In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity
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This seems like a great opportunity for those in other professions to do the same. Laid off from your Industrial Systems Engineering job and looking for work? Help a homeless shelter optimize their processes. Accountant? Donate some time to a local thrift store to help get their books in order.
I think this could really hit the mutual-benefit sweet spot: it helps you get a job, and it helps an organization trying to benefit the community as well.
It would be very interesting to see a list of things that people have built or done just to learn and show up their work in different professions.
In theory, all the ways an employer vets someone are open to them. Review a resumé, contact references, ask other people who might know the reputation.
If this is really what's stopping them, then it might be time for someone more motivated than I to set up a non-profit to deal specifically with this sort of problem for other non-profits.
In the area where I live and work, there's a charity called Activate Good (http://www.activategood.org/) which is designed to place willing volunteers with nonprofits who need help. It's really quite cool for those of us who want to arrange for teams of people to do community service but don't have a lot of time to research worthy causes. All I have to do is tell them about how many people will be there, and they'll find something for us to help with.
They also look for specific jobs (like marketing, copywriting, IT help, etc).
This could be expanded into process engineering.
One particular non-profit I've had contact with is really bad at this. It verges on pure corruption at times.
Why receive a service for free from someone you don't know when you can pay a friend to pretend really hard that they're working?
See also Chesterton on the fence: http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2004/05/chesterton_14.html
The way I would approach it would be to attend a board meeting or email the Managing Director of the charity directly. Folks at the retail level of soup kitchens are really busy and deal with difficult people all day long. I think if you use a top-down sales technique to donate your experience you'll fare better. Yes, I believe you do, in fact, need to sell your donated time. Less sales really, and more positioning.
Source: I'm a marketer and I've failed at helping non-profits by starting too low on the totem pole. Conversely, I've also succeeded by starting at the top.
I'm not going to go around begging to be charitable, nor immerse myself in organizational politics that I don't put up with when I'm getting paid for it. I can't even begin to express how ridiculous such an idea sounds to me. At this point I'm happy to stay home and relax.
[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
You're talking about doing something even more degrading than a typical interview process.
In the charity work that would translate to you offering your expertise to build something and when you don't have time or don't feel like the software/thing you contributed is cutting edge anymore.. then you quit. The nonprofit's "Linus" now has to decide what to do with your not-so-shiny system now that nobody knows how to maintain it and, to make it worse, a nonprofit is not a project like the Linux kernel with thousands of contributors, so it might be the system you contributed is now really critical and they can't throw it under the bus like Linus would do.
So that's one side of why nonprofits sometimes say no and you have to prove your way, not only to show your are capable (most volunteers really are) but that you are reliable and committed.
Of course each nonprofit will be in a different situation so even though they might perceive you as not reliable enough, they still think they might be able with you being gone one day so they say OK.
The politics side of business you don't like.. it doesn't exist because someone decide to call that thing a "company" or a "corporation".. it exists because the beings creating them are humans. It just so happens nonprofits are also run by humans.
It's hard to say no to someone offering their time and expertise, but unless it is focused as part of a larger, on-going plan, it may do more for the volunteer than the organization.
The first is that the food bank's mission is philanthropic, so any suggestion that "you should consider operating like a well-run restaurant to be more efficient" is usually dismissed.
Secondly, most food banks are under-resourced, so they're always "stuck in the weeds" by just trying to get everyone served, and that prevents them from taking a step back and thinking about how to make things better.
The third is simply human nature, people who have been doing things for a long time are resistant to change and perceive advice from outsiders as a threat. This is usually illustrated quite well in those "restaurant makeover" types of shows, when the celebrity chef and/or restaurant consultants try to talk sense into the struggling restauranteurs.
I'm sure there must be similar organisations around the world - they are probably your best bet if you're looking to contribute your talents/time to assist a charity/non-profit.
In college we called the guys in the IE program "imaginary engineers" but in real life the discipline is responsible for making assembly lines and other manufacturing processes work as efficiently as possible. All modern manufacturers of any scale live and die by their IE departments.
on one hand its true, cuz i spent almost my entire last 2 years in 'hardcore' optimization, network flows, computer simulation etc, with only a couple 'filler' courses in facilities design, efficiency etc...
on the other hand i got into the major cuz my GPA was horrid, and my advisor who was one of the leaders of the engineering physics department was like yeah dont bother to apply to the engineering physics you should apply to orie instead...
Mainly, they had a reputation for a light workload, which people naturally extrapolated into a judgment of the discipline.
When this came up I always proposed the alternate explanation that Electrical Engineers' higher workload might, just might, be due to a sadomasochistically-macho department culture, and Industrial and Operations Engineers' lighter workload might be due to a curriculum designed by efficiency experts.
This is one example, but there are dozens. PR and marketing, organizing, programming systems, construction expertise... It happens less often than it should but frequently also more often than we hear about. Toyota just has a good PR team.
It's also a better way for you personally to get involved. Anyone can mop floors or scrape old paint. Very few have the skills you have, so figuring out how to donate your expertise is a better use of your time.
