Word-of-mouth, personal recommendations? Almost certainly, but how do you translate “word-of-mouth recommendations” into actions that a business in industry “B” can take?
I’d like to take credit for the following idea, but I can’t – it belongs to one of my clients, and they were gracious enough to let me use it.
They belong in industry “B”; a sturdy but non-flashy business that has a track record of steady improvement as well as a history of treating its employees well. This business has a fairly large number of skilled positions, but has its greatest need in one particular job. Somewhat concerned with the decreasing numbers of qualified candidates who respond to their regular job openings, they decided to try something new.
An open house.
They decided to open the facility up, advertise that they were doing so, give tours, have employees there talking about their work, show the equipment they work on, have refreshments – in other words, encourage people to come see with their own eyes what the job is like, and with their own ears listen to the people who work there talk about what they do.
They had individuals come. They had wives come. They had grandmas come. The grandmas asked good questions. You don’t think the grandmas were there because they had no place else to be, do you? Oh, no – they were there because they had a certain someone in mind…
As a direct result of that open house, they were able to hire two qualified candidates and had several others who were in the process of being evaluated.
Success!
They plan to make the open house a regular event.
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You might think that the point of this is that taking creative steps such as an open house to broaden exposure and word-of-mouth referrals would have a positive impact on your ability to find skilled candidates, and you’d be right.
But another point is that an open house presents an entirely different perspective of a business. Instead of attempting to relate to unknown brick, concrete and glass exteriors, with an open house the public gets to see the faces and relate to the people who work there – something that goes a long way towards lowering the amount of uncertainty for those looking at Industry “B”.
Especially if there’s a grandma in the crowd.
[Warning! Technical post following! Be prepared for acronyms and unexplained manufacturing processes! Hang in there... it’s worth it.]
I was relatively new in my first maintenance job when we began to make use of accelerometers and vibration-monitoring software to keep an eye on our most crucial large rotating equipment. Our new NDT group collected data with a hand-held device and did the analysis using software on a PC. I’ll admit, it was long enough ago that PCs in the plant were still pretty novel.
This was about the time one of my graveyard shift mill mechanics encouraged me to stick a long-bladed screwdriver in my ear. It’s not what you think, and I’ll come back to this later.
I was (and still am) a true believer in the value of predictive maintenance, and for our processes – rolling mills – being able to plan ahead for major downtime tasks was exceptionally valuable.
The first instance we had of predicting a bearing failure was met with skepticism by our old school production manager. Fortunately, he was an open-minded old school production manager, and we negotiated a couple days of downtime. When the time came, and we began to open the rewind mandrel gearbox with the failing bearing, there he was, wanting to see the proof with his own eyes. And, there it was, where we had identified it, a large crack (almost a complete fracture) of the outer race of the inboard bearing. Run to failure would have ruined the gearbox and caused more than a wee bit of downtime, which was a very precious commodity to us. As it was, caught early, we had a fairly easy time changing the bearing, and we were back up and running early.
Independent of, and actually prior to, being informed of the impending bearing failure by the NDT folks, one of my graveyard mechanics waved me over one night when I was in visiting the folks on that shift.
He pulled a long-bladed screwdriver out of his toolbox on the back of his industrial-sized tricycle (it was a big plant, and that’s how the mechanics got around). I followed him over to the rewind mandrel gearbox of the Tandem Mill, which was ticking over.
He jammed the blade between the inboard bearing carrier and the housing, bent over, and placed an ear firmly against the handle of the screwdriver. He listened, nodded, then stood up and gestured to me. I put my ear on the end of the screwdriver handle, and conducted through the blade and handle to my ear was the fast gearbox hum as it turned an empty spool in the beltwrapper. The noise level in the plant was high, but using the screwdriver that way I could clearly hear the gears.
“I don’t hear anything but the gears.” I told him.
“Exactly,” he said.
