Engineers From The United States

"Being a successful inventor, starts with being curious, and asking the right questions."

"Trying to assess the true importance and function of the Internet now, is like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk if they were aware of the potential of American Airlines AAdvantage miles."

"It's disgraceful and embarrassing that the highest technology in a typical inner city high school in this country is the metal detector the students pass through at the front door."

"Most products are ugly. The harsh reality is that in many of these markets, form follows funding. And that products go where the market takes them."

"[On the need for ultra high definition television] The problem with television isn't the number of horizontal scanning lines. It's the lines of dialogue spoken by the actors."

"There's no Bits, like Show Bits"

"The Internet represents the greatest story telling technology since the development of language. It will be far more important than reading and writing as a purposeful tool. Everything that is enabled by story telling will be enabled by the Internet."

"In 250 years, reading and writing will have turned out to be a fad."

"Technology is stuff that doesn’t work yet."

"“The Net, I guarantee you, really is fire. I think it’s more important than the invention of movable type.”"

"Vibrant companies must put together five-year plans. But they must be willing to change these five-year plans every single year."

"The technology needed for an early Internet-connection implant is no more than 25 years off. Imagine that you could understand any language, remember every joke, solve any equation, get the latest news, balance your checkbook, communicate with others, and have near-instant access to any book ever published, without ever having to leave the privacy of yourself."

"Since the 1980's, we have been concerned about acceptable risk, but I believe that we have now entered the era of acceptable uncertainty."

"Moral relativism is an easy and sloppy way to deal with personhood."

"Scientific advances can wreak havoc with social values. What appears to be advanced thinking at times turns out to be retrograde attempts at dehumanization. Advances in technology can be used to commoditize human beings. Genetic fetal testing, for example, can be used to screen against the "unfit"."

"I believe synthetic biology forces society into the chaos of ethics. And, I believe that every connotation of "chaos" applies to the ethics of synthetic biology. Researchers must decide if a particular endeavor is ethical because, of course, mistakes can result due to the unpredictability of these very complex systems. I also believe that the original Greek and the Genesis, Chapter 1, understanding of formlessness applies, since scientists are trying to move to the simplest creatures possible, so-called "chassis bacteria", onto which they can add desirable traits at their choosing. Finally, I believe that the mathematical connotation of chaos applies, since even the most simple living creature is a dynamical system that is highly sensitive to initial conditions. I sometimes wonder about the extent to which those most intimately involved and those strongly advocating synthetic biology think about this."

"You often hear that the language of science is mathematics. I don't completely agree with the article. I don't think it is a definite article. Mathematics is "a" language of science. But, it is only "a" language of science. The language of science is English. The language of science is Spanish."

"Humility is fundamental in science. I recall during an update meeting with my PhD committee at Duke saying that I thought I would be ready to defend my dissertation in May. The unflappable engineering professor, Aarne Vesilind, said he agreed, but year was I talking about?"

"The ability to interact with a computer presence like you would a human assistant is becoming increasingly feasible."

"There are some people who imagine that older adults don't know how to use the internet. My immediate reaction is, "I've got news for you, we invented it.""

"And programming computers was so fascinating. You create your own little universe, and then it does what you tell it to do."

"The coordination of information technology management presents a challenge to firms with dispersed IT practices. Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources."

"Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources"

"In today's volatile world, organizational design is an everyday, ongoing activity and challenge for every executive, whether managing a global enterprise or a small work team. Globalization, worldwide competition, deregulation, and ever-new technologies drive the ongoing reassessment of the organization. The executive response has been many new forms of organizational design: virtual, learning, modular, cellular, network, alliance, or spaghetti – to name a few. New organizational forms challenge old ways of organizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Yet fundamental design principles underlie any well-functioning organization. Organizations still require a formal design."

"Henry M. Leland was the guiding genius of the Cadillac Motor Car Company. He was the company’s founder and became the Division's first general manager when it was purchased by Billy Durant and in 1909. Religiously devoted to accuracy of machining and quality construction, Leland recognized that in true interchangeability of parts lays the key to a great future automobile industry."

"After getting to know the young Daytonians () Henry Leland told them about a friend of his who had stopped to help a woman whose car had stalled. As he cranked the starter, it kicked back and broke his jaw. The man later died from an infection as a result of that accident. This led Leland to ask Kettering and Deeds if they could use electricity to start a car. Of course, they accepted the challenge. A self-starter would not only prevent such accidents but would also open up the car market to women who were unable to crank a car. They returned to the Barn to try and make the first self-starter for automobiles..."

"If they had made that longer six-cylinder strong enough and had supported it well enough, they would have obtained the smoother action they talks about in their advertisements. But they could not do that, and those early sixes had a very undesirable period vibration at certain speeds. That vibration more than offset the gain that they would have realized, if they had treated the crankshaft properly."

