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Aim and Stats
Now in our fourteenth year of operation, the aim of the "OD" and "BTA" sessions is to continue to foster an appreciation of InThinking
within an emerging network that is developing inside Aerojet Rocketdyne and beyond. Dates for future "OD" and "BTA" sessions along with additional "thinking" opportunities for 2013 can be found in this announcement.
OD + BTA Stats
For an update on OD and BTA statistics, this month's invitation is going out to 1900+ partners in the U.S., as well as fellow InThinking partners in Australia, Austria, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Chile, Dubai, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the U.K. Taken together, these individuals represent over 600 organizations in this list of nations, from elementary schools and senior high schools to colleges and universities, from one-person consulting firms to GenCorp, United Technologies, GM, IBM, General Electric, NASA, Bechtel, Kuwait Energy Company, Philips Electronics, and The Boeing Company.
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Welcome First Timers
Your names have been added to this announcement list by virtue of your attendance in our series of InThinking Roadmap seminars, workshops, and overviews within Aerojet Rocketdyne, or attendance at the annual In2:InThinking Network Forum, through a personal request, from you or a friend. Welcome to our thinking networks.
Click either link below to send me the name(s) and e-mail address(es) of anyone you would like to have added to this mailing list, or let me know if you would like to be removed. Thanks!!!
ADDITIONS
DELETIONS
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Meeting Notice Service - OD and BTA
If you'd like to receive meeting notices on your Microsoft Outlook schedule for upcoming Ongoing Discussion conference calls and Better Thinking About... webinars, reply to Bill Bellows at william.bellows@rocket.com and your name will be added to our meeting notice list. |
International Participants
Our conference call sessions are toll-free within the U.S. and Canada. Several international participants have been able to connect toll-free using Skype for a VOIP connection, which we now recommend to others calling in from outside (or inside) the U.S. and Canada.
First, you'll need to establish a Skype account at www.skype.com. Once Skype is set up and functioning correctly the only thing that is different when connecting with our "InThinking Roadmap" conference call sessions ("OD" or "The New Economics Study Sessions") is the use of a pass code and security code. For our "OD" sessions, these numbers are provided once the "participant survey" is completed. For the "The New Economics Study Sessions," these numbers are provided in an email from Tim Higgins, who hosts these calls. In either case, when prompted by Skype to enter these codes, use the keyboard not voice option and be sure to turn off the computer's microphone, otherwise the numeric keys don't function. If the microphone is left on when the codes are entered, Skype's automated operator will reply with "number not recognized," as no number has been transmitted. Also, please note that the "pound key" in the U.S. (#) translates to the "hash key" in the U.K.
New users of Skype are encouraged to perform a conference call test in advance of the scheduled "InThinking Roadmap" conference call. Contact Bill Bellows to arrange for a test call. |
Additional Reading
Beginning in 2009, a series of articles have been prepared for the Lean Management Journal (LMJ) to share InThinking insights with the Lean community. This month's feature LMJ article, Reflections on the Fabric of the Toyota Production System (released with the permission of the LMJ), was prepared to encourage LMJ readers to think beyond the prevailing explanations of lean and consider the possibility that the fabric of the Toyota Production System is more closely aligned with the implementation of ideas borrowed from Genichi Taguchi and W. Edwards Deming than has ever been acknowledged in the lean literature.
Contact Bill Bellows with questions, comments, or observations about this article. |
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Good morning from the Los Angeles campus of Aerojet Rocketdyne, located in Canoga Park, California, on the western end of the San Fernando Valley.
Aerojet Rocketdyne's InThinking Network welcomes Andrew McKeon, from New York City, New York, to lead our ninth Ongoing Discussion conference call of 2013 on October 4th (a new one-day option for September) and also our 165th session since we began in January 2000). As for a topic, Andrew has selected the 2009 paper he co-authored with Gipsie Ranney, "Thinking About Management From a Climate Change Perspective", in his first time with us as a Thought Leader.
