Inside the iPhone: Biscuits and Tea

This past weekend the NY Times had an in-depth piece on some of the decisions and processes surrounding the manufacture of Apple's iPhone. The excellent piece is absolutely worth your time and attention, as it provides some fascinating insights into the requirements, expectations, and outcomes from a high-volume, high-tech, design, development, and manufacturing process today.

Suffice to say some of the commonly-held assumptions about United States firms inability to compete for most of the value-added supply chain and manufacturing processes for the iPhone are validated - US universities are not producing enough skilled engineering talent chief among them.  But some other assumptions, mainly the sheer cost advantage provided by outsourcing less skilled assembly tasks to lower wage locations like China, while not completely dismissed, are at least downplayed as a key decision driver for Apple in the Times piece.

In the piece the labor cost differential is estimated to contribute only a relatively small percentage of the iPhone's eventual market price stating: "However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense."

While $65 per phone is still relevant, it isn't necessarily enough on its own to drive decisions to outsource. So if the labor cost savings from assembly in China isn't the primary decision driver then why is the vast majority of the iPhone manufacturing process conducted outside of the United States?

Well if you believe the Times reporting it's almost completely about speed and flexibility. To me the most telling example comes from Apple's 2007 decision to re-design the device's screen just weeks before the launch date. A major change like this, so close to the delivery date would normally result in a missed product delivery, bad PR, unhappy customers, and perhaps even opened the door for a competitor to beat Apple to this market.

So what happened? From the Times piece:

One former (Apple) executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhonemanufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Let that story sink in a bit. A veritable legion of workers, that were on-site 24/7, and that could be roused to work at a moment's notice to start cranking out the newly re-designed iPhones.  I am sure the former Apple executive is right that the speed and flexibility in this example can't be matched by any American firm.

And likely no American firm ever will, at least for the foreseeable future. Because having thousands of workers living on the manufacturing site, and that could be roused to work in the middle of the night with a biscuit and some tea doesn't align with any American's conception of what modern work should be. Does that sound like the kind of workforce your firm would want to assemble?

But when you think about it a little, the idea of thousands of people, all living together in very controlled circumstances, available to work at a moment's notice for extremely low wages, and lacking any real power to do much about their situation does sound a little familiar.  

It sounds a little like prison.

Robot Toys and Team Building

Note : From this point forward, I make no more apologies for posting about robots, sports, Jeff Van Gundy, nor any more empty promises to refrain or limit such posts. There, I feel better.

Check out the video below, (email and RSS subscribers will have to click through), a demonstration of a new kind of robot-themed toy called Cubelets from Modrobotics. Cubelets are a modular robot building system, where each cube possesses different features and capabilities, and once combined, form a simple, functioning robot.

Really neat idea right, and how about the spokesperson?

Beyond being a clever idea for a flexible and adaptive building toy system, I think the design of the cubes themselves into three distinct archetypes - 'Action', 'Sense', and 'Think', also demonstrate a pretty insightful understanding of team dynamics, and more specifically, what kinds of diverse capabilities that have to be assembled and unified to some extent to achieve successful outcomes. 

'Action' cubes do things and focus on outputs and come with names like 'Drive', 'Rotate', and 'Flashlight'

'Sense' cubes pay attention to things and focus on inputs, with names like 'Temperature', 'Brightness', and 'Distance'

Finally, 'Think' cubes perform simple logic functions like 'Maximum' and 'Passive'.

If you check out the demonstration video, and can pay attention despite the lederhosen-wearing demo dude, you will see that the cube types are easily assembled to create simple toy robots. The key feature being that at least one cube of each type is needed to make a functioning robot. Adding more cubes, and varying their position and orientation allows the users to create more subtle and sophisticated toys, but the basic elements of 'Action', 'Sense', and 'Think', influence the outcomes.

Remember, Action cubes do things, Sense cubes pay attention to things, and Think cubes do the math and handle the complex technical stuff. Thinking, doing, and processing the technology - the three important kinds of skills you need in any project I think.

Oh wait, there is one more skill type I forgot, and there doesn't seem to be a Cube for - 'Creativity' or 'Insight' - essentially coming up with the right ideas in the first place, deciding what needs to be done, and the best way to do it. Figuring out if the robot should even be built in the first place. In the Cubelet toy set, there doesn't seem to be a cube that can do that.

Because that's your job. For now anyway. 

Until the robots figure out how to do that one too.

What a Year's Worth of Email Can Teach You

Email. A burden. A time-suck. An endless stream of incoming messages, some batted back, some ignored, some discarded, most forgotten. But still a necessary and important tool for getting work done today, two decades after its introduction into our working lives.

And despite dramatic and continuing popularity and value provided by alternate forms of electronic communication, (SMS, social networks, enterprise collaboration technologies), email, for most information workers, remains the dominant digital collaboration and discussion medium. We hate it but we can't live without it. Kind of like Reality TV or Facebook.

But for a tool that is so dominant in many of our professional endeavors, we often have little insight into how we use the tool, and how our usage might be effecting our success, productivity, and career prospects. We know we use email a lot, perhaps even all day long, and we can see how many unread messages we have in our Inbox, but after that, the level of understanding about a communication and work platform is typically extremely limited.

That's why a new service from ToutApp is so interesting, an 'Email Year in Review' report that provides, in a neat little infographic, a rich look into an entire year's worth of email traffic, messages, response rates and more. My full report of Gmail usage from 2011 is here, (a small sample of the full infographic is below).

 

Other sections of the report dig into most frequent correspondents, most commonly emailed 'circles' or groups of recipients, and some interesting chronilogical data around email usage. Did you find that last Spring's project missed its deadline by a few weeks? Could have had at least something to do with a spike in email traffic right around the critical Go-live? Or do you find yourself mainly pushing email all day long, forcing you to do 'real work' late at night or on weekends? If you are like me, you will probably be surprised by at least some of the data from a year's worth of email.

Currently the Email Year in Review is only available for Gmail accounts, so its usefulness for most corporate employees will be limited, but for frequent Gmail users the report is illuminating, and for all of us that are interested in improving performance and collaboration both personally and inside our organizations, the approach to analyzing the data is instructive.

Email is one of those tools and processes that is so familiar, so entrenched, so deeply immersed in our working lives that it can be really hard to look at its use dispassionately, with some perspective, and with an analytical eye. But understanding more about how email might be impacting your success is something many of us should spend some time considering.

If you are a heavy Gmail user, I'd encourage you to request your own custom email analysis report from ToutApp here. You might be surprised at the results.

There will always be jobs the robots can't do. Maybe.

I know the entire 'Robots and other automation technologies are displacing human labor' line of discussion can get a little tedious at times. After all, advances in technology that fundamentally change the labor markets and the need for certain types of labor is an old story. And when other contributors on Fistful of Talent take on the robot subject, we may have finally jumped the shark on this one. But against my better judgement and with the quasi-approval of my friend Chris Wilson, I am going back to the robot well one more time. So here goes.

How many family farmers are out there anymore, working a few dozen acres of crops? When was the last time you took a train across the country to attend a business event? Have you had to individually print, collate, staple, assemble, and mail company reports or binders in the last 10 years or so? (Right now, someone reading this is thinking, 'Hey I still collate').

Old story, I know. Technology advances unabated, makes our lives better, (hopefully), raises the standard of living, and provides ample ammunition for our incessant, 'I remember back when I was a kid...' admonitions to our kids and friends who simply would DIE without their iPhones or free Wifi at Starbucks.

Besides, the standard thinking goes, there will always be entire categories and classifications of labor that simple will not ever be usurped by robot or other automation technologies. Robots can be programmed to perform simple, repetitive tasks, and respond accordingly to relatively simple external cues and stimuli, but advanced, nuanced, and subtle kinds of jobs and tasks are still the (more or less), exclusive domain of human workers. Service jobs and construction jobs in particular seem immune to the forces of robotization.

Case in point - robots, on their own, could never build something like this, right:

 

This picture, sourced from an article on the NPR Krulwich Wonders blog, is of a brick tower designed by Swiss architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler. The entire 20-foot tall tower was assembled by a team of four flying robots that grabbed each brick individually, then flew to the correct place on the rising tower, and finally set the brick in place before returning to the dispenser to re-start the process. The battery powered robots periodically stopped their work to plug in for a recharge when their batteries were running down.

Sure, it took humans to design the tower, build and program the flying construction robots, and monitor the entire process, but eventually couldn't the building, programming, and monitoring tasks themselves be automated?

You can take a closer look and see the flying robots in action on the video below, (email and RSS subscribers will have to click though). While you watch the video I challenge you to think just for a moment about our generally held ideas about labor, automation, and the future of work.

Eventually, is there going to be anything the robots can't do?

Check out the new and improved Fistful of Talent

For the last couple of years I have been a contributor on the outstanding blog Fistful of Talent. Last week Fistful re-launched with a fantastic new design and layout that does a great job of highlighting the contributions from the superb team of writers.Fight!

Today on FOT, my friend R.J. Morris takes on one of my favorite topics - how relentless technological progress, increased automation, and improving robotics are pressuring the workforce, even in so-called 'creative' fields of endeavor. Check out R.J.'s post, 'What HR Jobs are at Risk', as well as the rest of the new Fistful of Talent, you will be glad you did.

Thanks R.J. for the mention today, and thanks to everyone at FOT for the work you all do and for allowing me to play along too.