I think that building a team to create a business is the trickiest,
least understood area in technology. Manipulating people with
advertising has been reduced to a science, but developing cooperation
and synergy has not. The technical people have to have their heads
full of a model of the device they are working on. They can't do a
good job and spare the brains to understand the financial details at
the same time. Similarly, the other departments have to be focussed
on their own jobs. This often leads to misplaced optimism about the
progress that others can make, or a slow response when one department
has been running on wishful thinking itself.
I know a guy who wants to develop geothermal power, which always has
trouble with mineralization of the apparatus. He is busy raising
money, and can't be convinced that just using rapid fluid motion will
not solve that problem. If he came to grips with the time scale of
molecular action, even in his own body, it would double the workload
he sees ahead of himself, so he stays in denial. Similar value traps
abound in every job. The ability to deceive is a strong survival
skill, and self-deception greatly reduces the associated workload.
Nature, however, is never fooled, so we have to be rigorous in both
science and business. There are situations where people can rise
tremendously to meet expectations, and others where there is almost
no remaining potential. These are often confused, with disastrous
results.
One time, a consultant was called in to reduce staff and improve
organization at a company that had grown quickly. Job descriptions
were almost non-existent, but he soon identified one woman who seemed
to be doing nothing at all. However, everyone was adamant that she
had to stay. It turned out that she just went around asking in a
friendly way how things were going, and then resolved potential
conflicts between sections by pointing them out early.
Bob Stuart
"The essence of modern management is to make individual strengths
productive, and individual weaknesses irrelevant."
- Peter Drucker
On 9-Jul-11, at 12:14 PM, Tom Miles wrote:
Tom Taylor,
As you well know starting a business of any kind is a challenge.
When I took a business course in the 1960s they considered a sector
of the economy to be healthy if it had both a high rate of business
starts and business failures. We always seem to have a number of
"Starts" in gasification. I would expect a high rate of failure in
gasification and a low rate of success.
With gasification we are often trying to start businesses in
several areas at the same time - preparing and handling biomass,
making clean gas, dealing with solid or liquid effluents,
reprocessing the gas to a product which may not have a market,
adapting the gas or liquid to secondary conversion processes,
developing new markets, developing distribution systems. We often
assume that the processes and equipment we will use in each step
are already "proven". We also forget that if we are good in one
area we are probably naive in another. Many companies that start
out in thermal conversion of biomass (carbonization, pyrolysis,
gasification, combustion) get launched when they have demonstrated
a small part of the process in the laboratory. That small success
becomes what Doug Williams calls a "funding magnet". We have all
seen what financial folks can do with that. Projects don't get
easier when they get bigger. Or they become efforts that are
perpetually under-funded because the technically savvy may not have
the financial horsepower to move the project forward.
This gasification business is not easy. To be successful the
systems must be simple, maintainable and reliable. Proving
reliability is always a challenge. You need another successful
business to support your gasification habit until it works. I'm
sure that there are easier businesses to get into.
Tom Miles
_______________________________________________
Gasification mailing list
to Send a Message to the list, use the email address
[email protected]
to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page
http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/
gasification_lists.bioenergylists.org
for more Gasifiers, News and Information see our web site:
http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/
_______________________________________________
Gasification mailing list
to Send a Message to the list, use the email address
[email protected]
to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page
http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/gasification_lists.bioenergylists.org
for more Gasifiers, News and Information see our web site:
http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/
