129 - Industrial revolutions and Eli Whitney

I'm David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

Last time I offered some thoughts on the craft age.  Today, I want to start talking about how we ended up mastering mass manufacturing.

As I mentioned last time, shifting population patterns, from rural setting to urban settings increased demand for manufactured goods.  Textiles were in high demand since everyone still needed clothing, so the first industrial revolution really begins with inventions to increase the productivity of spinning yarn and weaving material.

In England, the Spinning Jenny was invented in 1764 followed in 1769 by the Water Frame, the first fully automatic and continuously operating spinning machine.  The water frame was large and required a water wheel driven by a running stream.  These were the first factories, since before now, most spinning wheels were in individual homes.  

All this automation boosted the demand for cotton, creating a market for cotton grown in the US.  There are a couple of strains of cotton that grew in the south.  There was a black-seeded long-staple variety that grew well in coastal areas and a green-seeded short-staple that grew well in the interior areas of the south.  

The long-staple variety was relatively easy to brush out, but the short-staple was very labor intensive.  The economics of cotton made owning slaves not only morally repugnant, but also unaffordable, so in the mid 1700s, slavery was actually declining in the US.

That changed in 1793.  That's when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.  This was a machine that was so simple to make and to operate that it changed the economics of the south and perpetuated slavery for another 70 years.

While Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1794, he was unable to profit from it because planters would just copy the design and build their own rather than pay the license fees he was asking.  When he was unable to successfully sue the planters, he sued the states and was able to win and receive payments from South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia.  

Tomorrow, we'll talk about what happened next for Eli Whitney.

I have partnered with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky and Hiitide and we're doing a book review online of his book "The Blind Spots Between Us:  How to Overcome Unconscious Bias & Build Better Relationships".  It begins on February 1st.  

Here is the registration link:  https://api.hiitide.com/api/v2/email/click/?cid=David&ea=click&el=click-to-learnmore&cn=david_&cm=social&cs=campaign&redirect_url=https://hiitide.com/crews/the-blindspots-between-us&ci=david

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow

128 - The Craft Age and craft culture

While this segment is called The Craft Age and craft culture, I’m not sure that "Craft Age" is an appropriate term.  Since the very first human struck two rocks together to make a sharp edge, we've been making things by hand.  

Craft manufacturing is just that.  Making things by hand, with or without the aid of tools.  Crafts people are often called artisans and they make unique pieces of work to trade.  

The success or failure of a crafts person depended upon functional quality.  If the product didn't do what the customer needed it to do, or if it failed to last as long as the customer thought it should, then the craftsman probably couldn't stay in business.  

In the middle ages, when more people began migrating and congregating in villages, towns, and cities, the craftsmen would band together to form a guild, whose purpose was to protect the craft.  They would restrict entry into certain professions, and define training requirements, from apprentice, to journeyman, to master.

The culture surrounding this economic system depended heavily on understanding value from the customer's perspective, and on development of expertise by the craftsman.  That's the only way to guarantee quality.  

These three characteristics - value, mastery, and quality - live on today.  A quick visit to Etsy.com will show you how strong craft manufacturing remains.

On the down side though is availability.  When your business model focuses on making exactly what the customer wants, and your financial situation doesn't allow you to speculate it's impossible to have a product "in stock." 

When today we have Amazon Now delivering products to us in 2 hours, that tells you that people have lost patience except for some special purposes.  While once we were content to wait for that customized quality good to be made just for me, now we're not.  

And the cost doesn't help.  Manufacturing products by hand is expensive.  

As population centers grew and taxed the capacity of the craft guilds to satisfy the demand of the population, inventive people go to work to speed production and lower costs.  We’ll talk about a few of them over the next couple of days.

Now the challenge is to get exactly what we want and at the cost we're willing to pay - the value problem; and to get it to work just as we need it to work - the quality problem.

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.

127 - Timelines for industrial and cultural change

Hi, I'm David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

I love studying historical timelines.  History's stories have always been fascinating.  But there is so much rich detail, and so often contradictory records based on the point of view of the writer at the time. 

