Welcome to another episode of capitalism discovery.

Last week, I had to do a self assessment at my work. At the end of it all, there was a new section that wasn’t there the last time I did it. I had to list out the instances in which I represented my company’s values.

Of course if the question was framed in a different manner, something like “tell us about the part of your work you’ve done that you’re really proud of and show us how you included our values in it?” I won’t be bothered by it. This would be different from the earlier sentence because it doesn’t question my worth, it asks me to be proud of my work and basically show it off. It doesn’t question me or my actions. But its not framed that way.

It included vague words such as Integrity, Responsibility. And I had to prove and show instances when I showed those traits. I didn’t know why I felt icky about it but then I read this.

Jack Welch was sort of a legend in the business world. We read about outrageous acquisitions and out of the box 4-D chess moves by Elon these days but Jack started it all. According to sixsigmadaily.com “He ran General Electric from 1981 until 2000. During that time, the company’s revenue increased fivefold to reach $130 billion. Welch became one of the most famous CEOs in the world. His biography – “Jack: Straight From The Gut” – sold 10 million copies worldwide.” But that’s the catch. sixsigmadaily.com wants to sell me a course. The truth is that Welch created a bunch of jargon to cut jobs and outsource GE’s work. During his term GE exited almost all of its consumer facing electronics divisions (from which the “E” in “GE” came from) and became a financial services company. I joke with my friends occasionally that every company eventually becomes a bank/lender. Apple did it. Starbucks did it. Tesla did it. This is because lending is one of the very few ways you can guarantee a return to the investors. And Wall Street loves this. And another way is cutting jobs. And Jack? He’s the master of cutting jobs.

He calls it the “vitality curve”. Every year he asked GE’s managers to group their subordinates into three categories. 20% of the subordinates went into A, exceeds expectations. 70% went into B, meets expectations. And 10% went into C, it didn’t matter what they were categorized as because they were fired. This system is called Stacked Ranking and Wall Street loves this too. People become less, short term expenses become less, line goes up, suits are happy.

Soon GE was just a holding company that offered financial services. Cory Doctorow says that the company was “getting out of the “doing things” business and converting itself into a doomed, cockamamie finance scam.”

I’m not saying that striving for efficiency is unethical. In fact, in the days of climate change incremental changes towards the collective good are essential. Reducing waste and converting energy efficiently are two of the most difficult problems we need to tackle in 21st century. They sound simple enough, but ask any engineer and they’ll tell you how difficult it is to run things as efficient as possible. In fact my first post on here was about lean management.

I cannot tell if my company is now suddenly inspired by Jack Welch or not. But I don’t feel good whenever I have to fill out documents, show proofs for all my actions and constantly prove my worth and then fill out documents again. This doesn’t feel like work, but feels like I’m back in school. Maybe this is part of the process of continuous self improvement and incremental updates.

The knight’s tour problem is a famous mathematical/computer science problem that tries to find the least number of steps required for a knight on a chess board to visit all the squares on a chess board. Various versions of this problem exist and they usually change in the size of the board, type of the board or method of solution. (See r/AnarchyChess)

My mother randomly asked this Sunday afternoon if she can quiz me about something. And she asked me what are the minimum steps a knight must take to visit all the squares on a chess board. I was stuck and didn’t even know how to start to solve the problem. And I asked ChatGPT before googling it. (See this). It gave me a bunch of algorithms and spewed out a lot of complicated words that seemed to be linked to Statistics. And before I could give a reasonable answer mom tells me that there’s a sanskrit verse that solves this problem that was written in 9th century by someone called Rudrata in his book Kavyalankara. And then I googled it and read the wiki. I’m not going to pretend that I understood the solution or even the logic.

Then the conversation strayed afar. My mother teaches Sanskrit and is very good at it. She told me that she knew about the existence of the problem and the solution for years. But she told me that she was asking herself why she never mentioned it to me. We talked about whether a person enjoying a piece of art or culture bears the responsibility of promoting or preserving it. And that sent me thinking.

