Came across a blog with above title. And it’s wonderful. It’s really mindset that.l needs to be fined tuned over what tools we use to make us more productive.
We have many tools and strategies as well as long list of self help books, what’s needed is a mindset to change once’s practice and become more productive.
What I have seen, including myself , we use and learn all these tools with Big Bang, but go back to original “productivity”, blaming either the tools, or being modest and blaming self discipline. Whatever those reasons are, the root cause is always “I’m not motivated” of being productive.
How counter productive is this? Oxymoron may be. But that’s the truth. The truth is, unless one has high Blood pressure or deep sickness, one doesn’t look for his health easily (I know, some of you reading this will be as fit as Rambo, but listen me out), similarly as ping the burn out is manageable and the underperformance is not impacting my routine I’m ok with my habit of loosing sight of my goals or procrastinate something.
But why to wait?
Look for opportunities and start now. Start now saving time and start now in investing future. I’ll talk about this in coming blog. Meanwhile do visit the blog which I came across. https://www.jotform.com/blog/productivity-is-more-about-mind-management-than-time-management/
So that’s that, i started my first post way back in 2001, that time in blogpost. With an idea of sharing my know how and make all aware of current good practices.
My passion was welding and mostly all my early blogs are about them. Back then, 21 year old me learning lots of things, and it was fun.
last 22 years, has given me opportunities to diversIfy my knowledge. And I take pride in myself, of able to learn so many diverse items.
after a really long break, I tried to do some justice to my website, obviously moving to own domain was one, thought that will give some commitment to peruse this further.
Thinking got me here, and start with my 1st post. its mot technically first, but its first from my long lost love of writing and sharing.
Question is
What should I share?
What should be the frequency?
is it ok to share my other passions here?
will it be a good place, or is blogging right platform to share diverse information?
How to make this more relevant and vibrant.
So let me continue think I’ve it and post here whatever I think is relevant. May be after some time it will boil down to some categories. God knows. But let’s start
What I will be sharing?
Question is what I can share. Okie let me give a thought, what are my interest, as that will keep me driving.
#Welding and pressure vessel: this is long lost love. Past decade in away from this subject. May be I need to rekindle this, and start sharing what little I think it’s amusing to me.
Books I read #GoodReads : I read almost a book per month, and recently started making mind maps out of it, it’s interesting, and I think I should share this with you all
#Machine learning, Timeseries and Forecasting : New skill set. Want to share whatever amuses me or whatever I came across as challenges. Sometime it’s as small as syntax error or sometime it’s choosing the right platform. It’s all about R and Python, but it’s a hell of a world.
#Software : one of the biggest hobby, and a full time Garage project of mine. I got lots of insights and sleepless night while working on smithing as basic as creating my diary or as complex as creating calculations tools (hosted on this website). So lots of opportunities to share my know how here.
#Behavioural Science: This is a subject, I fallen in love with as I groomed as Manager and Leader. I work on #Productivity and # Planning as well as #skills to develop myself and my team members, I think it will be super cool to share my insights here
Let’s start, “The sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up.”
Source unknown
So with those four five categories, let me work on next post.
Ringtone: Exploring the Rise and Fall of Nokia in Mobile Phones
By Yves L. Doz and Keeley Wilson
Nokia, which easily can be termed as the most innovative company, helped bring the mobile revolution which currently we are in, adapting the need of being connected 24×7, and at its peak having more than 40% market share and a true leader. Though unnoticed many of us don’t know Nokia still exists and is the world’s largest 5G infra company and still innovating. But what touched us is the Nokia Mobile Company, and this book is about its rise and fall. Breaking general misconception and reasons behind its fall.
Against the general perception of failure due to not looking ahead or lack of innovation, the reason behind the fall of Nokia Mobile company is due to a change in business model to a matrix organisation
That’s the summary of why Nokia mobile failed so miserably, it’s just because of poor execution of matrix organisation. And that’s what interests me, as a leader myself, justifying the use of matrix organisation for better productivity, it’s even important to understand the consequences of its poor execution. This book covers all those aspects with Nokia as a centrepiece. Whereat all the phases of it, we were touched as a consumer or as heartbroken engineers to see the fall of such a beautiful product company.
Small trivia
Before I begin the review of this book, let me share how mammoth the Nokia is. We always see it’s mobile and thinks Nokia started as a mobile company and ended as one. However, it’s surprising to know Nokia started as a Cable company in Finland in the 1800s, moved to Telecom infra in the 1900s, followed by infra for the first car telephone and diversified with the mobile decision in the late 1990s
What this book Is about
It tries to answer following questions, which generally we also want to know.
Could Nokia’s decline have been unavoidable—just an extreme case of Schumpeterian creative destruction?