We can't see everything and we can't know everything.  Facts from one point of view are different from another.  You and I might watch the same video of an accident, a shoplifter, a police shooting and walk away drawing two completely opposite conclusions.  

My message is to try your best to keep and open mind, and try your best to understand multiple points of view before you charge off to take action.

Among these timelines, if you take a macro view, you can see patterns of change.  Sometimes it might be new knowledge driving the change - like Galileo discovering that the earth revolved around the sun, although this kept him under house arrest while he lived - or it might be new technology driving the change - like James Watt's steam engine.  

Every now and then, you'll find something so momentous that it changes everything and creates a new culture around that technology - think about the smart phone and how it has changed the way we all live.

Over the next few weeks, I want to explore some of these timelines with you and the culture that prevailed in each of these chunks of time.  Specifically, I will talk about craft production and a craft culture, then I'll share some key technologies that resulted in a mass production age and how that changed the culture - particularly in the US and the UK.

To try to help us all maintain that open mind, I have partnered with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky and Hiitide and we're doing a book review online of his book "The Blind Spots Between Us:  How to Overcome Unconscious Bias & Build Better Relationships".  It begins on February 1st.  

Here is the registration link:  https://api.hiitide.com/api/v2/email/click/?cid=David&ea=click&el=click-to-learnmore&cn=david_&cm=social&cs=campaign&redirect_url=https://hiitide.com/crews/the-blindspots-between-us&ci=david

I hope you'll join me on this journey.

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.

126 - Culture of Confidence

Good morning. I'm David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance.

The term "High Performance Culture" has been in circulation for a pretty long time now with probably a dozen consulting firms offering strategies to create one.  Most of these are very good.  

What I want to do is to view the need for higher performance as a management-response problem, one that is created by leaders to take the organization to another level.  We'll have to define what we mean and how to measure it, and there are many components to this.

For example, at one client, they adopted an HPC that involved 15 key components, and many of them had subcomponents for further clarification.  It is an excellent package, but there weren't any measures of performance actually tied to HPC.  It was more of a "reminder" to leaders to behave according to the values described.

Based on my research, organizations want cultures of engagement.  They might call them Problem Solving cultures, or continuous improvement cultures, or even high performance cultures, but the desire is the same:  we want our people to show up, do good work, improve that work whenever they can, and achieve our goals.  So we have 4 key measurement areas:  Attendance, Productivity, Improvements, and Results.  But the way we measure and respond is far more important than what we measure.

Are we measuring these things at work?  Most places I've been aren't really.  But let's say we're not getting what we think we want.  If that's a problem, let's look at the root cause.  In the years that I've been working on this with people, I believe the single most important root cause for failure in all four of these areas is that our workforce has low self-efficacy for engagement.

Self-efficacy is the belief in our ability to influence events that affect our life and our sense of control over the way we experience events (Bandura, 1997). [From Self-Efficacy and Leadership Commitment During Lean Strategy Deployment by Angela D. Pearson. November 2019 PhD Dissertation.] 

Another way to think about it is our individual confidence in our ability to perform a particular task in a particular setting.  I think it is particularly relevant in a work environment.  Performing the work is typically taken care of during someone's on-boarding and on-the-job training.  

We expect people to have to work up to a level of competence over time.  But how much time to we spend reflecting on why that competence is really important?  In most cases, managers will tell you that competence is important only for how it affects the results; not how it affects the person.  

Competence is the most critical builder of self-efficacy for that job.  Competence leads to mastery.  Mastery leads to innovation.  When you're an expert, you don't burn cognitive energy on actually doing the work - you just work.  Your brain is free to think about ways to improve the work - but we, as leaders, need to make that a clear expectation.  We want you to achieve a level of competence because it will allow you to find better ways to work and that benefits both the worker and the company.

I've hit this in a few other videos, and in the future, I'll go into a lot more detail.  But for now, I'm going to shift gears a little over the next couple of weeks and talk about some historical developments that have shaped the way we think about work.  Hopefully, if we understand what shaped that thinking, we can change things and reshape or reframe our thinking.

Subscribe and follow along.

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.