Consider the case of Sanskrit. It is a rare language. A lot of people are offended when I say so. Including my mom. But the number of people who speak Sanskrit is very low and new academics who are signing up to study it is not increasing. My mom disagrees. She works everyday to promote it, preserve it and cherish it. She is at an age where she is starting to forget what she studied in her college and she is terrified that she will not be able to give this brilliant language the attention it needs.

But how much responsibility does one have? People experience so much throughout their daily lives without realizing that they’re making history. They repeat things, do things for the first time or even the last time but everything they do is a part of history. Whether or not someone else notices it is another question. But through these activities people also experience unique activities or pieces or art/culture that are specific to their region, language etc. Do they bear the responsibility to promote it? Is it okay to enjoy it as is? What about preservation? It reminded me of one of John Green’s video essays/ramblings called “Empathy and its limits” in which he says that “over a 150,000 people are gonna die today, and if I felt as strong about all of their deaths as I would about a death in my family, I wouldn’t be able to function, right? So I understand that empathy needs to have limits, but like, I feel like my empathy is too limited.”

I feel like my empathy is too limited.”

I guess the real Knight’s tour problem is not the piece of wood moving across the chess board, but the incredible people who preserve our culture by carefully taking care of it and promoting it by visiting/touching as many lives as possible. For me it represents the incredible responsibility people like my mom feel about the preservation of their culture and identity.

Yesterday night I finished my first playthrough of the Halo Trilogy. In 2022, I promised myself that I would read more books, play more games, and do things that I always wanted to. It took me a while, but I did it.

I know that I’m roughly a decade late to the party. I also know that there is enough discourse on the internet about Halo and why it is great. This is not about the game, but what it means to me.

My family was one of the first families with an internet connection in the locality, and I remember very vividly playing a Mario clone on a dusty old CRT monitor, Need for Speed: Underground 2 in a Tata Photon + store for 100 Rs/hour, and a Need for Speed clone in my mom’s school computer lab with a wheel. These are experiences that I could never forget in my life, but due to the lack of a capable machine and accessibility, I was never able to play them myself. It was always a “limited experience”. In summer 2012, I went to a friend’s house. After a while, we got bored, and my friend brings out these two boxes. I didn’t know what they were and he told me they were his “video games”. I was expecting him to just start Vice City or Cricket 07 which were the only popular ones back then. But he didn’t do that. He told me that it was an Xbox and a PS2. Never heard of those names by then and didn’t understand what he meant by that. He connects it to the TV, inserts a disk, turns it on and music starts playing. 

Halo: Combat Evolved.

New Game. Takes 20 mins roughly for the tutorial to end. My friend gives me the controller, which I’d never seen before, and the scene opens on Halo. The bright beams of light shooting into the sky, the scary atmosphere, and the familiar yet very strange architecture and colours of the buildings. And the music. Few hours later, we’re on the beach landing level on the warthog. Marines and my friends cheering me at the same time while I smash through the grunts. That memory, is burned into my brain. Core memory unlocked. I had to stop because my friend wanted to play something else. This time it’s PS2. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. He wanted to continue a level that he was in the middle of. My friends were playing this together, but my brain was stuck in Halo. Then I had to go home; time’s up. I looked up Xbox. It costs more than a month’s salary. And it ended there.

For some reason, I never really thought about Halo after that. I was playing games, but never the ones that I wanted to, just the ones that my friends were sharing with me. I remember the music and the landscape, they were in the back of my head, but never tried to play it. And in 2018 the Halo Infinite was revealed. The music hits. I immediately get pulled back to 2012. And almost a year later I get my first performance machine. But still I never had time to play with it because I was mostly using it to work or learn CAD. And then Covid hit.

