Most comments on the Toyota crisis focus on the company's reputation for superior, reliable vehicles and its nemesis in sudden acceleration incidents in many models, and in regenerative braking problems of the Prius.
Looking more carefully on the glowing press the company received until very recently, it turns out that the quality and safety of the product wasn't what intrigued many business writers. It was the system of improving the process, of which reducing defects was only a part. Two paragraphs from a typical feature, in Fast Company (2006), show how even admirers acknowledged the weaknesses of the Toyota system:
The most optimistic precedent is Intel's response to the Pentium floating point bug of 1994, when some chips yielded erroneous results, inspiring jokes like:
The mathematician who publicly revealed the Pentium flaw, Thomas R. Nicely, has an excellent summary of the episode and its lessons, which now speak to the auto industry, too, since one automotive information technology expert has called today's cars "30 or more computers on wheels":
Looking more carefully on the glowing press the company received until very recently, it turns out that the quality and safety of the product wasn't what intrigued many business writers. It was the system of improving the process, of which reducing defects was only a part. Two paragraphs from a typical feature, in Fast Company (2006), show how even admirers acknowledged the weaknesses of the Toyota system:
Lean manufacturing and continuous improvement have been around for more than a quarter-century. But the incessant, almost mindless repetition of those phrases camouflages the real power behind the ideas. Continuous improvement is tectonic. By constantly questioning how you do things, by constantly tweaking, you don't outflank your competition next quarter. You outflank them next decade.Management evidently was not seized firmly enough. There's hope for Toyota--but only if the public is convinced that it is learning from the disaster and shifting from lowering costs while maintaining quality to enhancing quality without increasing costs. It won't be easy. The nature of software has made reliability a problem, even for premium-priced European manufacturers with strong work ethic traditions of their own.
Toyota is far from infallible, of course. In the past two years, recalls for quality and safety problems have spiked dramatically -- evidence of the strain that rapid growth puts on even the best systems [emphasis added]. But those quality issues have seized the attention of Toyota's senior management. In the larger arena, when the strategy isn't to build cars but to build cars better, you create perpetual competitive advantage.
The most optimistic precedent is Intel's response to the Pentium floating point bug of 1994, when some chips yielded erroneous results, inspiring jokes like:
Q: How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light bulb?These are taken from a mathematics column by Ivars Peterson (1997) illustrating other software pitfalls. Of course, there were no fatalities associated with the flawed Pentium chip, but Intel, like Toyota today, was mocked for what consumers thought an inadequate response from a dominant brand. The chip maker recovered and even became the foundation of the new Mac operating system. The shock was probably good for it.
A: 1.99995827903, but that's close enough for nontechnical people.At Intel, quality is job 0.999999998.
Q. What do you get when you cross a Pentium PC with a research grant?
A. A mad scientist.
The mathematician who publicly revealed the Pentium flaw, Thomas R. Nicely, has an excellent summary of the episode and its lessons, which now speak to the auto industry, too, since one automotive information technology expert has called today's cars "30 or more computers on wheels":
Computations which are mission critical, which might affect someone's life or well being, should be carried out in two entirely different ways, with the results checked against each other. While this still will not guarantee absolute reliability, it would represent a major advance.Have you forgotten those Intel jokes? Maybe you're too young to have heard them. Either way, that's potentially great news for the auto maker.
Toyota's safety woes appear to be contagious; not only are the brakes of some of Toyota's flagship Prius models occasionally leaving drivers in the lurch, there's now a recall of European cars that use the same accelerator pedal system as the suspect Toyotas.
The controversy appears as a morality tale on the perils of overexpansion. Planned government investigations and legislative hearings may or may not confirm allegations that Toyota became complacent. But other factors are at work in the global automotive industry:
1) Money-saving standardization of components across models, and even across companies.
2) Global distribution of virtually the same models, used in many climates and road conditions.
3) Innovative, software-intensive, energy-saving systems, like the Prius's regenerative brakes.
