Antibiotics have been used in animals as long as [...]]]> This political as well as scientific issue has hung around for more than 50 years. About 80% of all antibiotics in the United States are fed to animals as disease prophylactics and as a growth stimulant. Recent developments promise to revive this dispute.

Antibiotics have been used in animals as long as in humans. Antibiotics eradicated a number of animal diseases that could wipe out a flock or herd very quickly. The second “miracle antibiotic” after penicillin, streptomycin, was developed at an agricultural experimental station and began to be used in animals in the 1940s.

The 1940s were also an era of rapid advance in animal feeds. Adding urea and vitamins to commercial feed spurred growth. So did small amounts of antibiotics in feed, before animals became ill. Healthy animals grow faster. This plus breeding for faster growth made possible large, concentrated feedlot operations, and commodity economics took over from there. Veterinarians and the livestock industry generally regard antibiotics as a pillar of their business model today.

Misgivings about bulk use of antibiotics began quickly. Research in 1956 noted the possibilities for microbes to become immune to antibiotics if constantly exposed, and that if animals loosed antibiotics into the larger environment, microbes would mutate to become resistant to them. Furthermore, humans eating “factory farmed” meat ingested small amounts of antibiotics regularly.

Evidence that microbes would become antibiotic resistant and weaken the effectiveness of antibiotics for therapeutic treatment of both animals and humans has increased over the intervening years. The FDA initiated action to ban antibiotic feeding in 1973, and in 1977 issued a notice to withdraw approval if manufacturers and users could not prove that the practice caused no harm. Over the past 35 years a stream of proposed bills, lobbying, and petitioning has not resolved anything while medical and environmental interests jockeyed back and forth with pharmaceutical and agricultural interests.

On March 22 this year, Judge Theodore Katz issued a directive to the FDA in response to another lawsuit by the National Resources Defense Council against the FDA for inaction. The judge directed the FDA to do now what it said it would do 35 years ago: Require that antibiotics fed to animals be shown to be safe, or ban the practice.  The same day, an unrelated research report was issued: fluoroquinolone, an antibiotic that the FDA had banned in feed in 2005, was still showing up in chickens and chicken products.

This issue shows the importance of the precautionary principle: that the parties taking action be required to demonstrate to the best of their ability that it will do no harm to others, or to the environment. Of course, in the commercial world this incurs a lot of expense before a revenue stream begins. Once revenue is coming, companies prefer to insist that their practices be proven unsafe before giving up existing revenue – and perhaps a whole business model. Delay postpones having to take action, but whether in the long run both the companies and the public are better served is questionable.

If Judge Katz’s order actually leads to a ban on antibiotic feeding – this time – how the agribusiness model will shift is not easily foreseen, but years from now the industry may see it as something that it should have addressed much sooner. That’s part of learning to improve ongoing performance, rather than be content with a cash cow.

If you’ve been following the amazing articles on this website I think you will agree that that any organization can do many things to reduce waste, cut cost, and improve the effectiveness of their organization. Investigating Compression Thinking has no downside except for the time invested to see if it is right for your [...]]]>

If you’ve been following the amazing articles on this website I think you will agree that that any organization can do many things to reduce waste, cut cost, and improve the effectiveness of their organization. Investigating Compression Thinking has no downside except for the time invested to see if it is right for your company.

The first problem is just starting the thinking. Progress toward any far out vision starts by just doing something, so here’s an idea on how to start.

Why not suggest to your top management that there may be opportunities to reduce waste, improve productivity, and become a leader in several important areas of change. Ask if you can recruit at least two other members of the organization to help you review the possibilities of this program and in 30 days report back whether or not it makes sense to go forward.

If possible select the team from different areas of your operation. Let’s say you are a manufacturer. You would want someone from the production side, someone from the engineering side, and maybe somebody from the office management or sales side to work together to see where changes could be made.

If you have not done much with environmental sustainability, maybe you can set up something simple like recycling inside the company. However, a more ambitious program that would involve all functions of a company is a review of how your products are packaged to reduce the amount of resources involved – and not just inside your company, with your customers and suppliers besides. At this point your objective is not to come up with any specific plan, but just to suggest areas that might benefit from a Compression Circle. Report back to your administration the reaction of your three-person team in the areas that they thought worthy of their own compression council.

If possible find three areas that are worthy of top management consideration from your initial review. Have one of your three person team head up a Compression Circle on that prospect, and in turn recruit two or three other members of the organization – again from different departments – to think it through.  The value of this exercise is to build teamwork and communication as well as delivering cost cutting and market saving results.

My guess is that each project would involve three or four two-hour sessions to come up with their results and a proposal for administration. For example, recently many companies had to review their packaging in order to meet the goals of major purchasers such as Wal-Mart. Many of them were able to reduce costs, and of course it is well documented that Wal-Mart had major reductions. When’s the last time someone from sales, manufacturing, marketing, and engineering took a look at how your product is packaged for sale and use? In my company it’s probably 10 years, and a lot has changed in those years. The type of customers we have and their needs have changed. So have the capabilities of our factory, but for most of us, if things are going well right now, we just go along.

You know the popular saying is if it isn’t broke don’t fix it. But those of us who follow the teachings of Doc Hall and the Compression Institute know that this is a path to failure rather than a key to success.

Every organization, from nonprofits to the largest manufacturers in our nation know that changes and improvements are required in order to survive, but it’s hard to break inertia and get going – and keep going. Management might not go along with your request, but my guess is that they will be glad you are thinking of how to make them more successful and volunteering to lead the evaluation process.