In the same time I was rewatching Eva, I also watched the excellent documentary called Power On, which is basically the story of Xbox. I went ahead and bought the Master Chief Collection but didn’t really start playing it because it didn’t feel real. This is me, buying something that I want, to do something that I want. It took me a while to accept it, and I started playing. It took me months to finish Halo: CE. Weeks to finish Halo 2. And one night to finish Halo 3.

I think the reason why this is important to me is because I was able to actually finish something that I really liked. The happiness is not just because the nostalgia hit me with a grin on my face every time I was on the warthog, but also because I had the ability to do it all. This is probably not a self-actualizing need but a very self-satisfying one. It wasn’t a limited experience anymore. It was a liberating experience.

Its 11th March 2023 and I’m 23 years old (not my birthday). One of the weirdest things about growing up is watching your friends move on to different paths in life. Some are choosing different career paths, some are moving out of the country. Its weird that I have to make appointments and schedule my week to see the people I grew up with. And dealing with friends in a different timezone is hard.

Another interesting part of growing up is to have the ability to make my own decisions. Most of the important decisions in my life till now were already made for me by my parents or circumstances. But now I have the choice and my whims mean something. I have money to spend on my hobbies and buy things that provide me comfort. Mistakes are now just another stepping stone and opportunities to learn. It does occasionally feel like I’m not being responsible enough. The never ending financial/career advice from people scares me a bit. But its also important that I acknowledge their advice and take what’s best for me. Because I’m the only one who can decide that.

I’m understanding that growing up and personal growth are completely different things. My priorities were so different a few years ago and now I’ve grown into a different person. My “goals” earlier were mostly of 2 types. Things that I can never get and things I’m definitely going to get. I wanted to be an astronaut like every other kid, but I also knew I had absolutely no chance of being one. But I also wanted to get samosas and I knew I’ll get them. But these days, its different. The effort, the fight to get something that I want needs so much more energy and involves so many more variables that I have no control over. The timeline feels off too, sometimes it feels like time move so slow that it actually hurts. And sometimes even a decade feels so less to achieve “success”. Its scary to know that in a while I’ll have to think about settling down. I simultaneously have no time to live but also want this to pass immediately.

But I’m cautiously optimistic about it all.

Alright this is more of a rant than an essay/blog. I was given a small amount of budget to spend before Christmas for a work from home setup from my employer. I already had a setup ready so I decided to buy a nice pair of headphones as a gift to myself. I was even willing to spend above the given budget if the headphones are worth the price. So I went down the r/headphones rabbit hole, watched Z-reviews videos, looked at comments on the rtings forum and decided to buy *drumroll* Audio Technica M50x. Almost every single person on the subreddit either actively discourages this product or suggests something better. Because of course there’s always something better. I went to expensive stores and malls that I would otherwise never visit and tried on headphones that are almost equal to or sometimes even more than a month’s pay. And the decision came down to two options. Good pair of wired headphones or an OK pair of wireless headphones with ANC.

The usual contenders for Wireless ANC headphones were Sony WH1000-XM4, Bose QC (and other variants of it). I tried listening to each of these for at least 20-30mins and I’m sure the store cashiers were weirded out by me. But I was the only customer there so it didn’t really matter. After listening to both of the these with my own playlists (102) and other “test playlists for new cans” I came to a conclusion that ANC is a hyped up feature meant for the elite who either have people to take care of their needs or narcissists who don’t care about their surroundings. Let me explain.

There are a few reasons why ANC keeps getting recommended to people:

1. Blocks noise on planes
2. Makes the audio quality better by blocking the surrounding noise
3. You dont have to crank up the volume to feel the music

And the rest of the points are more or less the same. Blocks the noise so you can listen to the music better. And this is where the problem begins for me. I *almost* never have situations where I have to actually block the surroundings noise to listen to the music better. In fact, I don’t have the privacy or the audacity to tell my family that I won’t be able to listen to what they’re saying for a while because I’m busy listening to music or a podcast. None of my friends are in such position and nobody in my circle has that privilege. The idea that you can let your house be unattended and you can blissfully be unaware of the things happening around you is a foreign concept to me and most of the people. I have to constantly be aware of my surroundings to be either safe or at least have a sense of security. I always have to be a call away from my immediate family because I have people that depend on me. I cannot tell my the people around me that my music is so important that I’m using technology to not only drown their words with music, I’m going to actively block it reaching my ears. I don’t need headphones to block the engine noise of a plane because I never fly and if I ever do, I’m sure I’ll keep staring in awe at everything instead of listening to a podcast. I’m simply not privileged enough to actually need this technology in my life. It’ll probably be a nice thing to have, but its not for me.