In other words, all the progressive changes that business and automotive journalists have been so excited about for years. Toyota's problems may come in part from simply implementing them more successfully than others, not necessarily from relaxing quality control. Honda, another global leader, also recently issued a massive recall.
Steve Wozniak, a Prius owner, is convinced the car has a software problem. Whatever Toyota's real problems turn out to be, a life-threatening software bug may be even more disturbing than a mechanical failure because of the difficulty of proving under all circumstances that the fix hasn't added some new glitch.
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To some observers, he is the arch-survivor, rising phoenix-like over childhood misery and life-threatening illness; to others, he is the maestro of perfect technological pitch, in tune with the soul of the new machine. My favorite insight into Steve Jobs, though, comes from an essay mentioning neither Jobs nor any Apple product.
The economic and psychological studies Drake Bennett cites in The Boston Globe suggest that our minds are inclined to take the path of least resistance, systematically choosing easier solutions:
Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it's a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.Steve Jobs is cognitive fluency incarnate. Consider Apple's name. It's the simplest among the great computer companies. True, Xerox and Google have shown that strange words aren't necessarily an obstacle to success. But Apple has the only logo in the group that evokes a concrete object, and one with powerful global cultural resonance. Mac, iPod, and now iPad are as short and easy to pronounce as trademarks get, among the best since Kodak, the late 19th century's personal usability miracle.Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally non-substantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people's judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement's author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities.
The design of Apple products is also cognitively fluent--not always right for every user, but certainly clearer. Consider the mouse. "Two buttons bad, one button good" has always been Jobs's watchword--and with tablet computing it's "Zero buttons even better." Jobs not only sponsored the first great set of icons--developed by Susan Kare, now an independent designer--but he extended the concept to devices of all sizes. Across each product line choices are limited but so rigorously defined that whatever is missing, like a netbook, is absent for a reason.
Of course not everybody wants a philosopher-king designer. Some of the right-click crowd are openly hostile. But that's another part of cognitive fluency. Today's scoffer may be tomorrow's convert. The main thing: few are indifferent. Even a joke video by the satirical weekly, The Onion, last year was on balance great free publicity. Parody is homage.
Unfortunately, there's a downside of cognitive fluency. Clarity does not necessarily make us smarter. Totalitarian glyphs and runes etched themselves in the minds of generations. More innocently, typography's effect on readers sometimes creates problems. High-quality laser printers with scalable fonts (pioneered by Steve Jobs in the mid-1980s) can make banal ideas seem more cogent to their student writers, yet before laser printing and electronic submission became routine, there was evidence that teachers actually spent less time commenting on elegantly printed papers and assigned lower grades. Even now, writers of all ages catch fewer errors when proofreading their own work printed in legible fonts than in difficult ones. Cognitive dysfluency, Bennett's article suggests, has its uses, and thus perhaps Apple's elegance has its own risks:
[T]o get people to think carefully and to prevent them from making silly mistakes, make them work to process the question: make the font hard to read, the cadence awkward, and the wording unfamiliar.(Question: if so, why were so many investors conned by Bernard Madoff's dot-matrix account summaries?)
Apart from Steve Jobs and information technology, does "cognitive fluency" have a buzzword future? I fear not. The concept might yet produce a best seller, but the phrase itself is too close to the psych lab to become the next "emotional intelligence." It lacks . . . cognitive fluency.
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Arthur Koestler is supposed to have said, "Wanting to meet an author because you like the book is like wanting to meet a goose because you like foie gras." This never stopped fans and biographers from their quest for the personal experiences underlying J. D. Salinger's fiction. Salinger was not the first best-selling author to inspire a generation; in Europe at least, comparisons are often made between Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther and Catcher in the Rye. Salinger also shares membership with Goethe (and Nietzsche) in the club of writers whose work inadvertently helped inspire tragedy: suicides imitating Werther and Mark Chapman invoking Catcher as his inspiration for the assassination of John Lennon. And Charles Manson notoriously claimed that the Beatles' Helter Skelter was a coded signal for apocalyptic race war, to be launched by what became known as the Tate-LaBianca murders. Of course, every writer knows there are good unintended consequences of one's work, too.
