Supply Chains and Virtuous Circles: More Than the Sum of Their Parts

The route between suppliers and customers can be a labyrinthine network with calamities lurking in unexpected places.  The top 10 supply chain disasters reported in Supply Chain Digest convey the possibilities. But supply chain disasters themselves are evolving.

 Dan Gilmore, editor in chief of the publication, says technological meltdowns are less likely today.  Most of today’s supply chain trouble,  he says, flows from failures of strategy or execution.

 “Virtuous Connections,” a Strategy + Business article by Richard Verity and Chris McNally, describes how one supply chain manager untangled the Gordian knots in the sprawling maze of connections an anonymous European company used to supply 30,000 products to 10,000 customers  The manager realized, the article says, that every supply chain is a set of virtuous or vicious circles. Both types of circles are complexes of events, in which each iteration of a cycle reinforces another iteration.  The S+B article explains that in a supply chain, deficiencies in on area reinforce weaknesses elsewhere in the chain. Read the article here to learn the managerial insights and decisions that fostered success.

The best known vicious circle is hyperinflation, in which prices spiral out of control as currency loses its value.  In a virtuous circle, each iteration of a cycle reinforces conditions that led to favorable results.

 A finely tuned supply chain—with no lost, late or damaged products and a shortage of irate customers—is a virtuous circle in which each link improves the next.  A functioning supply chain is more than the sum of its parts, the S & B authors showed, and the economic gains were more than those anticipated by each individual improvement. They were exponential. Improvements created tipping points that led to cost savings in parts of the network that seemed to have little to do with each other.   

 AMR Research published the Supply Chain Top 25 for 2009, which it identifies as iconic businesses that achieved innovational and operational excellence. What is the next supply chain disaster? It’s hard to say, but some experts suggest some supply chain failures are inevitable, and they may afflict those least prepared for change.

A Million Bats Died and 694 Tons of Insects Lived

An emerging contagious disease called White Nose Syndrome (WNS)  is killing hundreds of thousands of bats a year in the Northeastern United States, and scientists worry that some species could become extinct in coming decades.

 Bats with the frothy looking white material on their noses, skin and wing membranes  were first photographed in a New York state cave in 2006, and biologists began to study the fungal disease in  2007. Scientists estimate it has killed a million bats in 10 states,  with potentially severe ecological and economic consequences.  In most species, female bats produce only one baby a year, population losses do not quickly recover. 

 Thomas Kunz is Director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology  at Boston University. DeeAnn Reeder is an assistant biology professor at Bucknell University who specializes in comparative behavior and  physiology of mammals.  They discussed  Bats in Peril  on Radio Times, broadcast by National Public Radio. 

 The two professors say bats are a keystone species, meaning that they have a disproportionate impact on their environment and their absence would have dramatic ecological impact. They are the only mammals that actually fly, so they are unlike any other creatures.  One out of every five mammals is a bat, and their diets and habits are diverse.  Seventy percent of bat species feed on insects that  feed on agricultural crops and forests. Professor Kunz explains those missing million bats would have eaten 694 tons of insects. They also eat plant pathogens. Some species eat fruit, frogs and fish, and only three percent of bats feed on blood.

 The fungal disease is believed to have started in upstate New York and has now spread as far south as Tennessee. It appears to spread from bat to bat,  sometimes killing up to 90 percent of a hibernating bat colony.  When bats and other creatures hibernate in winter months their body temperatures drop and they tend to suppress their immune systems. In 2008 researchers discovered WNS was caused by an unusual Geomyces fungi, that likes cold and has been found in Antarctica. It’s not clear that the fungus is killing the bats. Professor Reeder explains the growth on their skin may be an irritant that wakes them inappropriately during hibernation,  burning their stored body fat and inducing them into winter flights in search of food, and ultimately leading to their starvation.

