The paradigm of working to providing money for the family or time

In work you get paid more and given more responsibility based on your experience level/years of service.  With the average length of duty at any one company being much less than 10-15 years it certainly logical to agree with the saying "learn in your twenties and earn in your thirties".  There is a disparity and disconnect in this traditional career path.  In your twenties you are paid the least and in essence you put in the most effort.  (Related reading: The Crossover Point)  In your thirties you tend to get married/have kids and your level of effort dips at work.  I ask the question why is there a dis-correlation between pay and effort?

There is a paradigm shift where they must ask the question now that I have hit my stride in my career... do I pull pack and re-configure my efforts to providing more money for my family or provide more time with my family (less time at work). 

Perhaps because many people take the "path of more time with my family" that those who chose to take the career orientated route are rewarded with higher career paths due to less competition.

Decreasing Productivity Rates In The Construction Field

I recently read an article from the “Journal of Construction Engineering and Management” that confirms the trend of decreasing productivity rates in the construction field in the USA.  This confirms that we don’t do business like the good’old days.

 In 1990-2010 era there is has been an increasing Union and worker rights movement.  Personally I believe this is cause by a variety of factors such as increasing level of personal entitlement and litigation. This has led to better safety, labor rules, and an overall worker environment.  I think it is safe to say that the industrial revolution era of sweat shops and rampant worker fatality/injuries is a thing of the past and a transition that China and India are going through now.

As a supervisor contrary to popular belief, the safest crews that follow the protocol’s to the letter are also the most productive. You can point out on a case by case where individual safety procedures and quality measures drastically slows down production however the GOAL here is to not have the fastest production times actuly this is very narrow sided to have this belief.  The GOAL is the bottom-line, to create these goods/services the cheapest way within the time constraints.  Often the bottom-line is effected by safety and quality.  A worker injury or bad lot of product quickly erases the fact that the lot was produced in record time. As a rule of thumb when I was managing my 50K a day crew I knew that the smallest injury would cost approximately $250,000 In litigation and employee compensation and $100,000 dollars of internal department administration/contractor costs to process the claim. As you can see it hardly made sense to take a change to get 110% of planned production for the day to rush or cut corners.  In conclusion there are many metrics of production but we should not lost sight of the GOAL.

Energy and Politics

Is it feasible to obtain all needed energy (heating, transportation,
etc.) from renewable sources by 2030 (20 years from now)? 

Mr Obama has mandated lofty energy goals.  One that is tangible to the
average consumer is the required MPG for vehicles.  I believe the
mandate is by 2030 cars need to be getting 40-50 plus MPG.  Yes we have
priuses and hybrids that get that.  But I drive around a Tahoe and I
gobble up 15 mpg and I don't see this happening.

Leadership (the government) is setting lofty goals for industry to follow.  I fully
support this although I am a skeptic.  To achieve that kinda MPG
rating on a truck requires not only removing every lb of unnecessary
weight in the vehicle but it requires a kinda of efficient motor
system that technology does not have.

As a side note... the movie "Back to the Future" had us flying in cars
by 2012 and look at us.  I am personally a little disappointed in our
society's development of handhelds and computer to date.  It seems we
have forgotten or been misdirected to concentrate on improving
technology on the discretionary technologies and we have lost
improvement in the realm of motors and even power plants.

To end on a happy note... Through the law of conservation of energy,
energy is not destroyed just lost in inefficiency.  I have heard that
the typical is much less than 10% efficient.  Given that there is much
room for improvement.

We need to vote with our pocketbooks.  Every time we spend 100 dollars
a month on our IPHONEs we are saying to the young minds to concentrate
on the next iteration of the iphone and not on more society benefiting
technologies.

Control Charts in the Workplace

“A control chart is merely a graphical record of data taken from a repetitive process…” Physically the control chart is a data distribution turned sideways with the horizontal axis being successive tests, days, distance, or some other indication of order.” An example is shown below with the math to derive the points.

Control charts are a very practical idea because they depict what to accept and reject in a very simplistic way that someone on a assembly line can understand.  Formulas and scripts can be written to update the control chart.

Now why don’t we use this useful too?  I think it is because leaders are unfamiliar and to distant from their academic years to do the raw math to computing these limits.  The math is very simple but those who have the capability and education stay away from using such tools.  Also there is a stigma against using math and statistics for the same reason people distaste economist and their predictions.  As a manage/supervisor the greater leverage to increasing productivity is not to come at you employees with numbers and stats but more of the softer relationship building skills.  Although keeping score with statistics can create a sports team mentality… statistics as your primary form of communication creates disconnection and resentment amongst the workforce.

Bad Science: Correlation and Regression

Analyzing the quality product of a road surfaced based on some quality measure in either the material itself or compaction process makes sense and is proven by statistics to have a positive correlation.  Typically these correlations are very precise where the line of best fit can be used to estimate the quality of the final product.  I think these are very useful in conveying statistical findings to the field personal in the form of heuristics or “rules of thumbs”.  One of these useful ones is that for every 1% deviation in compaction spec equates to 10% off the life the road.  This rule of thumb can be used to send home a point to workers that their attention to quality is magnified in the service life of the final product and this is why quality in their work means so much. To use statistics in this manner is a powerful management tool to foster anotomony in employees.