So my choices are now narrowed down to wired headphones. After going through all kinds of forums, sites and reviews I decided to choose between Beyerdynamic 770 or the M50x. I really loved the metal on Beyerdynamic but unfortunately the 32ohm version was out of stock and I had to get something as soon as I can. So I went with the Audio Technica M50x.

After adjusting the EQ according to my taste (started with this) I quickly grew fond of my new pair of expensive headphones. The clamping force is fine (for me) and the treble is manageable after the EQ adjustments. The detachable cable and spare cables are a plus. I admit that I have no prior experience with hi-fi audio and maybe that is the reason why I’m satisfied with these, but who knows. Maybe in the future there are more cans on the way.

Neon Genesis Evangelion. If there’s any piece of media that I absolutely love but would not recommend to anyone then that is Evangelion. Please understand that this is not a breakdown, review or analysis of the show. This is just how I feel about the show and what it means to me.

When I first watched the show in my childhood I was a happy kid running around school and I thought it was just another anime show that’s famous. And that’s mostly why I watched it back then, because it was famous. It was a show that had giant robots with kids piloting them fighting monsters and as soon as the show entered its darker episodes I stopped watching it because frankly, I did not understand it.

But things changed when I entered watched the show again in my late teens. I was a sad, angry teenager who was constantly feeling like the world around him was crumbling down. I constantly cried about people not caring enough and being left alone fighting imaginary battles with expectations set by others. The most minuscule movements of my body used to feel like I was lifting something thousand times heavier than me and the most basic tasks felt like a burden. I felt like a burden. Existing was difficult. And I had difficulty expressing this feeling to others because I was always told to keep my head down, work hard and not bother about feelings because its futile. And then I watched the show.

For the first time ever, I was seeing my own pain in someone else. I could truly resonate with the protagonists feelings and watching him navigate through it all gave me a sense that I was not alone. Don’t get me wrong, it was still mostly a robots fighting monsters show for me. I will not pretend that I managed to understand all the themes discussed in the show, but I could somehow relate to the sensitive dialogue between the characters and connect that to the personal issues I had back then. Evangelion felt like it gets me. As the show slowly starts to grow from its beginning about a lonely kid suddenly burdened with a huge responsibility into a meta analysis about humanity’s existence I started to understand that most things around me are more nuanced and complex than I thought. Each character’s complex back story with harrowing depictions of humanity’s both good and evil, the complete disconnected nature of the show so far away from anything I have ever seen before and the haunting yet really poetic description of individual’s struggles with past trauma exposed my past vulnerable teenage self to a complex story that both worked as a fun escape from reality and also a complicated psycho analysis of deeply flawed individuals. It is also a look into the humanity and society that I was really afraid of. End of Evangelion and its surreal montage is often criticized to be pretentious and incoherent jargon, but it made sense to me. Given that the thing happening during the montage in the show was quite literally the apocalypse of existence, each characters mind goes through a whirlwind of emotions and it was something I could relate to.

