The "wrong kind of snow"
became a joke phrase in Britain, as media misquoted a railway executive saying "we are having particular problems with the type of snow".
Railways in Britain and continental Europe had various problems in the past decade with environmental conditions that had not been covered in design and testing. In one case certain leaf-moisture combinations caused slippery rails, even though trains had been tested with contamination on the tracks.
Dry snow turned out to be a worse problem than wet snow, as its light particles were blown into more remote locations in the trains or sucked up by cooling fans with downward facing intakes, turning into wet snow inside where the electronics are. (That's questionnable design regardless - some type of separator should have been used.)
At the other side of the weather extremes, trains had to slow down due to rail distortion from greater expansion than designed for, due to high ambient temperatures.
My point in telling these tales is the challenges of ensuring that all environmental conditions are considered in design, and of finding or making realistic test environments.
(I know, people in the interior of North America might offer their range of cold snowy winters and hot summers for testing. ;-)

Why Motivation by Pizza Doesn't Work

Users make your product work, but....

There is good news in businesses.

An example of thinking about a limitation of technology
Here's a great example of someone thinking smart about a challenge, by observing what is different about a particular situation. Correcting for drift of an inertial position sensor.
In measuring location of moving objects, “inertial” sensors are often used. They measure motion by sensing accleration or speed and integrating with time to calculate distance travelled from a known point. (While today GPS is popular, signals from the satellites can be blocked by dense materials, wire mesh in building walls, and tree foliage.)
The accuracy of inertial sensors depends on achieving low “drift” – an erroneous output level even at rest. (The medical condition of “tinnitus” may be a crude parallel – hearing sounds that aren’t there.)
The inventor recognized that the foot of a person walking stops moving forward at one time in each step s/he takes, thus sensor drift can be checked - unlike an airplane, for example, which must move continuously.
(Of course much hard slogging is needed to make sure the method works, both in detail work and ensuring there isn't a fundamental barrier to using the method.)

Smart thinking about combining online shopping with retailers
The Sitka company, makers of surfboards and clothing for colder conditions, wanted to offer online shopping without competing with retailers who sell their products. So they found an e-commerce service that facilitates retailers bidding on an order based on geographic proximity to customer. (the article)
Seems real smart!
(I don't know the details - obviously shipping cost is a key factor for surfboards and wet suits.)

Retailers get some defense from federal government
Canada's federal government proposes to strengthen laws allowing citizens to arrest thieves.
(Safeguards are needed to prevent mis-use by people like Marxist activists who think that mob action is justified against businesses, who they believe are guilty of stealing from people, and from abusive managers.
That belief comes from Marxist exploitationt theory which is based on a "fixed-pie" view of life that is rooted in views of humans as uncreative immoral beings, except as a collective. And some store managers threaten people who complain about a service or unsafe store conditions - many business people actually believe in exploitation. The purpose of the law is to protect honest individuals, the rest will fail in the marketplace.)

First ask Why.
The link is to a review of a book that appears to make good points about how to achieve loyalty from employees and customers.
Sounds more fundamental than the usual advice.
“Loyalty, real emotional value, exists in the brain of the buyer, not the seller,” ...

Old not necessarily better
"I believe the finest instruments in the world are being made today - they just aren't old yet." says James Ham, who makes symphony instruments like string bass, violins and cellos.
Of course easier access to wood from around the world, and modern materials for other parts, as well as to shaping tools, better knowledge of physics, and computer computation, are available if needed.
But it's knowledge that counts, and Ham has enough to design improved shapes and make large instruments lighter, which players of the bigger ones should really like.
- (Reference Senior Living Magazine, December 2010)
A question is the time involved, which the maker hopes to get paid for. My impression from reading of Ham and others is that there are enough professional musicians who want quality that the best instrument workers can make a living.
(Why the old is best/new is best dichotomy? Ask Keith.)

Failure modes - an example
A homeowner flushes the toilet, then some time later finds hot water gushing out from the bottom of the tank in the back of the toilet.
She calls for help, which fortunately arrives quickly.
The water leak is too hot for either person to safely reach the toilet water shutoff valve at the wall. So he shuts off the water going into the hot water tank, then can shut off the toilet valve as only cold water is coming out at that time.
What happened? Why would hot water be gushing out of a toilet that is only plumbed to cold water?
Additional help concluded that the element was shorted to ground thus always on, so was boiling water with enough pressure to overcome the cold water pressure into the house. Flushing the toilet allowed that hot water to go through plumbing into the toilet tank, melting the standard plastic tube that connects the toilet shutoff valve to the toilet tank.
How could that mishap be prevented?
Click on this link for more details and educational comments.