Was it an instance of organizational evolution and adaptation gone astray down a dead end in the face of disruption and business model change?
Was this a failure of management volition—the wrong strategic decisions, poor choices of organization, inadequate management processes, weak leadership, and bad timing?
Some insights
Nokia always had the edge with its strong innovation. For example, although Sharp launched the first camera phone in 2001, it was Nokia’s camera phone released the following year which really changed the landscape, providing not only superior picture resolution but also picture-sharing applications that paved the way for multi-media communication. This product innovation came from fifteen labs around the world and a number of technical cooperation projects and partnerships.
Beyond product innovation, Nokia’s success was supported by an innovative and highly efficient supply chain system that had been built in the 1990s. Through this, Nokia was able to achieve much lower prices from suppliers than its competitors and ramp up new production lines to full capacity in a matter of days. In the 1990s it had also mastered lean production and Japanese quality processes and organized its integrated manufacturing around a few key regional hubs in Europe (Finland, Germany, Hungary), Asia (China), and North America (Mexico).
Just as success often results from many small positive steps, the roots of failure can usually be found in multiple small mistakes, which seem manageable when viewed in isolation. However following this book we can see small cracks, however, they are evident now, and could not be avoided in the actual scenario. For example communication gap between R&D and Sales and Marketing lead to ultimate failure with the Symbian operating system. Though a leader in OS development themselves, delay in adapting Android and working with Microsoft’s half-cooked mobile platform led to the last nail.
CORE principle
Author has evaluated the various ups and downs in Nokia with CORE dimensions .
C Cognition: this is what leader saw during that phase at Nokia, and strategise
O Organisation : it’s outing strategy to action
R Relationship : it’s about relationship with people.
E Emotions : Emotions are at play during various phases, this is what impacts the relatioy
My MindMap
Key Takeaway
Shifting from Symbian to Microsoft OS, Nokia overestimated brand loyalty and weren’t innovative enough
Decision made in 2001-05 made its impact in decline in 2013-15. Management need to be mindful of its long term impact.
Strategic foresight and intellectual leadership would have no value if not acted upon.
Poor management choices contributed to strategic stasis.
Successful past commitments leave a legacy
Outside parties, customers, major shareholders, strategic partners, industry pun- dits, and regulators can excessively and unduly influence one’s sense-making, particularly in adhering to a “being close to customers” logic.
Failure of cognition may not result from ignorance or lack of information, or even poor foresight, but from inadequate sense-making—i.e. not making effective sense of available information.
Management systems and processes have to acknowledge the irrepressible influ- ence of emotions, and thus leave some room for them to be legitimately expressed.
Where to buy. Available on Amazon as Kindle and Hard copy.
Recall watching many dish tv antenna on top of very weak Jhuggi or in slum areas? Thinking, people who can’t afford food and clean drinking water, how can they afford a TV? It’s not rational right?
Wrong, my fellow reader, People knows what they want…
Television is more important than food
The book tells the story of a man in Morocco. After he made a compelling case that he and his family really did not have enough to eat, he showed us his largish television with a satellite connection. We might have suspected the television was just an impulse purchase he had subsequently regretted. But that was not at all what he said. “Television is more important than food,” he told us. His insistence made us ask how this could make sense, and once we went down that road it was not that hard to see what was behind this preference. There was not much to do in the village, and given he was not planning to emigrate, it was not clear that better nutrition would buy him much more than a fuller stomach; he was already strong enough to do the little work that was available. What the television delivered was relief from the endemic problem of boredom, in these remote villages where there was often not even a tea stall to relieve the monotony of daily life.
The book I’m about to review, gives such examples , which are so co-relatable. Let’s start the review
The Book: Good Economics for Hard Times
By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (Both are Nobel holders and married to each other
The book tries to answers questions like:
Is immigration a biggest problem, to swing our attention, political environment and really a concern?
Does welfare, free cash make people lazy?
Do we need to fear Automation? Will it take away all jobs, leading to more jobless people on ground?
Does inequality going to stay?
Is climate change really impacting productivity and poor people?
What this book do wonderfully?
The book’s greatest contribution is its methodical deconstruction of fake facts: migration, we learn, is not on the rise – indeed, at 3% of global population, it is at the level it was in 1960. Natural experiments (involving Finns expelled from the USSR in 1945, Cubans flocking to Miami in 1980 and Jews settling in Israel in the 90s) prove that migrants do not steal natives’ jobs; they just help expose the holes in public services and social housing left by austerity. As for trade liberalisation, which economists treat as super-important, Banerjee and Duflo suggest it brings relatively small benefits while doing a lot of damage to the poor in countries such as the US and India. The resulting discontent turbo-charges racism: the moment white blue-collar men lose hope and apply for disability welfare benefits, it is no longer enough for them to denigrate black people and Latinos as “welfare queens”. They must now be depicted as gang members or rapists.