 “Bats have gotten bad press,” Kunz observes. In Western culture, we tend to fear things that come out at night, In Chinese culture, bats are considered good luck.  Professors Reeder and Kunz say citizen scientists can help improve understanding of bats and WNS by reporting discoveries of sick or dying bats, or disoriented bats flying in daylight. The US Geological Survey has an excellent web page on WNS and  bats.  The US Fish and Wildlife Service tells how you can help.

If You Lose Your Job You May Die Younger

Research suggests layoffs can have adverse health effects, both short term and long term.  A New York Times story by Michael Luo reports  that a 2006 study by a group of Yale epidemiologists found that people who lost their jobs had doubled risk of stroke and heart attack, and a study last year found that people who lost jobs faced an 83% higher risk of developing diabetes, arthritis or psychiatric problems.
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Till von Wachter, a Columbia University economist, and Daniel Sullivan, research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago,   examined records of earnings and Social Security Administration death records of Pennsylvania workers during the recession of the 1980s. Their findings, citied in The Times story, showed that men with long seniority in their jobs were 50 percent to 100 percent more likely-depending on their age-to die in the year after a   job loss.  Twenty years later, the researchers, found, their death rates were still 10 to 15 percent higher than comparable men who remained employed.  That meant that a man who lost his job at age 40 lost a year to a year and a half of his life.  Read their paperhere.

The Times story also quotes a 2009 study by Sarah Burgard , a professor of sociology and epidemiology at the university of Michigan, who found that persistent job insecurity might be as much or more detrimental to health as job loss.  In an era when people are expected to find several jobs over the course of a career, that has extraordinary public health implications. 

While research on life expectancy is recent, the complex relationship between health and work and the disruptive nature of job loss has long been documented. In the 1986 leveraged buyout of Safeway, 63,000 managers and workers lost their jobs through store sales and layoffs. A Pulitzer Prize winning Wall Street Journal story by Susan Faludi, then a Journal reporter, examined the aftermath. In addition to the organizational and structural changes in the business, her report described the wrenching impact on workers and their families, including illnesses, suicides and deaths, that those closest to the victims attributed to loss of livelihood.

Horror in Haiti: What Can We Learn?

Some bad news needs to be ignored. But which news, and when? How can we prepare for storms, floods, pandemics, terrorist attacks, financial meltdowns and other mass devastations?

Michael Useem says we need to develop a kind of peripheral vision that lets us see the real warning signs in bad news, criticism and unwelcome information. Useem and  Howard Kunreuther are authors of  a new book, Learning From Catastrophes: Strategies and Reaction and Response.

 Scientists predicted a major earthquake in Haiti  two year ago, but  the world  wasn’t  listening. Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis are often described as “once in a century” events. Rare but hugely consequential events “don’t sit at the front of people’s consciousness,”  Useem explains in an interview with his coauthor and professor Morris  Cohen in an online Knowledge@Wharton article.   A big challenge, he says, is to get business and community leaders  to think about disasters as  inevitable,  even if the dates are  unknowable. 

 Haiti has been impoverished for years, with a vulnerable population and many poorly constructed buildings.  Kunreuther, who has studied insurance, says very little property in Haiti was insured. While opportunities for entrepreneurship exist, the professors agreed  rebuilding will be harder than it has been in wealthier countries. After a 1923 earthquake devastated Tokyo,  for example, Japan made sure new buildings met improved and safer design standards.

 Useem describes an extreme case of bad news that never reached the top: Before the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded over the Atlantic killing its seven crew embers in January 1986, numerous problems had delayed the launch. One was the infamous O rings that cracked in the cold. The manufacturer  and the  engineers, who understood the booster rockets,  knew about the problem.  There were discussions and reports, but as Useem puts it, “top management did not absorb that information.” 

Kunreuther suggests more forceful ways of communicating about known risks with unknown frequencies.  If people are told there is a 1 in 100 change of a flood or hurricane in the next year,  the odds don’t sound scary enough to impel action  If the person is told live in this house for 25 years and there is a one in five chance you will have a major flood or hurricane,  the reaction is different. If people think an event is likely at some time, they’re more likely to plan and prepare.