Too many keys?
For the security needed today, one could have a pile of keys for all the individual locks one needs, on top of the usual residence and vehicle keys.
I've noticed the availability of easily keyed locks, and resettable combinations.
Locksmiths can rekey many locks by disassembling them, but at today's labour rates that gets expensive. Some have the MasterLock settable padlock, a good idea that is sensitive to over-doing the impact needed to set it to the specific key.
Combination locks are available that can be set or reset to a particular combination.
(BTW, new vehicle dealers usually have the ability to key a replacement lock cylinder to match existing ones, and of course today have to reprogram the "transponder" keys.)
Now come padlocks that you can set to match your vehicle's key. Nifty.
Note that these aren't high security locks (and see a locksmith if you need a quantity of locks using the same key, they can supply them), but are useful.
Another example of people trying to earn by helping people.

Rising from the ashes
What do you do when your manufacturing plant burns down?
The people of the Dana components plant in Fredericktown Ohio faced that challenge in 1998.
Before the ashes cooled, a phone company set up service and a sister company provided computers. Employees worked to salvage what could be from the ashes, and brought equipment from home (who would have thought some had a sand-blasting machine?). Other Dana companies provided some production equipment. Customers showed up to help.
Dialogue with customers established priorities of what to restart making.
Production resumed 72 hours after the fire, no customers had to shut down.
- (Reference "Diesel Progress" magazine of October 2000.)
That shows what people can do, working together. What conditions facilitate that? Keith knows.

Empowering people
Ted Miller of Matrix Aviation has a sound approach:
"When you come in and empower employees, accountability goes with it. That brings mixed feelings; happy that they've been empowered, yet concerned with the responsibility.
Each team member needs ethical and business standards to guide them.
The people who make decisions, who go forward and learn new things, deserve the credit."
- (Reference "Avionisc News" magazine of March 2011.)
Keith can elaborate on how you can achieve what Ted Miller did..

Someone did The Right Thing
Sor some reason unknown to me the door lock knob on a small washroom in a hospital was oriented in a "counter-intuitive" way. So someone took care of it.

Downstream Consequences
I've recently seen or read of several examples recently of a failure causing consequences far beyond what most people might expect. A few:
- The heating element in a water heater failed, and stayed on because the failure created a path from input power to case ground (thus bypassing the thermostat). The pressure of steam from boiling water pushed very hot water back into the cold water system, causing the inlet line of a toilet to melt, flooding the floor and the furnace below. (Newer water heaters and installations have more overheat protection and a backflow preventer, perhaps use of plastic plumbing depends on those features.)
- The automatic sprinkler system in a metal plating plant quickly extinguished a fire. But the sprinklers ran for hours, overflowing vats of acid, which ran into adjacent businesses. They remain closed weeks later. (Why weren't there fume hoods on those vats, which might have shielded them from the sprinkler water?)
- And the big one of 2011, the Daiichi nuclear power plant near Fukuhama Japan. The plant withstood the earthquake that was well beyond what it was designed for, but either the electrical controls or fuel tanks for its backup diesel generators did not withstand the tsunami that was well beyond what the plant was designed for. The reactors were all shut down, but without coolant circulation fuel rods overheat and react with water, creating explosive hydrogen gas. Claims that the accident is equivalent to that caused by negligent operation of the badly designed Chernobyl nuclear plant seem to be nonsense, but Daiichi is a reminder to think about the full impact of a failure against the consequences. (Besides radiation hazard to people in the area, the consequential damage resulted in huge economic loss to the plant owner - four reactors were damaged beyond economic repair - and to their customers (NE Japan is now very short of electrical power).)

With a side reminder of compatibility.
In Japan there are two different electrical power systems.
The frequency is different between two areas of the country, and many devices will not run on the other frequency.
So movement of power, sometimes called "wheeling" in Canada and the US, is not possible to help cover the shortfall of generation in areas near the earthquake and tsunami damage.
- (Reference IEEE Spectrum magazine)
Standardization can be good.

Rising from the ashes 2
What do you do when your office is unusable due fire?
The people of Merry Maids in the Victoria BC area faced that challenge in 2010.
Immediately they relocated computers to the boss' home so that work schedules could be used.
Cleaning equipment and supplies were taken to the parking lot to be sorted.
Office staff contacted each cleaner with advice.
The result of their efforts was that they did not cancel or reschedule a single appointment the day of the fire. That is dependability.
And the owner put up with use of his dining room for two weeks.
- (Reference "Best of City" magazine, 2011 issue, Black Press.)