About that time, we heard the coolant sprays go on, the bang of a coil hitting the first stand, and in a few seconds the sheet came out of stand two and flapped and crashed into the beltwrapper. After about five turns on the spool, the beltwrapper pulled away and the mill ramped up to speed. After watching the sheet wind up on the spool for a few seconds (it’s actually pretty mesmerizing), I looked back and he was listening to the gearbox again.
“Now try it,” he said.
I did. This time I heard a distinct high speed click. I stood up and we backed away to a safer distance from the edge of the sheet.
He said, “It’s been getting worse – and you only hear it under load. Better get ready to replace that bearing.”
I asked him if he listened to all the mill gearboxes. He looked mildly insulted and said, “Of course I do.”
I believed him. I also believed in and respected what he knew, and what he would do to take best care of his equipment (for he considered it “his” mill). I thanked him, and assured him we would plan a bearing change.
A few days later, the NDT folks told me the same thing, but with different details, and we made plans with our production manager for the downtime to change the bearing
The point of this is that there is a definite place for technology in maintenance – vibration monitoring works, and it should be an important technological part of many maintenance programs. Having the NDT prints of changes over time in amplitude of the bearing crack frequency made it easier to persuade our production manager to agree to the downtime.
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A greater point, however, is that dedicated and expert craftspeople are a crucial part of any maintenance program, for their impact is not limited to one small aspect of maintenance.
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Are your maintenance people experts on your equipment? If not, we can help you get them there. Contact us.
photo credit: www.industrialbicycles.com – mover-trike
I first wrote about “It’s Nice When Things Work” last year, but this story is a bit different.
It starts out with one of those situations that happens with most of us at some point, when you make an observation to yourself (psst! you shouldn’t do that), ignore the observation, and, sure enough, something happens that forces you to remark to yourself – but typically also to those around you, prefaced by an *&%#^ – “I told you not to do that!”
It happened during June, when we were in Greece, returning to the Plaka area in Athens from the ferry port of Piraeus via the subway. I was dragging along a very cumbersome and heavy oversized duffle bag, which was fine until we had to change trains at Omonia. The subway car was very crowded and the bag very awkward, and to make it out of the subway car before the doors shut I briefly needed two hands, so I had to pull my right hand out of my right front pocket, where it had been guarding my wallet…
You can see where this is going.
I had my hand out of my pocket for maybe three, four seconds, and in that time my wallet was plucked. I’m a pretty seasoned traveler, never had my pocket picked, and I knew better – I knew I should not have had my wallet anywhere accessible, but there it was, and there it went. I knew it was gone as I got out of the subway car, but there was nothing to do but check the floor to make sure I hadn’t just dropped it (ha), then cancel the two credit cards and get a new driver’s license when I got home.
I was still fuming for a long time – not because I got my pocket picked, although that was embarrassing, given I knew better, and not because of losing cash (not much… had that right, at least) or the cards, but I was really attached to that wallet, a long-held gift from my mother-in-law.
So we’re home, and eventually, six weeks or so later, I get a new wallet to use.
About that time I get a notice from the USPS that they tried to deliver a certified letter to me from the U.S. State Department.
What could that be? I laughed, told my wife I wasn’t wanted on any outstanding international warrants that I knew of, and went to pick up the letter the next day.
It was a relatively fat envelope, and my thought that they had found my driver’s license or something from my wallet passed out of my mind as a potential solution to the puzzle.
Instead, when I opened the envelope, there was a very warm, brief letter from the Embassy in Athens saying they had collected something of mine from the Metro office at the Syntagma Station and there was… my wallet.
With my driver’s license.
With my two credit cards.
In fact, with everything except the cash, even the receipt for a purchase made just prior to the loss, kept where the money had been.
The thief, obviously, just took the euros, left everything else – everything – and tossed it – but not in a trash can.
That means someone – Metro employee, Greek citizen, or visitor – within the subway station at Omonia found my wallet and took the trouble of turning it in to the right someone at the Metro, without removing anything else of value.
In turn, that person moved it to lost and found at Syntagma, where someone else looked it over, saw the driver’s license and notified the US Embassy.