 Another lesson from mass disasters, Kunreuther says, is that it never affects just one country:  “We are in an interconnected world. We have interdependencies”  He says interconnectedness can make us realize disasters are global as well as local and lead us to think more broadly, in longer terms, and coordinate our efforts.  The ability to mitigate the impact of disaster depends greatly on decision made before it happens.

 “The world has a long term obligation to hang in there. “ Michael Useem

We All Need to Bundle Up in the Snow, But Culture Impacts How We Think About It

Can climate change skeptics get a warm glow from waist-deep snow?

A New York Times story by John Broder  reports that Senator James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, a prominent naysayer on the science of climate change, celebrated the record snowfall in Washington DC by building a six foot tall igloo on Capitol Hill. He used a cardboard sign to label it “Al Gore’s New Home.”  He’s not the only gleeful skeptic.  A  Washington Times editorial “Global Warming Snow Job” declares  “Record snowfall illustrates the obvious: The global warming fraud is without equal in modern science.”

Dr. Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes the WeatherUnderground blog,  reminds us that climate is measured in decades and centuries, not months and seasons, so single events don’t  signify long term changes. But he also reminds us that most climate scientists say extreme weather is consistent with a warmer earth, and warming has been measured over long periods.  A Bloomberg News story quotes Matt Rogers of Commodity Weather Group as explaining that weak El Ninos produces cold, snowy winters in the Northeast..  And the federal Climate Impact Report cites rising ocean temperatures and says documented warming increases  the likelihood of colder winters in the Northeast, more drought in the Southwest and more major Gulf Coast hurricanes.  

Why do different people reach such different conclusions about scientific information?

“Fixing the Communications Failure” ,an article by Dan Kahan in the January 21 issue of Nature, offers insights on why people believe what they do.  He says polarization about climate change  and polarization on such highly charged social issues as  abortion, same sex marriage and school prayer, arise from what he terms cultural cognition.  Cultural cognition, he writes, “refers to  influence of group values—ones relating to equality and authority, individualism and community—on risk perception and related beliefs”.

Kahan and scientific colleagues  Donald Braman at George Washington Law School, Geoffrey Cohen at Stanford University, John Gastil at the University of Washington in Seattle and Paul Slovic at the University of Oregon  have studied the mental processes behind cultural cognition. Their research suggests, for instance, people with individualistic values and those who accept hierarchies and respect  authority,  tend to dismiss evidence of environmental risk from global warming because that evidence could lead to restricting industry and commerce, which they admire. They also resist directives from government.  People who have more egalitarian and “communitarian”  values tend to be suspicious of industry and view it as a source of social disparities, and more receptive to the idea that its activities should be regulated.  They also tend to think government’s responsibility includes protecting people from harm.

Listen to a National Science Foundation interview in which Dr. Kahan with talks about how these views influence a person’s interpretations of the risks inherent in many scientific areas.

How can scientists present information without getting caught in culture wars?  Professor Kahan says people are more open minded when information could support, rather than threaten, their values. For instance, he writes, an individualist who dislikes the idea of constraining industry might be receptive to a climate change response that included geo-engineering. An egalitarian who is suspicious about the risks of nanotechnology might be more receptive to its adoption if there were emphasis on the role nanotechnology could play in environmental protection.  People also tend to be more open minded when they receive information from those who seem to have similar values, he writes, so scientific information presented by diverse groups of experts may have a better chance of being received thoughtfully by broader audiences. Read his essay here.

Human Engineers and Slime Mold Create Surprisingly Similar Network Designs

What living organism can solve complex network engineering problems despite having no brain?

 Slime molds are unusual—they’re neither plant, nor animal nor fungus, but they can create a community of cells that follows simple rules to travel, solve problems, and adapt to environmental conditions.   Scientists from England and Japan tested the slime mold’s capacities by putting 36 oat flakes in a pattern that represented the positions of cities around Tokyo. Oat flakes are a slime mold treat. After a day, the mold had built a network of nutrient-carrying tubes that looked pretty much like the Tokyo rail system, which carries millions of people every day among far-flung locations. It’s a model of efficiency designed by talented engineers and experts in mass transit.  