My MindMap
Key topics and some insights
Impact on me
Current times, when you have more news coming on mobile than you go out and watch yourself or ask someone to validate it, and as people around loosing patience in a blink of an eye, and even knowing that the content received, has high probability of being a misinformation, we get biased and make out perceptions on surrounding and creating an irreversible situation around us. This book helps clear this muddy water, helps get clear reflection of self in clear water to know self better.
Reading this book helped me to understand my biases and basic assumption on human behaviour when it comes to subject like migrants, tax cuts or taxing riches, automation taking job away, climate change impacting once life, racist behaviour towards community either cast based or economy based.
The book clearly mentions, “We should not stop telling the truth, but it is more useful to express it in a nonjudgmental way”. And it did wonderfully well in this regards it shares data points which we can see, validate and hence accept.
Key concept like to remember
StatisticalDiscrimination: This concept helps why police stops and checks black driver more often, why we see more Muslims “accidentally” killed by authorities and why There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. Why we see so less women at leadership position. And how self discrimination impacts one’s performance in a place, where there are no bias. (Self discrimination triggers once under performance thinking s/he is getting discriminated)
Where to buy? It’s Available on Amazon as Kindle or hard copy. Great for collection.
Iconic Oral B Brush designed by IDEO, of which Tim Brown (author) is CEO. Till this point, we learned about ‘design thinking process’, with empathetic thinking, Defining the problem statement, Ideate the concepts, build prototype, test and launch the product.
The designer who designed it, once went to near by sea shore, and found few of colorful brushes washed over beach! the design came to its end of the life cycle, most of the part of the brush was intact.
Designer can’t prevent people from doing what they want to do with its product they own, but that doesn’t excuse them from ignoring the larger system. Often in our enthusiasm for solving problem in front of us, we fail to see the problem that we create.
Change by Design
The book is all about all round thinking while designing a product/solution for a problem. IDEO is the company, which has brought the ‘design thinking’ concept to masses. and Auther himself is known as one of the founding members of this key concept.
Key Concept/ Take away
Ideas for #Leader
What is design thinking
Finding interdisciplinary team members
Putting people first
Inspiring the birth of great ideas
Ideas for #Process
Look : Look at inspiration, ideation, and implementation together to become great at design thinking.
Prototype : Build the prototype of your idea and begin testing as early as possible to help you encompass all areas of innovation at once.
Storytelling : If you want to make your great new idea stick, use storytelling.
About Author
Tim Brown : CEO of IDEO
Tim is leading IDEO, and key person to bring ‘Design Thinking’
He has published many books/articles for this topic including for innovation.
Process on ‘how to innovate’ is explained simply, with three step approach. Innovation is an ongoing activity, its not an on/off like activity. One has to be mindful of his surrounding, get inspiration and how quickly we can bring idea to life thru rapid prototyping. Few example like complex product like google glasses the prototype was done in 30 min!
I Understand role of Empathy in design thinking, but the insight I got from this book is, empathy without action is of no use, what we need to do is act quicky and convert idea into reality by rapid prototyping.
How one preheats they boiler feed water? We have two options,
Via economiser, mounted on exhaust of boiler, and heating incoming feed water by absorbing lost heat in flue gases
Via Deareator tank, adding steam to deareator and heating the water temperature. Though the purpose of deareator is as name suggest remove the “oxygen” from the water, by heating it. Nevertheless it also increases the temperature of water in this process.
Let’s talk about economiser
Now that’s the question, one should not ask, if possible, one should always use economiser. It generally speaking will increase boiler efficiency by 3-5 percentage points.
It also helps reduce the thermal stress on boiler as a whole.
Then why this question?
Challenges with economisers are few, apart from how much heat we are recovering vs how much expenditure we are doing in is installation, maintenance and qualification.
Assuming the economics works well, the next question is if you absorb too much heat, and condensation happens, it will lead to sulphur corrosion, distorting not only boiler but also chimney in long run.
Criteria for designing economiser from user perspective
Define maximum hot water temperature we expect out of economiser, this has to be above sulphur due point
Define maximum pressure drop allowed. As more pressure drop will add more duty to the Blower, adding to running energy cost
Acid Dewpoint Corrosion
Criteria for design from Designer’s perspective
Configuration of path, with multiple branches to make water flow, it helps get maximum efficiency but also adds to pressure drop and duty on feed pump
Profile of fins for heat exchanger, some profiles of fins, for example serrated fins, has huge heat transfer to area ratio, and are highly efficient, but also adds to pressure drop on air side, and blower duty increases accordingly.
Number of passes of hot flue gases, this ensures more residential time for the flue gas, so that we can extract more heat, however, this will also cost us more pressure drop and added duty to the blower.