What made Salinger different was the curse of authenticity. Goethe could become a respected official while continuing to grow as international icon of letters. Pablo Picasso and Bob Dylan could evolve as artists, constantly experimenting. There was even a kind of romantic logic in the poet Arthur Rimbaud's retirement from poetry at the age of 20 to become a coffee trader and later arms runner. And the Russian-French Hegelian Alexandre Kojève could even follow another kind of logic in abandoning philosophy for administration, according to Francis Fukuyama:
[I]n the universal homogenous state, all prior contradictions are resolved and all human needs are satisfied. There is no struggle or conflict over "large" issues, and consequently no need for generals or statesmen; what remains is primarily economic activity. And indeed, Kojève's life was consistent with his teaching. Believing that there was no more work for philosophers as well, since Hegel (correctly understood) had already achieved absolute knowledge, Kojève left teaching after the war and spent the remainder of his life working as a bureaucrat in the European Economic Community, until his death in 1968.But where a salaried position seemed the fulfillment of Kojève's philosophy, it's not clear what teaching writing to young people would mean for the creator of Holden Caulfield. And how a novelist of mid-century city life continue to write while cut off from his real milieu, with all its convulsions of the sixties, seventies, and beyond, in a retreat best known for its painters and sculptors?
Of course Salinger himself would have been the first to condemn the very notion of a life strategy, of shaping a public persona. His passion for privacy was so deep it allowed at least one photographer to portray him in a an unflattering image of fear and anger, but he might have preferred it to the smile and wave of a mellow old sage that would have been the more prudent path when cornered.
In the privacy and authenticity sweepstakes even Salinger had to yield pride of place to the Persian-English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, who banned most public performances of his work for 40 years. Yet with the release of new and old works after his death, his reputation has continued to grow. So it's wise to reserve comment on Salinger's legacy, except that he paid a high price to create it.
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Toyota's decision to suspend sales and production of some of its best-selling models in the U.S., after a series of sudden acceleration accidents, deserves applause. But it also raises a question. How could such bad things happen to a brand once a watchword for quality control?
The writer William Langewiesche recently upset some readers with his praise for the automated flight control technology of the Airbus 320--and his belief that the engineer, ace pilot, and Airbus executive Bernard Ziegler, responsible for its design, should share credit with the captain of US Airways Flight 1549, Chesley Sullenberger III, for its miraculous landing in the Hudson early last year.
But if fly-by-wire, as the Airbus electronic system is called, is such a safety milestone, why does there seem to be a problem with drive-by-wire? In November, the Los Angeles Times reported:
Unlike mechanical systems, electronic throttles--which have the look and feel of traditional gas pedals--are vulnerable to software glitches, manufacturing defects and electronic interference that could cause sudden acceleration, they say.Why electronic throttle control in the first place? According to the LA Times, it's economics: "cheaper to install." Other sources disagree, and manufacturers probably aren't releasing actual cost data. But even if it costs more, it's a mark of the power of Moore's Law that it's now competitive to manufacture and install a pedal position sensor, an electronic control module, a throttle position sensor, a throttle control motor, and all the connecting electric wiring versus using a conventional steel cable.
"With the electronic throttle, the driver is not really in control of the engine," said Antony Anderson, a Britain-based electrical engineering consultant who investigates electrical failures and has testified in sudden-acceleration lawsuits. "You are telling the computer, will you please move the throttle to a certain level, and the computer decides if it will obey you."
