Will Manufacturers Rule the Global Economy Once More?

strategy+business, February 1, 2019

by Theodore Kinni

We’ve been treated to various versions of manufacturing in the past couple of decades. There’s manufacturing as an exercise in financial arbitrage — a link in a global supply chain that is reforged whenever and wherever people will do more work for less pay. There’s the maker movement, populated by hordes of entrepreneurs laboring away in shared shops. There’s Industry 4.0, where we inefficient humans need not apply. There’s the revitalized rust belt, polished to a mirror’s shine with tariffs. And now there’s Tuck School of Business professor Richard D’Aveni’s vision of manufacturing, detailed at length in The Pan-Industrial Revolution, a book that starts out strong but eventually bogs down in speculation.

D’Aveni’s version of manufacturing could be labeled “when dinosaurs rule the Earth once more.” He thinks that hulking tyrannosaurs like battered General Electric are going to rise up and roar in the years ahead. If he’s right, the Dow Jones Industrial Average might actually become industrial again.

D’Aveni weaves this new vision on an intricate loom. Its weft is composed of additive manufacturing (AM), which includes all the evolving forms of 3D printing in combination with other production technologies, such as lasers and robotics; its warp is digitized, AI-powered management systems and platforms.

AM is a game-changing family of technologies, and D’Aveni illustrates them with a host of gee-whiz examples. Lockheed Martin can 3D-print the entire body and interior of its 12-ton, 50-foot-long F-35 fighter jets in about three months, compared with the two to three years it takes to make them using traditional technologies. (It’s now working to cut production time to three weeks.) Electronics parts supplier Lite-On is using 3D printers to make 15 million smartphone antennas annually, demonstrating the technology’s potential for cost-effective mass production. The medical device company Stryker, which is already 3D-printing joint implants, is developing machines that can be installed in hospitals to produce customized implants while surgeons and patients wait. Local Motors has demonstrated its ability to 3D-print a car — reducing the number of parts needed from 30,000 to 50. Read the rest here.

Tech Savvy: Exploring the Ethical Limits of App Design

by Theodore Kinni

MIT Sloan Management Review, June 2, 2016

Are your employee apps ethical? Companies are providing employees with more and more digital services for purposes that range from enhancing teamwork to getting a better night’s sleep. But do they promote agency — or addiction? Perhaps it’s time for managers to take a closer look at the design of those services — and question the techniques they employ to create a compelling user experience.

Toward this end, Tristan Harris has some choice words in a new article on Medium. “I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities,” he begins. “That’s why I spent the last three years as Google’s Design Ethicist caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked. When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want you to show you where it might do the opposite.”

Harris goes on to call out common hijacks that are intentionally and unintentionally built into the design of websites and apps. They include: menus that give the impression of choice, while limiting it; the embedding of intermittent, variable rewards that induce addictive behaviors; reliance on powerful motivators such as social approval and reciprocity; and seven more.

“I’ve listed a few techniques but there are literally thousands,” adds Harris. “Imagine whole bookshelves, seminars, workshops and trainings that teach aspiring tech entrepreneurs techniques like these. Imagine hundreds of engineers whose job every day is to invent new ways to keep you hooked.”

Harris, who studied under Professor BJ Fogg in Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, is talking about big social media services offered to the general public by companies, such as Facebook, Instagram, TripAdvisor, and NYTimes.com. But his conclusion applies to digital services aimed at employees, too:

“The ultimate freedom is a free mind, and we need technology that’s on our team to help us live, feel, think and act freely. We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.”

...read the rest here