 Research by Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University and Mark Fricker of the University of Oxford is reported in the January 22 issue of Science.  A story in Wired, by Laura Sanders, reports that initially, the mold dispersed evenly creating, a mesh around the flakes. But within hours, it began strengthening some nutrient tunnels and connections, while others disappeared. The researchers used the behavior of the mold to create a mathematical description of the network formation.  Fricker explains in the Wired story that such a malleable system could be useful to create networks that change over time, such as wireless fire and flood warnings. In addition, decentralized, adaptable networks  would be useful for soldiers in battle, for swarms of robots exploring hazardous places, and they could help scientists understand how blood vessels grow to support tumors.

 “A Life of Slime,” a story in the Economist, explains that the species used in the experiment, physarum polycephalum, a plasmodium slime mold, is membrane-bound  bag of protoplasm that forms when single cells mass together and fuse into a huge cell with multiple nuclei.  Cellular slime molds, another variety, spend most of their lives as separate single-celled organisms, but upon released of a chemical signal, they aggregate into a swarm.   P. polycephalum often travels across damp forest floors, and as it forages for food, it puts out protrusions of protoplasm creates nodes and branches, and its body forms a network of tubes that carry nutrients. Both stories note that the networks not only find the shortest distance between different points. They feature redundant connections that allow for resilience in case of breakage—just like well-designed network created by human engineers. No one know how these brainless organisms self-organize organize with such amazing success.   The Economist story notes that in a similar experiment, the slime mold created a network that was quite similar to highways that connect England’s principal cities. 

 You can watch a slime mold network forming on YouTube, and listen to Professor Nakagaki’s lecture on organization in an amoeboid system.

Mapping Networks in the Republic of Letters: Modern Techbnology Meets the Enlightenment

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and America,  a network of scholars, scientists, theologians and literary figures who exchanged ideas across decades and national boundaries formed the basis of an intellectual community known as the Republic of Letters. Now humanities scholars are collaborating with technology specialists and “cyberscholars” to reach a deeper understanding of that metaphysical republic.

 The Republic of Letters: The Electronic Enlightenment Project at Stanford University has produced extraordinary social network maps that visually represent the thousands of letters sent and received by the luminaries and their lesser known contemporaries whose opinions profoundly influenced modern thinking. 

 Dan Edelstein, assistant professor of French and principal investigator, describes some new insights about the spread of ideas in a YouTube video.  A Stanford Report by Cynthia Haven tells how Professor Edelstein and his collaborator, Paula Findlen,  a history professor,  created maps that offer a new overview of broad historical patterns.  

While Voltaire admired England’s institutions and freedom, for example, most of the 15,000 letters he wrote in his lifetime went to Paris, and very few to England.  By contrast, Jesuit Scholar Athanasius Kircher, whom Findlen calls the first scholar with a global reputation,  corresponded with intellectuals in China, India and the Americas.  Oxford University supplied metadata for some 50,000 letters.

 Edelstein says the Republic of Letters was “a remarkable institution because it was the first kind of peer review,” with scholars discussing and evaluating each other’s work and methods, offering encouragement and fostering excellence. “This was a kind of separate state, a republic that had its own laws, its own governance,” he said. “It was not a monarchy, but represented a kind of ideal, a Platonic city for intellectuals, except that it stretched across cities, even continents.

 “We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information,” Edelstein said. “In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others.”

 Associate History Professor Caroline Winterer says the project allows scholars to think about figures of the past “in the same historical space” and ask new questions.  For instance, she said, “When you have a rich, dense and geographically expansive correspondence network, what exactly puts you in the hub?”  Original thinking? The ability to bring people together? Benefits to bestow? While Benjamin Franklin was renowned as a man of ideas, his correspondence suggests his own central position arose   from help he provided for many Americans and Europeans with a multitude of mundane and financial matters.