"On the train I was going over the problem of Sixes versus Fours and the disturbing periodic vibrations with which the 'six-cylinder manufacturers were contending. I realized the emphasis our competitors were placing on the fact that six smaller cylinders, producing the same maximum power as four larger ones, would result in smaller individual impulses, and consequent smoother action."

"Our car was an Oldsmobile, delivered to our home by Mr. Olds himself. I recall how our family went out to the street curb to look at it. Mr. Olds worked quite a while cranking it, muttering something about each car having an individuality of its own. But after we began to make motors for him, father took the individuality out of them. After our own little Oldsmobile was properly equipped, it acted in quite an exemplary fashion."

"There always was and there always will be conflict between Good and Good Enough, and in opening up a new business or a new department one can count upon meeting resistance to a high standard of workmanship. It is easy to get cooperation for mediocre work, but one must sweat blood for a chance to produce a superior product."

"I had trouble at first, in the early 1900s, in selling Mr. Leland our roller bearings. He then taught me the need for greater accuracy in our products to meet the exacting standards of interchangeable parts. Mr. Leland came to the industry with a mature experience in general engineering and in gasoline engines, which he had long made for boats. One of his specialties was precision metalwork, which went back to his experience in toolmaking for a federal arsenal during the Civil War, and which he afterward developed in the Brown and Sharpe Company, machine-tool makers of Providence, Rhode Island. It has been called to my attention It has been called to my attention that Eli Whitney, long before, had started the development of interchangeable parts, a fact which suggests a line of descent from Whitney to Leland to the automobile industry."

"At first we were of necessity slow in putting out those motors, but after we had gotten under way we delivered them so rapidly that Mr. Olds said we must have a motor incubator at our place."

"The teams at times could go but a short distance every day. In bad weather at night there would be as many as 150 horses at one of the small frame inns which were not more than five or eight miles apart. Each driver had to care for his eight horses, feed, clean, card, harness and unharness. For all this work my father received the wages of $15 per month."

"Henry Leland had a profound influence not only on GM, but also on many later automakers. His nickname became “the Grand Old Man of Detroit.”"

"Mr. Sloan, are made to run, not just to sell."

"Observing and performing the process is the best way to develop insight into it. However, the team must be vigilant about avoiding the temptation to overstudy. The goal must be to move quickly to redesign. Before concluding we should comment on another tool that is available to reengineering teams, namely benchmarking. Essentially, benchmarking means looking for the companies that are doing something best and learning how they do it in order to emulate them... Used this way, benchmarking is just a tool for catching up, not for jumping way ahead. Benchmarking can, however, spark ideas in the team—especially if teams use as their benchmarks companies from outside their own industries."

"Sadly, we must report that despite the success stories described in previous chapters, many companies that begin reengineering don’t succeed at it... Our unscientific estimate is that as many as 50 to 70 percent of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended."

"Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed."

"A business process is a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer. A business process has a goal and is affected by events occurring in the external world or in other processes."

"Business reengineering isn't about fixing anything. Business reengineering means starting all over, starting from scratch. Business reengineering means putting aside much of the received wisdom of two hundred years of industrial management,... How people and companies did things yesterday doesn't matter to the business reengineer."

"The genesis of reengineering lies in a phrase one of us coined in the late 1980s: “Automating a mess yields an automated mess.” Unless an organization reconceptualized its operations, overlaying new technology on these operations accomplished little."

"It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. We should “reengineer” our businesses: use the power of modern information technology to radically redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance."

"Reengineering has captured the imagination of managers and shareholders alike, sending corporations on journeys of radical business redesign that have already begun to transfigure global industry. Yet aside from earning them improvements in their business performance, the shift into more-process-centered organizations is causing fundamental changes in the corporate world, changes that business leaders are only now beginning to understand. What will the revolutions final legacy be?"

"THIS BOOK is not about reengineering; it is about reengineering’s consequences, about its aftermath and its abiding legacy."

"Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer."

"Despite a decade or more of restructuring and downsizing, many U.S. companies are still unprepared to operate in the 1990s. In a time of rapidly changing technologies and ever-shorter product life cycles, product development often proceeds at a glacial pace. In an age of the customer, order fulfillment has high error rates and customer inquiries go unanswered for weeks. In a period when asset utilization is critical, inventory levels exceed many months of demand."

"To succeed at reengineering, you have to be a missionary, a motivator, and a leg breaker."

"Reengineering cannot be planned meticulously and accomplished in small and cautious steps. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition with an uncertain result."

"Quality management is a systematic way of guaranteeing that organized activities happen the way they are planned."

"The first erroneous assumption is that quality means goodness, or luxury, or shininess or weight. The word "quality" is used to signify the relative worth of things in such phrases as "good quality," "bad quality," and that brave new statement 'quality of life.' 'Quality of life' is a cliche because each listener assumes that the speaker means exactly what he or she, the listener, means by the phrase. It is a situation in which individuals talk dreamily about something without ever bothering to define it."