Marvin Klein

Co-founder, PortionPac Chemical, Chicago

Big History scholars contend that accelerating complexity is inevitable. Starting from the Big Bang, they [...]]]> A Yogi Berra definition of complexity: “If I understand it, it’s simple; if not, it’s complicated.” So how do we make things seem simple? Increasing complexity seems inevitable, so can we distinguish between useful complexity and wasteful complexity?

Big History scholars contend that accelerating complexity is inevitable. Starting from the Big Bang, they present evidence that the direction of cosmic evolution for 14 billion years has been increasing complexity – because of the physics of an expanding universe. Increasing complexity is more smarts in more intricate, denser, cooler packages.

Computers exemplify this. In 1946 the ENIAC computer weighed 30 tons, took up 1800 square feet, and consumed 160 kilowatts of electricity. A modern integrated circuit might draw 70 milliwatts (not megawatts), but computation speeds surpass ENIAC by many orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, demand for computation is also growing so fast that waste heat from billions of phones, computers, and servers is a problem.  Can we complicate computers even better?

Or take the automobile. The original 1908 Model T had 812 part numbers (not the total number of parts). A modern car is too complex to pin down an equivalent number. Toyota says one has about 30,000 parts (not part numbers). Lists of parts at assembly include many sub-assemblies. Not all parts go in every car. In addition, each car has about 10 million lines of code in 20-40 different controllers complicating the thing, but code doesn’t count as a part.

No lone individual can comprehend such complex devices. They are designed and built by processes. People interact with the processes and with each other. Relatively simple processes can produce complex outcomes. You don’t have to understand all about a car to drive it. Likewise, people don’t have to fully understand a web of processes to contribute to designing, building, or servicing a car. However, at a minimum they need a working understanding of the processes in which they participate.

Rote assembly workers have to know that much, but when work processes become complex, with new twists popping up constantly, it is inadequate. Then participants have to understand the why of their work in depth — to know when something is wrong, or likely to go wrong in the future. They have to become learners on the job. They have to understand the mission of the organization, the goals of a process, how to improve a process, and how to consider a wide scope of issues assessing that process. In today’s language, an organization needs a lot of fast learning “mini CEOs” in a lot of positions. A few brains controlling processes are insufficient.

Too much of our complexity is man-made “imaginary complexity.” It exists only because we have not learned enough to simplify something that could be made simpler. This is waste from slow learning.

In the design world, imaginary complexity is an inefficient design that we have not learned enough to refine. In work organizations, it’s inefficient bureaucratic procedures, work arounds that hopelessly attempt to prompt us to think about considerations that we might overlook. But these are cumbersome. Surely there are better ways to prompt learning faster, without so many re-dos, delays, and rejections.

Take the car example again. In inefficient design processes, engineers waste time verifying specs, updating bills of materials, waiting for simulation results, and on and on. They may spend 90% of their time wrestling their own systems instead of asking what-if questions, looking at design alternatives, or thinking about end-of-life re-use processes.

Complicate things with the need for life cycle physical processes, and reasons for better learning organizations multiply. Design for instance, is not just to create functional artifacts, but to anticipate lifetime processes by many work organizations and by the product users. These processes may need to be flexible to allow for future upgrades and changing requirements. Vigorous learning enterprises are needed to keep up with this. We are leaving behind a world in which it was good enough to design, build, sell, and collect the money.

Every work organization is a learning organization to some extent, or it’s no longer alive, so we’re really talking about invigorating their learning processes. You’ll find a lot about the Vigorous Learning Company on our web site. There’s enough to it to keep anyone mulling a while, and it’s not appreciated without the [...]]]>

Every work organization is a learning organization to some extent, or it’s no longer alive, so we’re really talking about invigorating their learning processes. You’ll find a lot about the Vigorous Learning Company on our web site. There’s enough to it to keep anyone mulling a while, and it’s not appreciated without the mulling.

The key to getting started is Servant Leadership by those with the influence to shift the culture of the organization. If those “at the top” are not Servant Leaders, everyone else is constantly bucking their non-understanding.

Servant Leadership begins with attitude, a deep belief that the organization really consists of people, and that success is developing them to fulfill the organization’s mission. This is extreme. People are more than a company’s most important assets, a financial description. From a performance view, everything really depends on people. Physical assets, money, and intellectual property are what people work with. They make something happen with the financial assets – or not.

Dispel the mythology of serving ownership, and if well led, everyone has to become responsible for success of an organization’s mission. To be truly dedicated, they have to feel that responsibility. That makes a huge difference in why people work.

Think of ownership as a sponsor, not a supreme master. If an organization practices quality, the client or customer is supreme. If it is environmentally responsible, not even the customer is supreme. Servant Leadership is the development of people and processes to look at all this, seeing in multiple directions at once, and helping them always do the right thing.

If you have not visited our reworked web page, please visit www.compression.org. [...]]]> We had a board meeting on February 18. Like everyone, we had to work to avoid being sucked into the mire of finance and legalities, and concentrate on how to promote our mission. We did make a little progress.

If you have not visited our reworked web page, please visit www.compression.org. Revisions will continue. Content will shift toward video. Some are up now, and more will come.

Everyone is invited to an overview webinar at 9:15 EST on April 3. It’s through the World Trade Group.

Plans to promote Action Learning Groups began to jell. We are working on materials to support those plans. We’re looking for pioneers in Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, Minneapolis, Portland, and Northern New Jersey. If you feel venturesome, contact Doc.

The Compression Institute’s challenge is to induce pioneer organizations to work and learn together to deal with what we term Compression, translating the limits of a finite world into local actions that they can take here and now. Bucky Fuller, believed to have coined “Spaceship Earth,” also described the present system as “competitive confusion.” We think Compression Thinking, while very different, will simplify how work organizations can step up performance to this level. Our biggest problems are human, not technical.