I was introduced to Andrew by Dick Steele, co-chair of this fall's Deming Institute Conference, to be held on October 18-20 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. This year's title is "Out of the Crisis - New Thinking for a Sustainable World." In a partnership with Aerojet Rocketdyne, we are featuring two conference speakers as Ongoing Discussion Thought Leaders this year, Mark Mykleby last month and Andrew this month.
Andrew's 29-page Thought Piece, begins with these findings,
In its Fall, 2009 issue, the MIT Sloan Management Review reported on a wide-ranging study in which 1500 business leaders were surveyed to ascertain their views on the new skills managers will need to address sustainability in the coming years. Results of interviews with experts in the field indicated that there were five management responsibilities that needed improvement: (1) the ability to act on a system-wide basis; (2) collaboration across conventional internal and external boundaries; (3) a business culture that rewards and encourages long-term thinking; (4) new capabilities in activity measurement, process redesign, financial modeling/reporting; and (5) new skills for engaging and communicating with external stakeholders. The survey results indicated that what is lacking in many sustainability initiatives is an overall plan. Efforts are often defensive and tactical rather than strategic; multiple initiatives are disconnected with one focusing on products, another on facilities, and perhaps others addressing employees, customers, or the general public. And sustainability initiatives as a whole reflect incremental rather than transformational change.
W. Edwards Deming spoke about transformational change. And even though he rarely used the term sustainability, Deming would have recognized his ideas reflected in each of the five areas that the Sloan Review cited: Deming taught (1) an appreciation for a system, (2) the importance of cooperation and collaboration as well as competition, (3) the need for managing for the long-term to foster a robust and durable enterprise, (4) new ways of looking at and understanding data and variation and the implications this has for management, and (5) an understanding of business in the broader context of community and society. The kinds of management approaches that sustainability experts today see as critical were being discussed - indeed urged - by Deming decades ago.
and follows with this perspective,
Climate change indicates that humanity has misunderstood the systems relationship between the earth and the global economy. We have been optimizing the global economy and believed earth's natural resources existed to serve that aim. While this has brought about great development and wealth, we are seeing other less beneficial consequences. The human economy is beginning to dominate the earth's capacity for renewal. We are seeing unprecedented ecosystem degradation and species loss, depletion of natural resources and now human-induced climate change, the most urgent and dangerous indicator that the old ways of thinking are unsustainable.
To optimize the overall system means we must understand the interconnections and interdependencies between the global economy and the earth as a system. If the old way of thinking saw the earth in service of the economy, a new way of thinking sees the economy in service of the earth - the economy as a subsystem of the earth to be aligned with and shaped by the characteristic behavior of natural living systems on the earth.
The key to addressing climate change is through an appreciation for a system - taking the complex interactive system that is the earth and aligning the global economy to its aim. This has huge implications for all aspects of human development, from how we procure and use energy, to how we design, manufacture and use goods, to how we feed ourselves. New management tools and new ways of thinking will be needed to manage this shift.
Link here to download Andrew's Thought Piece and learn more about his broad views on management and sustainability, inspired by a deep appreciation of Dr. Deming's System of Profound KnowledgeTM.
Link here to register to attend.
Looking ahead, our October "Better Thinking About..." webinar will feature Don McAlister on October 10th on the topic of "Better Thinking About the Independency of Project, Risk, and Knowledge Management."
Link here to register to attend in advance of the announcement.
And, further ahead, mark your calendars to join us on October 24th and 25th, when Marcia Daszko will join us for the October Ongoing Discussion to lead a conversation on how fear erodes profits.
Link here to register to attend in advance of the announcement.
Biography
Andrew McKeon founded BusinessClimate to provide consulting services that help clients create value in ways that foster sustainability while increasing their global competitiveness and profitability.
Andrew has organized the annual conference BusinessClimate to gather global leaders in sustainability to explore the technology, policy and management transformations which are necessary to build a resource efficient low-carbon economy. Underlying what is perhaps the greatest business opportunity of the 21st century, Andrew believes there is an organizing principle akin to Moore's Law.
Andrew has held the position of MTS (Member of Technical Staff) at AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Alcatel-Lucent) and, thereafter, worked as an operations and control specialist in derivatives at Goldman Sachs and Vice President and Business Area Controller at Deutsche Bank. In 2006, he began working with US Vice President Al Gore in raising awareness on climate change.