Observational studies do not establish cause and effect it is a logical fallacy. It can be used to generate hypothesis that then can be tested to establish cause and effect.  This explains that some statistics can fit these lines of best fit but it is not the major contributing factor to the final outcome.  In other words for example we all know that “people who eat breakfast are less likely to be obese” and this can be proven statistically but is that the mechanism that is factoring to obesity? Perhaps people who eat breakfast go to sleep on time and aren’t snacking and playing video games to the wee hours of the morning?

Occupy Wall Street

“The next time you find yourself in an argument, rather than defend your position, see if you can see the other point of view first.” – Richard Carlson

Lately there has been much talk about the 99% vs the 1%.  People occupying wall street over the bailouts and excessive executive compensation... basically the poor hating the rich.

In a recent popular blog the writer asked readers the vague question, "How much money do you make and how much money do you have saved".  In the comments people there were two type of responses the haves "I make 70k a yr and have 450k in savings" and have-nots "I work from home and make 20k a year and have 2k in savings".  Then the have-nots got really jealous and stated to rip on the haves.  The post got to explicit and was taken of the site. 

It has been said before but part of the reason the haves are the 1% and in the position they are in is because they are not thinking like the 99% (I say that even though a lot of the 1% are born into wealth).  The 99% percent instead of protesting (camping out and smoking pot with the other jobless) how can you better harness this collaborative effort to something productive and more creative (other than copying your hippy parents' shenanigans).

Another observation is that whats the goal of the occupy wall street?  Productive companies spend massive resources and are very deliberate in defining strategy and vision in order to steer a movement towards a common goal.  It seems to me that there is no goal, end game, or progress towards a greater good with these protests.

Let us disband these misery camps and get out and get some... Ok there might not be any jobs out there so lets go and create them.

Boots on the Ground

All professions have an entry level position. Before a lawyer there is a field attorney, a banker manager is a teller, a civil engineer is "the CAD guy" or surveyor, and a construction manager needs to be an estimator. These positions lay the ground work and experience to make higher level decisions. In the Construction management realm a lot of decisions stem from cost and quality. Having the framework of an estimator and developing the heuristics of knowing what costs what, what are the equipment/manpower needs, and the time needs is invaluable. The RS Means software is a tool for calculating the needs of a job. However, the estimator's view of the project is often the reverse of what is happening in the field. Software allows for projections and calculations of cost and time but I think it is invaluable for an estimation or anyone to get into the field and see what is actually going on.

A short story... When 9-11 was happening Rudy Giuliani was in the the headquarters trying to work with his team to estimate the needs and next actions to address the crisis. Then as any good leader does Mr. Giuliani put his boots on and went outside to walk the streets. In his own words he basically said that without having the 1st hand knowledge of the magnitude of what was happening outside he would have made the wrong decisions.

The Inverse Relationship Between Performance and Rewards

Lot of value in the first half of this Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation 18 min video ...you with probably watch the rest.

As long as the task involved only mechanical skill (monkey work), bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance." But once the task called for "even rudimentary cognitive skill," a larger reward "led to poorer performance."..."Higher incentives led to poorer performance." Source: MIT, US Fed Reservel, Really smart folks

Additional viewing of the carrot and the stick: Alan Watts: Music and Life

Hello World + Goals

I like to ramble because I am a passionate passionate man.  I'm not into politics but there are a lot of topics that interest me such as: diet, exercise, leadership, making everything in life relate to some sort of sport analogy, geeking out on statistics, taking about Pareto's laws, Darwinism, how videogames ruined my childhood, how cloudy and dark Seattle is, maximum gains from minimal effort... and the list goes on.

Another reason I am starting this is to improve my typing speed (w/ the death of AIM/MSN) and I just sprained my ankle and can't move.

So here is the first post... and unfortunately it not a humorous one.  It goes hand in hand with 2011 new years goals.  I was trying to sit here and complete my graduate application essay... its not that hard just 500 words but I'd rather run a 5K race.  And in addition I have my work crew's startup meeting where I have to give some more inspirational speeches again to motivate people to "work safely in 2011".  So i've always had these notes on how to make a goals since I don't know how to get the folks to work safely and I am having trouble writing this freaking essay.

Its pretty generic and people prob heard this stuff before: Using the SMART acronym

* Specific – Be as specific as possible as to what you want to accomplish. “Spend more time with friends” is not specific and too easy to abandon because you don’t know when you’ve reached that goal.
* Measurable – If you can measure it then you’ll be able to track your progress. If you can track your progress, you’ll know when you’ve achieved it or how far close you are.
* Attainable – You can’t run a race unless you know when it ends right? It has to be an attainable goal otherwise it’s too easy to give up. You don’t want it to be easy to achieve, but you don’t want to put it out of reach.
* Realistic – This pairs with attainable because you don’t want to set such an auspicious goal that it’s impossible to achieve. You can adjust it based on your progress but you can’t shoot for the next galaxy at the start (the moon is OK though).
* Timely – Everything needs a bound. If you have no sense of when it needs to be achieved, then it can always wait until tomorrow. Or the next day. Or next year.


But if you want my skinny on it here is what I came up with a ding dong proof pokeyoke template (just fill in the blanks):

"I will achieve this attainable+challenging goal of ______, by this time realistic frame _______, measured by this metric of achievement ____, by doing this action plan_____, my first course of action will be____"

A Real life example:

"I will achieve this attainable+challenging goal of making everyone work safe by this time realistic frame the whole 2011 work season or until I get promoted, measured by this metric of achievement zero-reportable injuries, by doing this action plan un-assing myself from my truck and building better relationships, my first course of action will be to have a good 2011 startup meeting"