How to Play Hookie from Work
I'm at Headquarters today and needed to talk to someone about a couple things he owed me. He never answered his phone so I went by his office every few hours to see if he was in, and he never was. But I know he was at work today because his keys, wallet, and sunglasses were all on his desk....but they never moved positions throughout the whole day!.

I forgot about the old fake keychain trick. This only works in medium to large organizations that have lots of meetings. Here's what you do:

1. Get an extra keychain and put all those junk keys you don't need any more and an extra car key on it.

2. Get an extra wallet and fill it with a few credit cards you don't use anymore. Maybe a few bucks.

3. For that extra bit of believability, get an extra pair of sunglasses (cheap knock-offs okay)

4. Come in the morning, turn on your computer and turn OFF the screen saver. Throw keys, wallet, sunglasses on the top of your desk, as if you got in late to the office for a meeting, threw everything down, and ran out.

5. Take real keychain, wallet and sunglasses and leave building. Play golf, go to movie, etc.

6. Everyone will assume you are in a meeting.

I actually never tried it - I just leave without using all the props - but it IS effective. The funny thing is that the person who told me this trick was my actual manager at the time, so if I saw a set of keys on his desk, I knew not to go looking for him.


posted by Director_Mitch @ 5:39 PM (Permalink)
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Don't Like the Sec Def? Join Army, Commit Crime
According to Volokh, they would like to make it easy to unseat a Secretary of Defence. According to them, in order to force a Sec Def to resign, all someone needs to do is:

1. Join Army

2. Commit Crime

3. Have said crime filmed and plastered all over the press

Volokh apparently believes that all illegal activity committed by a few people in the hundreds of thousands in the military should be held accountable to the Sec Def.

posted by Director_Mitch @ 4:45 PM (Permalink)
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Just In Time Marketing
Many people are familiar with Just in Time, or JIT, manufacturing. This is the strategy of having manufacturing materials show up at the assembly plant "just in time" to start the manufacturing process. For the manufacturer, it means holding less inventory and requiring less space for holding that inventory, thus releasing cash for more useful endeavors. JIT is now practiced by the vast majority of the world's manufacturers. I have even seen assembly sites where the manufacturer's supplier has warehouses on-site, with the components being moved less than 100 feet from the supplier to the manufacturer- the manufacturer is billed only after the component or raw material is moved that 100 feet.

Interestingly enough, it seems that Samsung doing something analogous in cellphone product development, sort of a Just in Time Marketing (a Google search of the term finds a few consulting companies using the name and a few "internet" marketing schemes, but I don't find this very obvious phrase being used in the way I am about to describe).

As noted before, cellphones are becoming as much a fashion accessory as communications tool. This makes the success of any given model hard to forecast. Samsung's strategy is thus to do the following:

1. Design as many models as possible

2. Do a limited production run for each model, shipping enough out to the channel to give consumers a "taste"

3. See which models take off

4. Quickly ramp into mass production the winners.

5. Don't create any more of the losers, selling off any inventory at fire-sale prices.

This strategy turns the standard product development process on its head. The typical electronic development cycle requires all sorts of volume forecasts, ROI (return on investment) analyses, bidding from suppliers, setting up the assembly line, and several other major steps. In this case, Samsung is borrowing a page from the fashion industry, putting as many designs out there as possible, even if it means eating the cost on the losers.

Unlike the fashion industry, however, there are vast capital expenditures, complicated components and other complications with creating a cellphone. This means that Samsung had to create a supply chain that is somewhat different than the standard manufacturing flow:

1. Common "Base" Design - Similar to different car lines using the same chassis, Samsung has to require that all phones have a "base design" that each model has in common. This means all the basic communication "chips" in the phone and how they are connected are the same between the different lines, creating a common supply chain for about 75% of each phone, no matter what its external design may be.

2. Quick Design Cycles - For this strategy to work, Samsung has to constantly put new models on the market, meaning it has cellphone design cycle is measured in months instead of half-years and longer for many of its competitors.

3. Flexible Suppliers - While the suppliers in the "base" design have a fairly steady demand forecast (some models will succeed and some will fail, but the overall volume will be fairly constant), those suppliers who supply the "non-base" features like cameras, GPS or other non-standard options have to contend with the possibility of being designed into a flop, meaning no further demand from Samsung, or the phone becoming a home run and having to immediately ramp to millions of units a month. While this might not sound like a big deal in theory, it is a very big deal in practice. If a vendor has to be able ramp to mass production immediately, the manufacturing capacity has to be reserved or inventory built. If the Samsung product is a flop, the result is idle capacity or excess inventory - something that can end careers. Obviously, this forces suppliers to be flexible and creative in supporting Samsung, which can be a differentiating feature in sales negotiations.