While it is important to understand and interpret the show in your own unique way, it is also important to understand the situation in which the show was released and also Hideoki Anno’s state of mind while making the show. The studio Gainax was on the verge of bankruptcy before Evangelion despite partnerships with Bandai and Mayazaki. And Evangelion was their last Hail Mary attempt to save the company. And it did more than saving the company, it pushed the studio into limelight and became a behemoth. Although currently its now a shell of its past self. By now it is public knowledge that Anno was battling crippling depression and had a breakdown while making the show. As we watch the episodes, it becomes clearly evident exactly at which point it began and the show immediately starts deviating from its mecha-anime origins to something much darker. In a way Anno was using his characters to voice his struggles. Anyone who has ever battled depression will immediately recognize Anno’s cry for help. And that is what exactly the show is. Throughout the series with the help of characters and their trauma, we get a direct look into the his state. And this special view is unique to Eva.

The pandemic pushed many of us in corner and forced us to do new things and pick up new hobbies. I started consuming more content in multiple forms. Books, shows, games etc. And when Netflix recommended Eva again in the pandemic, I watched the whole show in a day. And watching this time felt somehow different from all times I’ve watched it earlier. It felt like I was watching my past self who was stuck in pain and agony; and very different from my present self. I understood the religious, philosophical themes better this time. I understood the nuance. But I realized its not me anymore. Watching it again told me that how much I’ve changed and grown over the past few years. The relationships and friends I made taught me a lot and pulled me out of darkness. I’m thankful and grateful for it.

I think I finally moved on from Eva. Thank you for everything. I hope I don’t have to go through all that again, but I know you’re there.

Lean Management, also known as the Toyota Management, is an ideology emphasizing the value of waste reduction and also standardization of parts. It is a relatively simple concept but it has proven to show significant impact both production capacity and also production speed. It has five key principles which elaborate on this method further.

Five Principles

1. Value: Identify and define the value of the product you’re trying to manufacture. Create a certain value to what the customer is willing to pay.
2. Value Stream: Create a stream through the company with emphasis on value generating departments. This way it gets easier to identify which systems to improve upon and which systems to appraise.
3. Flow: Development of a workflow for each product will make the production run smoother and also helps in identification of problems. This also helps during the product development phase to identify hindrances for the future production run.
4. Pull: “Pull” in this context means the action to take up any production job. Creating an effective pull mechanism ensures that only necessary products with sufficient demand are taken up and this optimizes the resources of the company.
5. Perfection: This is the most important step. Even though a lean management framework optimizes and increases the efficiency of the company, it’s not perfect. This step helps in identification of known issues and solving them. This step is used to make the production more dynamic in nature.

Advantages of Lean Management

1. Improves efficiency of the company
2. Reduces waste
3. Deployment of a better pull system
4. Identification issues becomes easier

Criticisms of Lean Management

Even though there are known benefits of lean management, it’s not free from criticism. Because of its scope and also its broad nature, Lean Management is considered more as an ideology than a standard procedure. And also because of lack of any consideration of the workforce, it is not considered to be a labor friendly methodology. Better ideologies such as Kanban, 5S and Six Sigma have emerged in the later part of 20th century and have taken the principles of Lean Management and made them better with today’s standards.

Covid-19 and Manufacturing Industry

To understand the importance of lean management during the pandemic we first need to analyze the situation in the current world. Due to Covid-19 thousands of employees have lost their jobs and factories around the world are shut down. But this pandemic has put another challenge in front of the manufacturing industry too and that is increasing the production of essential goods. Food Processing industry has seen significant growth and the medical equipment such as ventilators and face shields have shown a rise in demand.

Demand forecasts were revised around the world in almost every sector when the pandemic hit us in February. Consumer goods have seen a drop in demand and clinical devices such as blood pressure and heart rate monitors have seen a surge in demand. This has reset the priorities of firms around the world and Lean Management rose to the occasion to help companies cope up with erratic demands.

Lean Management during Pandemic

In Lean management more time is spent during the product development phase than actual production because if the production team can optimize the run for one batch, then it’s just a matter of volume equation. This means that the team has to reorganize and go back to the drawing board and make decisions over and over again about issues that were thought to be easy. Because of the restrictions around the world it’s not exactly easy for a firm to obtain raw material and new equipment as easily as before, let alone development for new developing projects. So existing materials and tools have to be repurposed. This is exactly where lean management is useful. It helps in identification of all the values and creates a value stream so the management already has an idea about the systems which will help the manufacturing during these troubled times. These new but technically existing tools can now be repurposed.

