[Gasification] What happened at Choren

Bob Stuart bobstuart at sasktel.net
Sat Jul 9 17:08:38 CDT 2011


I think that building a team to create a business is the trickiest,  
least understood area in technology.  Manipulating people with  
advertising has been reduced to a science, but developing cooperation  
and synergy has not.  The technical people have to have their heads  
full of a model of the device they are working on.  They can't do a  
good job and spare the brains to understand the financial details at  
the same time.  Similarly, the other departments have to be focussed  
on their own jobs.  This often leads to misplaced optimism about the  
progress that others can make, or a slow response when one department  
has been running on wishful thinking itself.

I know a guy who wants to develop geothermal power, which always has  
trouble with mineralization of the apparatus.  He is busy raising  
money, and can't be convinced that just using rapid fluid motion will  
not solve that problem.  If he came to grips with the time scale of  
molecular action, even in his own body, it would double the workload  
he sees ahead of himself, so he stays in denial.  Similar value traps  
abound in every job.  The ability to deceive is a strong survival  
skill, and self-deception greatly reduces the associated workload.   
Nature, however, is never fooled, so we have to be rigorous in both  
science and business.  There are situations where people can rise  
tremendously to meet expectations, and others where there is almost  
no remaining potential.  These are often confused, with disastrous  
results.

One time, a consultant was called in to reduce staff and improve  
organization at a company that had grown quickly.  Job descriptions  
were almost non-existent, but he soon identified one woman who seemed  
to be doing nothing at all.  However, everyone was adamant that she  
had to stay.  It turned out that she just went around asking in a  
friendly way how things were going, and then resolved potential  
conflicts between sections by pointing them out early.

Bob Stuart

"The essence of modern management is to make individual strengths  
productive, and individual weaknesses irrelevant."
  - Peter Drucker

On 9-Jul-11, at 12:14 PM, Tom Miles wrote:

> Tom Taylor,
>
> As you well know starting a business of any kind is a challenge.  
> When I took a business course in the 1960s they considered a sector  
> of the economy to be healthy if it had both a high rate of business  
> starts and business failures. We always seem to have a number of  
> "Starts" in gasification. I would expect a high rate of failure in  
> gasification and a low rate of success.
>
> With gasification we are often trying to start businesses in  
> several areas at the same time - preparing and handling biomass,  
> making clean gas, dealing with solid or liquid effluents,  
> reprocessing the gas to a product which may not have a market,  
> adapting the gas or liquid to secondary conversion processes,  
> developing new markets, developing distribution systems. We often  
> assume that the processes and equipment we will use in each step  
> are already "proven". We also forget that if we are good in one  
> area we are probably naive in another. Many companies that start  
> out in thermal conversion of biomass (carbonization, pyrolysis,  
> gasification, combustion) get launched when they have demonstrated  
> a small part of the process in the laboratory. That small success  
> becomes what Doug Williams calls a "funding magnet".  We have all  
> seen what financial folks can do with that. Projects don't get  
> easier when they get bigger. Or they become efforts that are  
> perpetually under-funded because the technically savvy may not have  
> the financial horsepower to move the project forward.
>
> This gasification business is not easy. To be successful the  
> systems must be simple, maintainable and reliable. Proving  
> reliability is always a challenge. You need another successful  
> business to support your gasification habit until it works. I'm  
> sure that there are easier businesses to get into.
>
> Tom Miles
>
>
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>
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