Monthly Archives: July 2005

Process Improvement – American Airlines

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Alexandra Marks:

Two American Airlines mechanics didn’t like having to toss out $200 drill bits once they got dull. So they rigged up some old machine parts – a vacuum-cleaner belt and a motor from a science project – and built “Thumping Ralph.” It’s essentially a drill-bit sharpener that allows them to get more use out of each bit. The savings, according to the company: as much as $300,000 a year.

And it was a group of pilots who realized that they could taxi just as safely with one engine as with two. That was instituted as policy has helped cut American’s fuel consumption even as prices have continued to rise to record levels.

From the maintenance floor to the cockpit, American Airlines is daily scouring operations to increase efficiency and find even the smallest cost savings. It’s paid off: Last week, the company announced its first profit in almost five years.

Via John Robb

An Interview with Mark Knopfler

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Weekend Edition:

The album’s first single, “Boom, Like That,” is a wry chronicle of the renegade business tactics of McDonald’s mogul Ray Kroc. Kroc started out selling milkshake mixers to the McDonald brothers, eventually buying them out and aggressively expanding the franchise. Before composing the song, Knopfler read books about Kroc’s life and business philosophy. The singer found inspiration in some quotes that were attributed to Kroc. He says, “I remember coming across a quote in a book. It was something like, ‘If the opposition is going to drown, put a hose in their mouth.'”

Defending the City

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Dr. Chet Richards offers an article for first responders in the age of 4th Generation Warfare (400K PDF):

This is where you come in. As impressive as insurgencies have been, at first glance they don’t seem to involve the 1RP community. Although many of them are nasty, brutish affairs—more than 100,000 people have been killed in Russia’s effort to rein in its breakaway province of Chechnya (1994 – present), for example, and some 3 million in the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (1998-present)—they are all far away, and most of them do not threaten American or European troops or civilians.9 They may be tragic, but as far as the 1RP community is concerned, they can be safely ignored.

This view, while comforting, is wrong. Being wrong, it is also dangerous. To see why, people who study these conflicts insist that they must be considered not as curious space-fillers on the evening news, but, as Barnett puts it, “within the context of everything else.”10 This means, among other things, that spillover from these wars finds its way to the United States and other developed nations (what Barnett calls the “Functioning Core.”) Participants, for example, may attack each other’s friends and relatives or fund-raising and recruiting operations, or embassies and so on in Core countries. Or they may see us as favoring the other side and decide to send us a message to back off and get out. Or they may cause a problem and blame it on the other side. Or they may cause a problem in our country to raise international consciousness of their struggle. Or they may attack to signal to both their local enemies and potential followers that they are a potent force, as may have been one of the motivations for al-Qa’ida’s attack on September 11, 2001. In any of these cases and so many others, something happens that would involve the first responder community.

Insurgency as a form of war, and a very successful one, is evolving into something else. And it is coming to a neighborhood near you.

Lauren Porcaro interviews New York City’s William Finnegan regarding their view of the threat and what they’ve learned from London.

Requiem for a Fictional Scotsman

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Kevin Barkes:

Other kids worshipped baseball players. My hero was a fictional Scottish engineer from the 23rd century.

Before the terms geek and nerd entered the vernacular, we were called
brains, or, more cruelly, weirdos. We built Heathkits, disassembled
televisions and tape recorders, and bribed the librarian to give us
first crack at the new issues of Popular Science and Popular
Electronics, usually by changing the ribbon or switching the golf
balls on her newfangled IBM Selectric.

Racine’s Artist Colony

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Robert Sharoff:

IF Racine, Wis., is not yet the Hamptons of the Midwest, it’s not for lack of effort.

This formerly gritty industrial city roughly 70 miles north of Chicago and 30 miles south of Milwaukee on the shores of Lake Michigan has been trying for much of the last decade to reinvent itself as an artist’s colony and tourist destination.

The efforts have included the opening of the $11 million Racine Art Museum on Main Street in 2003 and the creation of a gallery district centering on nearby Sixth Street, currently home to about a dozen galleries.

Racine Map. Madison based Gorman & Company, developer of the Mitchell Wagon Factory Lofts is mentioned in Sharoff’s article.

Racine is considering county-wide WiFi. Perhaps they’ll have it in place before we Madisonians do?

Small Town vs. Wal-Mart: Jefferson Opposition Alderman Faces Recall

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Reid Epstein:

The company left in its wake a recall effort against one alderman, a local newspaper smarting from the loss of a major advertising client and hurt feelings from people on both sides of the debate.

David Olsen, the targeted alderman, said the schism has divided the city of about 7,500 more than an 11-month strike at the local Tyson Foods plant in 2003.

Entrepreneurs: Competing with the Big Firms

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Tom Peters offers up several useful tips on competing with big organizations:

Can the small player compete in a world of Citigroups and Bank of Americas? I said it was a lark. And I more or less meant it. That is, among other things, giants— “new tech,” CRM, etc notwithstanding— will always be clumsy and impersonal relative to an “intimate local” who is really out to make a dramatic difference.

Cap Times on Media Concentration

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A Capital Times Editorial on “Breaking up Big Media Concentration“:

The consolidation of American media has robbed this country’s citizens of the competing journalism, the honest dialogue and the cultural diversity that the founders intended when they wrote a “freedom of the press” protection into the First Amendment to the Constitution.

American media were never perfect, of course.

But the quality and independence of the media have suffered over the past three decades, as Congress and federal regulators rewrote the rules to make it easier for big media companies to buy up more and more of the country’s communication outlets. As recently as 1996, a single company could only own a few dozen radio stations nationally. Now, because of the rule changes contained in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, one company, Clear Channel, owns more than 1,200 stations and dominates many local media markets around the country.

Not a word about the increasing concentration of the daily newspaper business, however. The internet is addressing this question, of course.

EAA Heats Up: B17 Buzzes Madison

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Click on the photos for a larger view.

The EAA’s AirVenture starts Monday. Looks like a fabulous show this year with Burt Rutan’s White Knight/SpaceShipOne paying a visit. A rare WWII vintage B17 buzzed Madison this morning. I snapped these photos in a hurry. The cell tower fly by is an interesting reflection of today’s world vis a vis 1940’s technology. More on the B17.