Due to advanced prototyping techniques and manufacturing methods such as additive manufacturing and virtual analysis of the product even before it is actually obtained in a physical form, wastage of both raw materials and also human resources is reduced. Manufacturing of rudimentary components with these techniques and raw assembly of them helps in further understanding of the final product the team is hoping for. Manufacturing giant General Electric calls this method “Moonshining” as a nod to the Prohibition era in the US. This helps in further reduction of the product development phase and more importantly reduces the already piling up stress in the workforce.

Back to Normalcy

As restrictions are being eased and the workforce is returning to the industries, people are bracing themselves for a return to normalcy. Which, for the manufacturing industry, means a sudden surge in demand again and attempts have to be made to reach the levels of efficiency of the past. Lean Manufacturing helps in reduction of waste all around the factory from human resources to material optimization. Digital technologies of today have paved a path to better optimization of factories to increase both quality and quantity of production. A virtual and digital twin, as Siemens defines it, “is a virtual representation of a physical product or process, used to understand and predict the physical counterpart’s performance characteristics.” By considering various data analytics and also with the help of new computational capabilities available today, digital twins help in analysis of the product under various scenarios previously not imagined and not thought of. These procedures help in improving the quality of the product, reduce the need for physical prototypes in a few instances and, in contrast to previous technologies, reduces the product development time significantly.

Relationships and Problem-Solving

Lean Management and in turn Lean Thinking relies mainly on two things. Relationships and problem-solving habits. A company can optimize its production line and keep producing at maximum efficiency but no company knows the future and no company can be ready for a crisis like Covid-19. But due to lean thinking and digital technologies, even small manufacturers can find solutions to new problems. Because of the nature of humans, the first response to a crisis like this is either to ignore it and try to move on after this ends or to overreact, panic and cause a managerial disaster. Lean thinking helps to clear the clutter up and identify one problem at a time and helps us to solve them quickly. Since identification of value streams is in the nature of lean manufacturing, this helps in making each team’s responsibilities clear and to the point and reduces load off of the workforce. A constantly evolving workflow increases productivity during the development phase and due to availability of information including data analytics of the firm and also external market analysis, development time is reduced significantly. An important and fascinating case study of lean management is the 1997 Aisin Seiki factory fire accident. In this accident a key factory which supplies components, proportioning valves used in automobile brakes to be specific, to Toyota burned to ashes. Due to this incident critics thought that there would be a significant drop in Toyota’s production because of its lean nature and maintenance of low inventory. But to everyone’s surprise Toyota showed little to no drop in production because of its long-term supply chain relations. Because of Aisin’s Just-In-Time production commitment the production rose to normal within 2–3 days. A study published in MIT Sloan Management Review found that this was possible because of the Japanese model of long term collaborative partnerships between approximately 150 firms. The study also found that there was no central command in this operation but just an “obeya” which is a term which loosely translates to a war room.

Conclusion

Covid-19 has shown that a crisis big enough can bring a company of any scale to its knees. This crisis has proven the importance of lean manufacturing ideologies and has shown how it can be useful especially in situations where supply chain relations are in shambles. In spite of the obvious advantages with lean management and lean thinking, firms and institutions still use obsolete systems such as spreadsheets and whiteboards to solve problems. Because of their rigid nature they tend to be in an endless routine of revising deadlines and restructuring teams instead of actual product development. This crisis has given a chance for companies to adapt to situations. The dynamic nature of lean thinking has increased transparency and reduced the need for briefings for every meeting. It is important to understand that digital manufacturing is not a stand-alone project but goes hand in hand with lean thinking. Covid-19 has shown the importance of supply chain relations, innovation and also crisis management. This is the time to rethink development strategies, learn lessons and grow out of the crisis and build on these ideologies.