Strategically, this allows Samsung to try many different designs since this strategy has failure built into it. A possible extension of this strategy is "semi-custom" phones. Consumers can custom order a PC from Dell today, so why not allow consumers to specify the design and specifications of their cellphone?

posted by Director_Mitch @ 3:35 PM (Permalink)
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I Worked on Cinco de Mayo!
I obviously work for an oppressive organization which is not inclusive in its holidays. Although I do think we get Buddha's birthday off...

Of course we live in the U.S. and not Mexico, which seems to be lost on Kerry:

Kerry celebrated Cinco de Mayo — one of Mexico's most important national holidays — at Woodrow Wilson High School, where he criticized Bush's education policies. He sprinkled his remarks with the Spanish that he's been learning on cassette tapes.

Bush "promised in the No Child Left Behind Act that billions of dollars would be coming to America. El rompio las promesas," Kerry said, then translated. "He broke his promises to America."

"We pray that the next Cinco de Mayo, they will celebrate here in the streets of the United States of America," he said.

I bet he doesn't pray that the 4th of July is celebrated in Mexico or anywhere in the world.

posted by Director_Mitch @ 8:12 PM (Permalink)
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If a Tree Falls in Suburbia...
...does anyone NOT hear it?

I had a Monterey Pine (Pinus radiata) in my back yard that died this winter. The sad part is that I didn't notice it until my neighbor pointed it out to me. How could I not notice a giant dead tree in my backyard? Well, here is the view I usually see - the trunk (the dead one is the one on the right).




I guess I just don't gaze skyward that often from my patio. This is what the crown looked like, and it was definitely dead.




Everyone had an opinion on what happened. The neighbor, who is like Middle Age Man from SNL, thinks it was pine beetles, although there was no indication of them and this species isn't listed as one of the targeted trees. The tree removal guy thought it was just age: when it's time to go, it's time to go, even for trees. The few web sites I perused on this species note that there is a fungus killing this tree, but I found no indications of that, so I am going with "age" as the reason for its death.

I am not particularly upset. While I like trees, I thought this one wasn't very pretty and it wreaked havoc with my fence and my plumb tree, which I am particularly fond of. So from both a need and a landscaping perspective, I had a crew come in this morning and take it down. They started cutting from the crown. Note the utility lines going through the tree (cable and phone, but no electrical), so once the crown is gone they cut it back further to get it away from the utility lines.




Now it was ready for the coup de gras:




Timber!





By my estimates the tree was 38 years old, which is about the age of the house.



The whole process took only 2.5 hours of constant chain sawing, so hopefully the neighbors weren't too annoyed. I am going to replace the fence and re-landscape the backyard later this summer, so I left the stump in until that project gets going.


posted by Director_Mitch @ 11:01 AM (Permalink)
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More Bad News for Kerry, Part XLVII
FACTORY ORDERS SURGED 4.3% in March, providing further evidence of a firming recovery in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Orders for durable goods rose 5%. (WSJ link requires paid subscription).

So several of Kerry's planks keep getting knocked over:

1. Economy - Even the dems have to admit the economy is looking pretty darn good. So good that even tax receipts are up, narrowing the deficit.

2. Jobs - This number, too, is improving and getting better. While he will exploit individual stories and point towards layoffs (there are always layoffs and unemployed, even during the very top of boom years), the overall numbers will keep improving, pulling up consumer confidence.

3. Iraq - Quick, what's the difference between Kerry and Bush over Iraq? The U.N. And the U.N. is gaining a lot of credibility lately, isn't it? He is even backing off the "no WMD" meme. Granted, there is a lot that can happen in Iraq between now and November, but I think things will improve, not get worse.

This is leaving Kerry sniveling about education and the cost of college. Should be interesting to see what other ideas he tries to come up with as the economy improves further over the next six months (healthcare costs will be one of them).

posted by Director_Mitch @ 9:39 AM (Permalink)
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Light Blogging for a While
Work. Travel. Family commitments. Yes, there is life outside of blogging and I will need to address it. So expect light blogging for the next two weeks as I travel to exotic locales, but I will post pics when I return.

Update: Trip postponed until later this month.

posted by Director_Mitch @ 10:46 AM (Permalink)
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