 For more on virtual teams and networks see Jessica Lipnack’s blog EndlessKnots

Our Environmental Albatross: Throw-Away Plastics

Inspired by scientific exploration of the Great Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre,  artist Anna Helper has created extraordinary huge, haunting and disturbing translucent structures from plastic waste from a local salvage yard.  Her woven cloud-like mass, called The Gyre, was displayed at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. 

 A story  in The Scientist by Katherine Bagley describes and illustrates Helper’s work,  and explains she is using many of the same materials to create a new exhibit for the Portland Museum of Art that will be called Great Haul. 

 Helper says in The Scientist story she has always been fascinated by the color and translucence of plastic, and the work inspired by the island of garbage has disorienting beauty.  Her work Intricate Universe shows her fascination with swarms, which might be birds, insects or even plastic particles in water.

Scientists have less etherial view of the plastics and other garbage that are forming a growing  floating Pacific ocean mass twice the size of Texas.  The Environmental Grafiti blog by Robin Bennett explains how American yachtsman  Charles Moore discovered the island of trash. Gyres are ocean regions where ocean currents are slowed by minimal winds and high pressure weather systems. They are spots of deadly doldrums where, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a doomed sailing vessel was “As idle as a painted ship, Upon a painted ocean.”  Coleridge also captured the ghastly image of refuse caught and trapped by converging currents.

Yea slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon a slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout,

The Death-fires danced at night.

The water, like a witch’s oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white. 

 The North Pacific Gyre has grown faster than global warming models have predicted, and plastic waste from the U.S. and Asia now makes up 80 percent of the trash mass collecting in that ocean region.  Other ocean gyres are gathering trash, but the North Pacific mass seems to be the largest. The millions of tons of plastic don’t degrade but they do break into tiny pieces that are beginning to replace eroding rock as a source of sand, and are getting into the food chain as creatures absorb and ingest them  Bennett points out in his blog that these plastics are entering the human food supply, with consequences that aren’t yet understood.  Nineteen of 21 species of Albatross—the bird the Ancient Mariner was cursed for killing—are among the creatures endangered today in part because of the plastic trash. When the birds ingest plastic particles, the space in their stomachs needed for food for their chicks is reduced. The mariner was redeemed, but the future of great wasteland of trash is unknown and the possibilities for clean-up are not encouraging.

Future Centenarians: Sages or Struldbruggs?

Children born in the industrialized world after 2000 are likely to live to be 100, researchers suggest, and the social and economic consequences will be huge and unpredictable.

“This is a demographic revolution the likes of which we have never seen before on earth,” Olivia Mitchell, professor of insurance and risk management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, says in a Knowledge@Wharton article.

 “The real challenges of living to 100 will be to systematically weave financial literacy into elementary, middle and high school programs,” Professor Mitchell says. “We need to get people to think differently about investing in themselves, in their human capital.”  She says basic economics eludes many workers. Only 20 percent of Americans in their 50s have planed for retirement, even though many will retire in their 60s, and live into their late 70s and beyond.  Mitchell says education needs change so that people are prepared for several 20-year careers over a life time.

“Ageing Populations: The Challenges Ahead,”  a Lancet article by Kaare Christiansen, a professor and aging expert at the University of  Southern Denmark, James W. Vaupel, of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, and others,  predicts a need for many radical public policy changes.

Their research suggests life expectancy will increase by 30 years in Western Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and even more in Japan, Spain and Italy.  While the Lancet study did not examine life expectancy in the developing world, the Wharton article says those countries are also experiencing increases in life-expectancy. According to Census figures, there were 55,000 centenarians in the U.S. in 2005, and the Census Bureau predicts there could be 5.3 million people over 100 year-old by 2100.  The Lancet authors think longevity will increase through the Twenty-first century, and that “continued progress in the longest living populations suggests that we are not close to a limit.”