The continuing mystery of sudden acceleration is a familiar technological problem. As systems become more complex electronically, they can be more efficient to manufacture. Standardization of parts across models, adopted at Toyota and other companies, saves even more money. But it also raises the stakes. In the absence of expensive multiple computers of different design checking on each other's results, an electronic or electronic-mechanical system may fail more catastrophically. And without a log or black box like those on airlines, diagnosis can be challenging. Where software bugs can be actuated by user error, results can be tragic, as allegedly in some radiation therapy X-rays. In driving and cancer therapy, normal operation is better with advanced computer-control and there are fewer problems, but when they do happen, they are more severe. Some safety experts call the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956 "the world's first radar-assisted collision."
One question remains. If malfunction of a single electronic-mechanical subsystem can shut down much of a world leader, how can we test the safety of tomorrow's "intelligent vehicles?"
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1) Supreme Court rules that at least in political campaign finance, corporations are people, too.
2) New York Magazine publishes a feature by John Homans with the cover headline "A Dog Is Not a Human Being. Right?" on evidence that many people say Wrong. To quote what Paul Newman never said, "Coincidence? I think not."
Scientific trends are blurring the boundaries of personhood. In some interpretations, shared DNA brings us closer to other animals, and even plants. Professor Marc Feinstein of Hampshire College, with a Ph.D. in human linguistics, has been studying the communication of dogs and even sheep. On the legal side, Oxford University Press will soon be publishing a third edition of Christopher Stone's classic Do Trees Have Standing?; New Zealand even has "The Rights of Rocks." And some distinguished ecologists and evolutionary biologists argue for insect societies as "superorganisms," as in the recent book by the Pulitzer Prizewinners Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson, reviewed perceptively by Michael Ghiselin. So the law may ultimately consider corporations not merely people, but a superior form of human life. Meanwhile, accelerating discoveries of extraterrestrial planets have encouraged many astronomers to revise upward the odds of contact with distant beings, one even suggesting that at least very simple ones might be here already. If trees do indeed have standing, should space aliens not share inalienable rights?
Seriously, what really connects the Supreme Court decision with canine politics is the growth of animal welfare organizations and the surprising tension among them, as described by Mr. Homans:
They're empathy enemies, at each other's throats like so many packs of wolves. The rescue people don't agree with the animal-welfare people, and both can't stand the animal-rights people, as traditional dog regimes like the American Kennel Club try to hold on to their privileged positions. It's a struggle for the Future of Dog a little like Russia in 1917, with weakened conservatives and radicals of many stripes, all trying desperately to invent a future.
Whatever the effect of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission on actual election results or policies, I suspect the biggest net winners will be advocacy groups, the already surging moral entrepreneurs of the Left and Right, with massive fund raising campaigns. And for the media: the judicial branch's own stimulus plan.
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Another surprise from the Massachusetts senatorial race: the paradoxical power of professorial politics. Many conservatives resent what they consider the hold of tenured, indoctrinating radicals on the college curriculum. But Tufts University, the alma mater of the victor, Scott Brown, is one of America's most politically liberal colleges, edging out Martha Coakley's Williams, and clearly beating Harvard and Yale, according to the Web site myplan.com. Of course Mr. Brown studied at Tufts 30 years ago, but even then it was starting to soar under the new leadership of the distinguished French-born nutritionist and World War II hero Jean Mayer, who had long been on record as favoring (according to his 1993 New York Times obituary):
a nationwide extension of food-assistance programs for the poor, a minimum annual income of $5,500 for a family of four, a national system for health and disability insurance, increased nutrition education, a 50 percent increase in Social Security benefits and mandatory enrichment of basic foods.Whatever these convictions meant to Tufts students at the time, Brown hasn't been talking to the press about them. The rescue efforts of the National Guard during the Blizzard of 1978 made a much bigger impression on him.