Andrew has been a sought after speaker and instructor on climate change and technology. His writing has appeared in such publications as Greenbiz, Reuters, and strategy+business magazine. He has been invited to speak at NASA, the United Nations, the Deming Biennial, and was a keynote at the IEEE sponsored PICMET 2009. He is an advisor to the UN-GAID and is a member of the Board of Directors of TransitCenter.
Andrew holds an MS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA, both from Columbia University.
Contact Andrew by e-mail at amckeon@carbonrational.com with any questions or comments you would like to share with him in preparation for this OD conference call.
Cheers...
Bill
Associate Fellow and Lead
InThinking Network
Aerojet Rocketdyne
Canoga Park, California
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October 4th OD Details
Please join us for one or all of this month's series of OD conference calls. As always, you are invited to participate for as long, or as short, as you can in one or more of these sessions. Note that the conversations vary from session to session, due to a variety of causes, such as who participates and what questions are asked. This diversity is captured every month, as the calls are recorded and shared with all who register to attend.
Option - Date/Time (Pacific Time);
1 - Friday, October 4th - 12:00-1:00pm
2 - Friday, October 4th - 1:00-2:00pm
The agenda for each option will be:
Timing: Topic
Opening 15 minutes: Call in and Introductions
Next 40 minutes: Ongoing Discussion
Last 5 minutes: Farewells and Close
Please reply to this note by noon, Pacific Time on Thursday, October 3rd to confirm your plans to participate in one (or more) of these options. If you do plan to attend, please complete the OD PARTICIPATION SURVEY by using the link below...
PARTICIPANT SURVEY
Telecon lines (including a pass code and a security code) have been arranged for those who cannot join us in a conference room at our Canoga Park facility and are provided upon completion of the participant survey.
As always, please forward this announcement to anyone we missed who would also like to participate.
Regards...
Bill |
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Future Ongoing Discussion Conference Calls
Mark your calendars - future Ongoing Discussion conference calls will be held on the following dates (subject to slight changes), from 12-1pm and 1-2pm Pacific Time.
Month, Dates, Thought Leader(s), Topics (link on each session to register): |
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Future Better Thinking About... Webinars
Mark your calendars - future Better Thinking About... webinars will be held on the following dates, from 11:30-1pm Pacific Time. Details for how to participate in this webinar series are provided upon registering using the participant survey for each event.
Date, Presenter, and Topic (link on each session to register):
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InThinking Together Seminar
Description: This seminar explores the philosophies of a variety of management theorist, including but not limited to Russell Ackoff, W. Edwards Deming, Edward de Bono, Tom Johnson, and Genichi Taguchi, among many others; as they apply to the management of organizational resources, including ideas, innovation, knowledge, money, equipment, and space. Among the topics of discussion will be the concepts of "better thinking about thinking" (InThinking) and Purposeful Resource Management as well as Purposeful Resource Leadership. The seminar will introduce you to these ideas through a series of questions that are specially selected to create awareness of a new approach to working together, learning together, and thinking together.
Registration Fee: there is NO fee to attend
Prerequisites: there are NO prerequisites
Format: two 4.5-hour sessions over two days, offered as an in-person event
Presented by: Bill Bellows
Schedule for InThinking Together classes in Canoga Park, CA for Aerojet Rocketdyne
Class #CP-2013-09 (NEW DATES)
Part 1 - 30-Sep - 8:00-12:30pm
Part 2 - 01-Oct - 8:00-12:30pm
Class #CP-2013-10 (NEW DATES AND TIMES)
Part 1 - 22-Oct - 12:30-5:00pm
Part 2 - 23-Oct - 8:00-12:30pm
Class #CP-2013-11
Part 1 - 21-Nov - 8:00-12:30pm
Part 2 - 22-Nov - 8:00-12:30pm
Class #CP-2013-12
Part 1 - 16-Dec - 7:00-11:30am
Part 2 - 17-Dec - 7:00-11:30am
Register to attend InThinking Together |
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