Researchers also say older people will be healthier than earlier generations. Wharton Professor Kent Smetters says in the Wharton article that Medicare will be stressed by a growing elderly population, but that because the highest healthcare cost are in the last two or three years of life, delaying that expense will save money beforehand.  Researchers also expect major change in employment, with increasing numbers of working elderly who may want more flexibility and part time jobs. Social changes will include adjustment in retirement age,  old workers with younger supervisors, changes in expectations and attitudes about age, and the need for institutional restructuring in Social Security, Medicare and education.

 As Vaupel puts it, people would organize their lives differently if they knew they’d live to be 100 or older.  Some projections for continued contributions by healthy old people are quite optimistic. A New York Times story, by Kirk Johnson, “Seeing Old Age as a Never-Ending Adventure,” tells of men and women who ignore presumed limits, hiking, mountain climbing and exploring exotic lands.  It also features an 89-year-old dare-devil who took up wing walking—he strapped his feet to the wings of a single engine biplane and flew across the English Channel at 160 miles an hour.  Other stories are less sanguine.   The worst could evoke the Struldbruggs, the immortals who lived in Luggnagg in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. They lose their youth, but live on, hairless, toothless, befuddled and despised.  By 80 they are legally dead and their heirs get their estates.  By 90, they forget most things, and can’t even read, because memory won’t carry them from beginning to end of a sentence.  Worse, because their language is always in flux, Struldbruggs of one generation can’t communicate with anyone from another generation.  The intergenerational consequences of real increased longevity will be a fertile area for study.

Self Organization Among Musicians and An Affinity for Natural Form in Art

If you missed the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra recent concert at Carnegie Hall, you can repair that loss here.

 This orchestra has a distinctive approach to making music. It was founded in 1972 by cellist Julian Fifer and a group of musicians who wanted to perform a diverse  orchestral repertoires as a self governing team. Their website explains they perform without a conductor, and rotate musical leadership roles for each work. “The orchestra strives to empower its musicians,” it says, “by integrating them into virtually every fact of the organization, literally changing the way the world thinks about musicians, conductors, and orchestras.”  A core team of leaders selected from the orchestra leads each particular piece and is responsible for its interpretation and arranging rehearsals.

 Fifer’s web site says before leaving Orpheus in 1999 to found PollyRhythm Productions, he “positioned Orpheus as an organizational model to help corporations address employee motivation, problem solving and job satisfaction.” He has worked with multi- national corporations to improve teamwork and creativity.

 Bassoonist Frank Morelli  explained,  in  a Carnegie Hall Playbill interview, how accomplished, opinionated soloists are able to “coalesce around the artistic direction of the soloist”  who is playing at a given moment. “We change on a dime from being leader to being team member through out each performance.” he said, adding his own technique. “My goal as a bassoonist is to think as if the soloist were playing an organ keyboard with a bassoon stop—as if he were playing my instrument.  I’m not going to do it my way.” The members keep focused on the soloist’s vision of the piece and feel shared responsibility and connection. Learn more about Orpheus performances and history.

 Internationally renowned oboe virtuoso Albrecht Mayer was a guest performer for the ensemble’s Oboe Concerto by Richard Strauss. Legend has it that Strauss composed the concert at the request of a young musically gifted American army officer, John de Lancie, who is said to have met Strauss in occupied Germany in 1945. Sources differ on that. But a Playbill story says after decades playing oboe with the Philadelphia Orchestra,   de Lancie recorded the Straus work  in the 1980s and invited members of Orpheus to accompany him.   

 Why are Planets, Eyeballs, and Billiard Balls all Round?

 If you are fascinated by celestial spheres,  earth’s roundness, and circles in such art as the paintings of  Russian master Vasily Kandinsky,  read Natalie Angier’s engaging story “The Circular Logic of the Universe” in the December 8 New York Times science section. Larry Liebovitch has studied heavenly orbs and human eyes, and Angier reports his observations on what makes things round. Liebovitch is a physicist, astronomer and complexity scholar who is associate dean for graduate studies and programs at the Charles E. Schmidt College of Sciences and professor at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University.