Liberal campus hegemony has in fact been a godsend for conservatives. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was leftist students who rebelled against well-meaning centrist liberals like the University of California chancellor Clark Kerr. And the protesters' tactics, in turn, energized the Right, student and adult. An official University of California Web page (don't miss the great cartoons!) on Ronald Reagan's legacy credits the uproar with Reagan's election as governor in 1966. Earl Cheit, executive vice chancellor under Kerr, declares, echoing Kerr's own view:
Reagan's political career owed a lot to the people who used the campus as a radical base for political activity. It is an irony that helped elect him.Mr. Brown is not the first conservative paladin from a liberal academy. Who knows where the movement would have gone if William F. Buckley, Jr. had been comfortable with his university's values in the early 1950s and never written God and Man at Yale. Exposures of Ivy League ways have since become initiation rites for such top-tier tories as John LeBoutillier (who still proudly lists Harvard Hates America on his Web site masthead), Dinesh D'Souza (a Dartmouth grad who once ran Princeton's dissident alumni magazine), Terry Eastland, and Ross Douthat.The last actually found not indoctrination but an even worse passive, careerist liberalism, of the kind that many left liberals have also deplored:
There were times at Harvard when I actually longed to hang out with a few more Trotskyists, rather than yet another set of future consultants and investment bankers. At least the Trotskyists cared about the important stuff.
Imbalances are good for conservatives at liberal schools (and naturally vice versa) by pressuring them to support their values. And the tendency of even those who excel in the humanities, like Chief Justice John Roberts, a Harvard summa and serial prizewinner in history, to choose the J.D. over the Ph.D., means that a larger proportion of conservative talent is channeled into positions of real political and economic power as opposed to doubtful influence.
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"It sounds like both the chickens and their farmers are in the Federal Witness Protection Program!"That's just one comment on a Wall Street Journal Page One feature on the security around the farms producing eggs for the flu vaccine program. Other readers were incensed that terrorists would use the intelligence to slip deadlier viruses into the pipeline. In this case, I think the security level was reasonable and wisely discreet rather than theatrical. Animal epidemics, even without terrorist intervention or spread to human populations, have cost billions. Once they begin, strategies based on mathematical modeling can create political and economic instability, as my colleague Dr.Laura Kahn's article on the 2001 British foot-and-mouth outbreak illustrates.
Chicken security, then, is actually serious business. But the need for avian-based vaccine production, complete with roosters in residence to assure that the eggs will be fertilized, is a symptom of the lag of much technology beyond basic science more than 55 years after the publication of the original double helix paper and over 30 years of bioengineering. By contrast, less than 14 years passed from Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin in 1928 to the massively challenging wartime scale-up project that produced enough of the antibiotic to treat the first patient in 1942. It took just six years from the Nobel-winning finding in 1948 that the polio virus could be grown in non-nerve cells (eliminating the risk of infecting the central nervous system) and the announcement of trials of what became known as Salk vaccine in 1954.
Not that research has been stagnant; there are promising alternatives. But none have been approved yet by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, to my knowledge. Meanwhile conventional production was blamed for delays last fall, so the tried-and-true system may not seem so safe or sound a pandemic or two from now. (See the Freakonomics post, comments, and links for more on this.) I don't know enough about the science, technology, law, economics, and politics of the delay to explain it, much less to cast blame. But as for the allegedly accelerating progress of technology, ten million hens would beg to differ.
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Technology can have positive unintended consequences, too. Consider the partial shift of computing to smartphones, netbooks, tablets, and other mobile devices, which have a medical bright side despite their possible effects on vision.
As reported in the Los Angeles Times, a new Australian study in the cardiology journal Circulation suggests prolonged television watching is bad for you, even if you otherwise live right:
Researchers found a strong connection between TV hours and death from cardiovascular disease, not just among the overweight and obese, but among people who had a healthy weight and exercised.While the study focused on television, the lead investigator, Dr. David Dunstan, believes the findings apply to sedentary computer use, too.
People who watched more than four hours a day showed an 80% greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease and a 46% higher risk of all causes of death compared with those who watched fewer than two hours a day, suggesting that being sedentary could have general deleterious effects. The numbers were the same after the researchers controlled for smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, an unhealthy diet and leisure-time exercise.