People are usually unaware of their own incompetence (I don't mean the term harshly), so I would expect hiring outside expertise seems would usually take a back seat to just buying supplies.
Often times, bookkeeping and organization become some of the biggest chores when a charity that gets big. It's quite something to watch someone manage a charity with just a bunch of Excel sheets, but I've seen that in action.
A tax break for companies that also donate time/expertise would be great, although I have no idea how you'd structure it.
But how can you solve it? That's a huge problem!
In engineering, and particularly with software, we seek to answer the small questions until we build a robust system.
1. ignore them, of course
2. give them a job
3. give them money
4. give them food
1 is awful, 2 is infeasible, you can't magically find a productive job for everyone, 3 and 4 both seem fine to me. Would you have them all buying food in stores instead? That seems like it'll take more money to get the same amount of people fed.
What would you prefer?
The only downsides I can see are (1) a soup kitchen may become a place for social networks to be established, which is also a benefit for those helped, and (2) the food-to-money ratio may be greater if a soup kitchen can buy the food in bulk (though then one might think about setting up systems where poor people can buy-in-bulk together).
As for 2, this option is actually feasible and the best of all four you have listed. It may not be possible to find a job of the same productivity as the average currently employed person, but you don't have to. As long as the productivity is positive (no matter how small), you get a benefit to society. And, obviously, the benefit to those you help by giving them a job is many orders of magnitudes higher than if you just gave them money, let alone just giving them food.
Ideally it would be a combination of money and food.
As a case in point, Norway's social safety net provides a living wage to anyone who can't provide for themselves. This involves a lot of drug users. They do end up spending some of the money on drugs, but at least they don't starve or freeze to death. I think this is a tradeoff that's worth it. You both save the effort of micromanaging and provide some dignity to people who have too little of it. If someone wants to be self-destructive, they will be regardless of the circumstances.
Because deploying engineers is not cheap too. Toyota provided more bang for the buck that is for sure, but were they in the red or black compared to just writing a check?
*at least as far as I understand.
This is the video of Toyota Production System being used in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy as mentioned in the article.
Ikea needs to hire Toyota to cut the time I shop there in half. That place is a maze! Maybe it's by design . . .
At least in the Ikea stores in my region they started to provide shortcuts. When using all of them, it's hardly 5 minutes to get through the entire shop from entry to cashier, where it otherwise takes half an hour. (but then you see practically nothing).
http://philanthropy.com/article/How-America-s-Biggest/140269...
"I've worked in the private sector... they expect results!" - Ray Stantz
The social fabric is a valuable resource ... too bad that it is near depletion in the world.
Here is some real data from a left-center think tank:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
Please show me the drop in corporate income tax collections. I don't see it. What I see is that corporate tax revenues have dramatically outpaced inflation, meaning we collect more real revenue from corporations than at any other point in history.
For example, in 1960, corporate tax revenue was ~$22B. A dollar from 1960 is worth $7.76 today [1]. To keep pace with inflation, today's revenue would would have to be ~$170B. 2012 corporate tax collections was $240B, or significantly greater than inflation.
And the further back in history you go, the more dramatic the effect.
From your numbers and the 1960 census, it looks like we were collecting $944/pp (2013 dollars). Accounting for today's population, we're now collecting $771/pp.
Assuming you buy the idea at all that corporate taxes have an obligation to feed the poor, it certainly does look like the supporting-power of said taxes have decreased over time.
But let me take a stab at it anyway.
I think its fair to say that the GP's concern is not collections per capita, but collections per person in poverty. In the 1950s, there were 39.5M people in poverty [1], while in 2012 there were 46.2M people in poverty [2]. So in 2012 dollars, we were spending ~$4500 per person in poverty in 1950, while today we spend ~$5200 per person in poverty.
Of course, you can play with the start and end dates to make the trend look different. But the fact is, by just about any measure, corporations paying quite a bit in taxes.
[1] http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/#3 [2] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2011/...
Edit: Wow, guess there is a lot of love for efficiency experts.
Amazon hires plenty of Industrial Engineers, Ops Researchers, Business Intelligence Engineers, etc. from completely different contexts. My coworker and I were both recruited away from the same company, which was in a very specialized manufacturing company (making adhesives and labels). Learning how to use the internal tools was a lot harder than adapting to a completely new context, because expertise can apply easily to new contexts through appropriate abstraction.
It's not so much that the techniques are completely different, as that people who work in the area use a set of abstractions built for that area, and are expected to know those particular abstractions, along with the terminology, typical practices, and constraints on why things are done a certain way. Maersk logistics engineers have a set of approaches built up over the years relating to the economic, legal, and technical context of shipping, for example; there's a whole pile of domain knowledge there, in addition to the general knowledge.
In petrochemicals some chemical-engineering experience is often preferred as well, since optimizing a refinery complex doesn't always break down cleanly between logistics and process-engineering specialties, so you often want people with backgrounds in both.
This isn't Amazon trying to move from 92% efficiency to 93% which probably is extremely difficult, this is a charity that probably never thought about these things seriously having folks who look for efficiencies being brought in.