Minimum feed water temperature and maximum outlet temperature, both factors are important to ensure we get better efficiency but also to ensure we have less issues with corrosion (oxygen pitting
Typical failure reasons
Typically in boiler, the flue gas is mostly utilised to super heat the steam, and then passed to economiser, in such cases, The temperature differentials between the flue gas and water are quite low. To maximize heat transfer, water temperatures at the end of the economizer run should be very close to the saturation temperature. If the temperature difference is very low, then it some time can lead to steaming in economiser. Steaming not only reduces the efficiency drastically but also lead to knocking and failure of weld during operation due to thermal impact.
Second reason for failure could be quenching effect. This happens, when boiler is stand by mode, that is steam is not consumed. Water in economiser reduces drastically, and sudden surge in demand, make feed pump, pump cold water to economiser, leading to thermal stresses, even if the delta of water differential is low, this will lead to failure after some time. This issue can be over come by losing some water in boiler itself via intermediate blow down, small water circulation in economiser helps avoid such quenching issues.
In office someone told me, lets not spend (tone was ‘waste’) time in making P&ID, as our machine has no piping! an I was like … confused on matching the description of P&ID with need of P&ID. and hence this article.
I just went back to basis, and tried to find out whats the ‘dictionary’ meaning first.
ISA 5.4 Says, This standard establishes minimum required information and identifies additional optional information for a loop diagram for an individual instrumentation loop. This loop is typically part of a process depicted on the class of engineering drawings referred to as Piping and Instrument Drawings (P&IDs).
EN ISO 1068 Says, a piping and instrument diagram (P & ID)
Document on ISA Website , refer The process and instrumentation diagram (“P&ID” as it often called) represents a document that can take on many different forms .
IS 3232: Says, RECOMMENDATIONS‘ ON GRAPHICAL SYMBOLS FOR PROCESS FLOW DIAGRAMS, PIPING AND INSTRUMENTATION DIAGRAMS
South Austria Water Technical Standard TS 112 : Process and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&ID)
So, is it Piping of Process diagram? What we understand?
The challenge, limiting it to piping application, user can ignore its advantage on discrete machines, where there is no piping (or less of it), but its highly automated.
To answer this question, we need to see what the diagram help us with.
It help us with
Understanding the design philosophy.
Understanding of process flow (energy and mass flow)
Process Control parameter, loops, interlocks
Economics of system, process optimization
HAZOP Study
Unit operation, interlinking between plants and machines.
It will be more appropriate to consider P&ID and Process & Instrument Diagram, which shows following but not limited.
Orbital welding in Sanitary application is extension to tungsten inert gas (TIG/TGAW) welding. This type of welding is default in piping, which the application demands Sanitary or super clean application, where cleaning is done with CIP/SIP.
The pharmaceutical industry currently uses orbital GTAW/TIG welding almost exclusively. This produces welds of high quality with very low rejection percentages; these joints possess high strength, high purity meta, and good surface finish.
Orbital welding is the controlled rotation of components within a fixed support, while an adjustable, non-consumable tungsten electrode attached to a guide moves (or “orbits”) the joint. The electrode, the arc, the area surrounding the weld, and tube interior are protected by a shield of inert gas—usually argon—with a purity of 99.995/99.999%
Virtually all the metal alloys employed in the pipeline fabrication sector can be welded and since the process is carried out in an inert atmosphere it produces results that are extremely clean, oxide free and without spatter
Its completely automated process and hence needed precision when preparing the face and edges before welding.
Following mind map will help you understand variable in Orbital welding. Please Explore. Will add more information shortly.
As we know, the out put from these industry are directly consumed by end user, and it impact either health value or patients safety! Its prime importance that the metal used in these industry ensures no impact on quality of products and also ensures minimum maintenance.
Many time, manufacturer prefer to take different batches of products in same equipment, and this leads to one more challenge of cleanability. and when one like to be equally sure, that no residual is passing to next batch, its prime important that the metal should not react with any chemical cleaning agents!
Stainless steels are uniquely qualified not only because of their long service life, availability and fabricability, but also because they are non-corroding, non-contaminant, they can be polished to very smooth finishes, they are strong and rigid, they can withstand heat and chemical sterilization treatments, and they are easily welded.
In such industry, following metals are preliminary used.
304 and 316 stainless steels and their L grades
Austenitic stainless steels with higher Mo content
Duplex stainless steels group
Superaustenitics in particular “6Mo”
Ni, Cr, Mo family commonly called the “Alloy C family”
Cobalt based alloys with high corrosion and wear-resistance
Titanium alloys, referred as chemically pure (CP)
Following table shows chemistry of typical Stainless steel used in industry
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