"The message here is that in addition to promoting regular exercise, we also need to promote avoiding long periods of sitting, such as spending long hours in front of the computer screen."One answer is the treadmill desk, an idea developed by Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic, and now the subject of an independent blog. And there's an interesting open question of
whether extended reading of printed matter at a desk or in a comfortable chair is just as hazardous, or whether it instead promotes the apparently healthful fidgeting identified by other Mayo Clinic researchers.
The electronic alternatives are smaller devices that may encourage people to stay on the move while viewing, reading, searching, and communicating. In the new world of restless, footloose connectedness, texting while walking may add years to your life -- if you don't get hit by a bus first.
Another possible corollary of the study: Marathon television watching, like the 2009 ESPN Chicago Couch Potato Contest above, deserves recognition as a hazardous competitive sport in its own right.
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Did buggy-whip makers fail to read the handwriting on the stable wall?
In Sunday's New York Times, Randall Stross debunks the parable told round the world by the late Professor Theodore Levitt's best-selling Harvard Business Review paper "Marketing Myopia," now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. Drawing on the historian of technology Thomas A. Kinney, he observes that we should learn instead from the carriage industry's suppliers, like the bearing manufacturer Timken, which flourished in the transition because they had essential metallurgical skills. (GM's Alfred P. Sloan originally ran a bearing company, too.)
So far, so good. But then, while acknowledging Studebaker as a major exception, Mr.Stross writes that unlike the buggy whip makers, who did not have an automotive analog,
[t]he carriage makers did, and they tried their best to remake themselves into automakers. But they were expert woodworkers without expertise in precision metalworking, Mr. Kinney said: "Bicycle manufacturers were actually better suited for auto manufacturing than were carriage makers."That's true, especially globally (think of Peugeot and Škoda), but in the United States, what's more impressive is how much if the carriage industry did rise to the challenge. The Flint Wagon Works bought Detroit's Buick Motor Company in 1903 and re-established it in Flint, hiring the head of another local carriage maker, the charismatic and impulsive William C. Durant of Durant-Dort, to run it. Durant acquired other car firms, including Oldsmobile and Cadillac, creating General Motors. Sadly, the bold entrepreneur's ventures never recovered from the Depression, and the modern GM was created by the master manager Sloan. The carriage makers didn't have advanced machining skills, but they could buy companies and hire individuals that did.
As James M. Miller writes in the Flint Journal:
The Flint Wagon Works brought Buick to Flint, and it and the Durant-Dort Carriage Co. served as the "training school" for many of the men - William C. Durant, A.B.C. Hardy, Charles Nash, James H. Whiting and others - who would later build and run Buick, Chevrolet and other companiesPerhaps the real point is that even when you think you've learned all the lessons and are doing everything right, disaster is still ubiquitous. After all, most of the fledgling auto companies went under not that long after the carriage makers did. Durant's colleague, the former race car driver Louis Chevrolet lost control of his namesake company and, like Durant, received a GM pension from Sloan. In turn, the success of the arch-technocrat Sloan in dominating the automotive market ultimately helped calcify GM's bureaucracy, recently bringing the company close to Durant's fate.
"These guys were starting an industry that was going to destroy another one, and making it a smooth transition," said Dallas Dort, president of EKG Research in Flint.
His grandfather was J. Dallas Dort, partner with Durant in the carriage company that bore their names.
Neither Mr. Stross nor his sources propose an alternative master parable of corporate change, so I suspect the buggy whip will be with us for a while. Fortunately, the picture for the carriage industry's architectural heritage isn't entirely gloomy. Last year the House and Garden section of the Times reported on the homesteading of Flint's Carriage Town -- and the ongoing renovation of the Durant Hotel. If success is never final, neither is failure usually total.
(Photo credit: Derek Jensen, via Wikimedia Commons.)