Someone else on the staff retrieved it.
Someone wrote the letter to me, and someone sent the wallet to Washington, D.C., where someone else packaged it up and sent it to me in Tennessee.
That’s a lot of someones, all doing the right thing, which ended up with me having, once again, my wallet.
If someone along the way – even the thief, for that matter, in leaving my driver’s license in the wallet – had done something differently, I’d never have seen it again.
But I did.
Now there is still no excuse for me to have had my wallet where it was reachable, but it is nice when things work the way they are meant to.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone did the right thing?
In the workplace, in the community, in the world. Perhaps we have to set the example, ourselves. After all, it does happen – happened with everyone who got my wallet back to me.
Surely you’ve had an experience like this.
You’re getting ready to participate in an activity and someone you’ve never met before is nearby. They casually strike up a conversation, talking with great confidence and knowledge about the activity and their experience in it, leading you to reasonably believe that they are rather expert. Thinking you might be challenged and learn something, you ask them to join you.
Then you start, and their expertise is revealed to be fraudulent, their skills erratic and weak, and their demeanor defensive with a touch of transference (“These must be old tennis balls! I can’t play properly with old tennis balls!”).
If you are so moved, and I hope you would be, you can be kind towards the imposter, nod your way through some minimum engagement, beg off, and be on your way.
It’s no big deal: just the briefest of lost time, and no lasting commitment or harm. You ran across someone who only talks a good game.
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Let’s change the circumstances.
You’re getting ready to participate in the activity of hiring a new employee for a position that requires specialized knowledge.
Many, many people are looking for good jobs, such as yours, and come to you as candidates.
Many of them talk with great confidence and knowledge about the job and the skills required to be successful in its daily tasks. Are they really knowledgeable, or just talking a good game? The awkward thing is, you can’t really determine if they are expert in their knowledge or if they are fraudulent until you have hired them and they are working for you, attempting to complete the activities of the job.
Or can you?
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The cost of hiring then having to dismiss just one person who is inadequate for the job can be very high – especially if it takes considerable time and resources to do so.
Hmmm. What you need is an objective, fair, and comprehensive assessment of what each candidate knows relative to what they actually need to know to be successful in the job before you hire them. With such an assessment, you can avoid hiring someone who turns out to be only talking a good game.
We can provide that objective, fair and comprehensive assessment, for any job with specialized knowledge. We’ve been developing content-validated technical assessment for fifteen years, and would be happy to help you determine if your candidates really know their stuff.
Or, if they are just talking a good game.
Call or email us – we can help. If you’d like them to know a little more stuff, we can help with customized training, too.
I love dichotomies.
Also, actually, I like that word: dichotomy. Not only does it look interesting, its definition is interesting – “a division into two especially mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or entities…”*
Here’s an example: in soccer, a “hand ball” by one team’s player out in the pitch results in a direct kick for the other team (well, it has to be intentional), so you avoid touching the ball as much as possible; yet the keeper (my position) is allowed – required! – to use their hands to catch or deflect the ball. The dichotomy: hands on ball – bad!, yet hands on ball – good! – same game, same field, just different people.
Here’s another, but a bit more relevant to our current industrial/manufacturing world.
Industries here continue to evolve and push automation (even the Chinese are beginning to use robots in place of assembly-line workers), from the infeed of raw materials to packaging and palletizing of finished goods. Automation is everywhere.
Yet when things don’t work properly, having knowledgeable people skilled with their hands to troubleshoot, repair and return the automation to proper functioning is not just essential, it is every bit as fundamental as having the automation manufacturing processes to begin with. The more highly automated, the greater the need to have skilled, hands-on personnel.
What a dichotomy
The U.S. has stayed ahead of the rest of the world in productivity through making good use of automation. Our challenge going forward will not be as much to continue industrial innovations, but to ensure that our industries will have the skilled hands to keep the automation working
Automation = hands-on. Now that’s a dichotomy
Photo: Rick Fornaro, * Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary