In the 1930s, after a prolonged nonviolent struggle, Sweden and Norway “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and thereby created the basis for something different. When the 1 percent was in charge, both countries had a history of horrendous poverty as hundreds of thousands emigrated to avoid starvation.
Under the leadership of the working class both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment.
The Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.
In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike.
In Norway labor seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.
Society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began in both countries when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.
Consider the Source – Sweden
Consider the Source – Norway

There is a short-sighted methodology for calculating the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) on an investment. It causes some investors to focus on smaller and smaller wins. If something doesn’t pay off for years, the IRR is so unattractive that the addled investor will focus capital on shorter and shorter term wins.
The other myopic view is called RONA. It is the rate of return on net assets. It sometimes causes companies to reduce the denominator through a reduction of assets. The “thinking” is: The fewer the assets, the higher the RONA.
Profitability is often measured by these ratios. The financial services industry has sought to simplify its practices through describing profitability by a ratio so that it can be compared across different industries. It effectively ‘neutralizes’ the measures so that they may be applied across sectors to every firm.

“You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.” — Morris Chang (Chairman and Founder of TSM)

The calculation of the IRR and RONA, based on a narrow view of costs and benefits, discounts long-term implications that include:

• The cost of the knowledge that is being lost, possibly forever.
• The cost of being unable to innovate in future, because critical knowledge has been lost.
• The consequent cost of  business being captured by emerging competitors that can make a better product at lower cost.
• The missed opportunity of profits that could be made from innovations based on knowledge that was given away.

Aevia — Consider the Source

Throughput Accounting (TA) improves profit performance with better management decisions by using measurements that more closely reflect the effect of decisions on three critical monetary variables (throughput, investment (AKA inventory), and operating expense. It is thus part of the management accountants’ toolkit, ensuring efficiency where it matters as well as the overall effectiveness of the organization.
TA is the only management accounting methodology that considers constraints as factors limiting the performance of organizations. It is the business intelligence used for maximizing profits. In contrast to cost accounting that primarily focuses on ‘cutting costs’ and reducing expenses to make a profit, TA focuses on the speed or rate at which throughput is generated by products and services with respect to an organization’s constraint, whether the constraint is internal or external to the organization.
Throughput Accounting is a principle-based and comprehensive management accounting approach that provides managers with decision support information for enterprise profitability improvement. TA is relatively new in management accounting. It is an approach that identifies factors that limit an organization from reaching its goal, and then focuses on simple measures that drive behavior in key areas towards reaching organizational goals.
Aevia — Consider the Source

“Once manufacturing is outsourced, process-engineering expertise can’t be maintained, since it depends on daily interactions with manufacturing. Without process-engineering capabilities, companies find it increasingly difficult to conduct advanced research on next-generation process technologies. Without the ability to develop such new processes, they find they can no longer develop new products. In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.” — Pisano and Shih
Aevia — Consider the Source

“Hi Scott, this is Steve.” Scott Steckley asked: “Steve Jobs?”
“Yeah,” Jobs said. “I just wanted to apologize for your incredibly long wait. It’s really nobody’s fault. It’s just one of those things.”
“Yeah, I understand.”
Then Jobs explained that he expedited the repair of Steckley’s computer. “I also wanted to thank you for your support of Apple,” Jobs said. “I see how much equipment you own. It really makes my day to see someone who enjoys our products so much and who supports us in the good times and bad.”
Jobs got directly involved in customer service, which was a part of Apple’s business for which he exercised a great deal of attention and patience. He fielded e-mails about broken laptops and intervened on support calls. CEOs of public companies are generally hands-on, but Jobs was involved in practically every detail.
When a customer asked Jobs via e-mail in 2008 why BlackBerry owners could tether their phones to their computers for wireless Internet access but the same could not be done with an iPhone, Jobs wrote, “We agree, and are discussing it with ATT.” The feature eventually came.
The value of using front line customer support to inform product development is unique in a marketplace characterized by surveys that yield a filtered view of customer relationships. The Jobs approach is truly refreshing in a world that often outsources relationship management.
Aevia — Consider the Source

When confronted with any of the following three people—and you have found it impossible to change their ways, say goodbye. These people passive-aggressively block innovation from happening and will suck the energy out of any organization.
1. The Victims
“I wanted a happy culture. So I fired all the unhappy people.” — A Successful CEO
Victims are people who see problems as occasions for persecution rather than challenges to overcome. Just when you think everything is humming along perfectly, they find something, anything, to complain about. So if you want an innovative team, you simply can’t include victims.
2. The Nonbelievers
“If you think you can or think you cannot, you are correct.” — Henry Ford
The link between believing and succeeding is incredibly powerful and real. Great leaders understand this. They find and promote believers within their organizations. They also understand the cancerous effect that nonbelievers have on a team and will cut them out of the organization quickly and without regret.
3. The Know-It-Alls
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” — Western Union internal memo, 1876.
The best innovators are learners, not knowers. The same can be said about innovative cultures; they are learning cultures. The leaders who have built these cultures, either through intuition or experience, know that in order to discover, they must eagerly seek out things they don’t understand and jump right into the deep end of the pool. They must fail fearlessly and quickly and then learn and share their lessons with the team. When they behave this way, they empower others around them to follow suit—and presto, a culture of discovery is born and nurtured.
Aevia — Consider the Source

The material has been dubbed “ultralight metallic microlattice,” and according to a news release sent out by UC Irvine, it consists of 99.99% air thanks to its “microlattice” cellular architecture.
It is so lightweight that the research team consisting of scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Caltech say in the peer-reviewed Nov. 18 issue of Science that it is the lightest material on Earth. As yet,  no one has asked them to run a correction.
“The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair,” lead author Tobias Shandler of HRL said in the release.
To understand the structure of the material, think of the  Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge — which are both light and weight efficient — but on a nano-scale.
The material in the picture above is made out of 90% nickel, but Bill Carter, manager of the architected materials group at HRL, said it can be made out of other materials as well — the nickel version was just the easiest to make.
As for the uses of such a material? That’s still to be determined. Lorenzo Valdevit, UCI’s principal investigator on the project, brought up impact protection, uses in the aerospace industry, acoustic dampening and maybe some battery applications.
Aevia — Consider the Source

The gist of the matter is this: God, as conceived by Jesus, receives and forgives the sinner, not for the purity of heart and life he has actually attained, but for that which he penitently and faithfully strives to attain.  —A. Campbell Garnett (1942)

The first requisite, if we are to move away from the disturbing inequality which now prevails among us, is, once more, a change of attitude. We shall have, no doubt, to generate a new form of disgust—disgust at fortunes that are far beyond the levels of any conceivable human wants…. A maturely moral society will be one in which the very thought of large fortunes will elicit the same kind of disgust as is elicited by an act of boorishness or poor sportsmanship.  —H. A. Overstreet (1933)