That shows what people can do. What conditions facilitate that? Keith knows.

Darn users don't read
So I purchased a hand-operated can opener
But I can't get it to work.
I try repeatedly, examining its fit to the can closely. (It has a sharp wheel and a grab wheel, offset a bit, just like the old one.)
Then I read the instructions.
Oh! it is supposed to be used horizontally on top of the can, not vertically on the side. (Just like the battery powered one I gave my mother.) Duh?
The new can opener works fine, when applied correctly.

The lesson for product designers is that when something is different from what people have used before you should be extra clear in communicating. (Yeah, in this case maybe just a peel-off sticker saying "Hey! this one works differently." :-)
And a lesson for Keith. ;-)

Little things help reliability
You have to get the big things right of course.
But little things can make your product or service fail.
I remembered how the B.C. Hydro electric power utility had failures when the rains came back to the Vancouver BC area each fall. Summers there are usually quite dry, so dust builds up on the insulators holding power wires. Arcing occurs on some wires when some dust is wetted by the rain.
The prevention is to wash them in September. A significant cost but probably saved in avoiding damage let alone impact on customers.

How do you justify that precaution in organizational decision-making?

A good leader of the military
This person makes sense.

How do you develop such leaders?

A watermelon grower gets the big C and more
At each corner of their big box there is a tip as to optimum storage temperature and other factors for best taste and value.
IOW, the maker is helping sellers' profit (and both will gain in the long term from greater satisfaction of the end customer due to better quality).

Sageland Farms of Pasco Washington "gets it".

The new product quandary
A major challenge of new product development is deciding when to release the product.
Early release in theory gets positive cash flow and competitive advantage.
But a deficient product won't sell well, as it will get a bad reputation from which it may never recover. (I think many potential investors for further development are wise enough to determine if the product has good market potential, and some smart enough to see if there is a solid base for further improvement.)

There are good methods to reduce risk, but the biggest is simply the combination of discipline with creativity and agility that can only come with clear thinking founded in solid values.

And when improving an existing product
The Boeing commercial airplane company faces the quandary of how much to improve their successful 737 product to improve fuel efficiency in the near term.
Customers want all the improvement they can afford, now. But more complicates the changes (e.g. large engine fan requires changes to nose landing gear), and eventually they'll design a new airplane anyway.

So Boeing will be resolute in sticking to the planned changes, but hopefully without unwise compromises when surprises arise. I suggest they get advice from executives on the 767 program - while that was a clean-sheet-of-paper design, pioneering full use of digital avionics in airliners as well as ETOPS and two-pilot flight deck in a widebody, they stuck to the plan, avoiding adding features until the first airplanes went into revenue service.

Oddities of product development:
Someone produced a sterilizer for your toothbrush, using some kind of light. Clever notion.
But it does not illuminate the brush fully, in part because it does not hold the toothbrush in the right place and is not long enough for fancy toothbrushes.
Unclear is whether it works by light impingement or less likely by creating ozone (in which case brush position is not so important).
Black and Decker produced a jigsaw with a nifty quick-change blade retention method. But it doesn't seem to hold blades well.
Oh, yeah - that piece of plastic that looks like trim on the side of the saw is actually a container for blades, with one already in it, from which the user could see the shape of blade needed - different (notches rather than screwholes). That nice B&D container of blades you already have won't work.
Think it through all the way - you especially have to spend time on uses of the product.

Advertising out of the box:
Pacific Coastal Airlines print advertising before Thanksgiving 2011 is noteworthy in two ways.
The format is a comic strip. The content is about people visiting people for Thanksgiving, which of course PCA can help with by flying them.
Smart, I hope it works for them.

A business adapts.
Villages Pizza is adapting to a shift in customer spending by providing ready-to-cook pizza to grocery stores.

I presume they expect name recognition to help in the clutter of products on the shelf. The article has information on the economics of the effort.

It is early to know if they are succeeding, but they are out there trying.

A marketing judgement
Among the many judgement calls businesses make is the size of a market.
The BMW car company did not see a worthwhile market in Canada.
But the Bentley family of experienced executives in Vancouver did, having experience with selling Mercedes Benz cars in Canada. They built their BMW Canada distributorship to the largest independent one in the world.

I suggest that capable local people were the key to evaluating the market.

Reference InMotion Black Press newspaper supplement of October 14, 2011, article by Alyn Edwards.

I'm chuckling at the alarm clock...
.....that rolls away so you have to get out of bed to turn it off. ;-)

A cute gift for Christmas, from "The Source" store (like a Radio Shack but in Canada).

Will some people still be able to ignore it?