David Foster

CPAC

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I was down at CPAC today, where I had the pleasure of meeting Pamela and Eric and of renewing an old acquaintance with Little Miss Attila. The highlight of the formal program so far was the talk by Mark Steyn–there are a lot of people who write very well but are mediocre or worse at public speaking, and I was pleasantly surprised by his excellent presentation.

If anyone is going to be there tomorrow and would like to get together for a drink or something, leave a note in comments.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Ace on winning the CPAC Blogger of the Year Award.

I enjoyed meeting Karol and Skye, both of whom have CPAC pictures up–also the famous N Z Bear, who doesn’t look much like the picture on his blog.

(cross-posted at Photon Courier)

Hunting the Five-Pound Butterfly

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(This is an old Photon Courier post which I dug out in responding to a post about skill shortages in manufacturing and thought might be of interest to the Chicago Boyz readership.)

The Wall Street Journal (11/16/05) covers the growing tendency of companies to do hiring based on a long string of highly-specific requirements. The article deals specifically with engineering jobs, but the same trend can be seen–though maybe not quite to the same level–in other fields, such as marketing and sales.

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Dog Language and Political Language

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(I posted this on Photon Courier in 2004–it seems appropriate for the current political season)

When you talk to a dog, you don’t have to worry a lot about using syllogisms, complete sentences, good analogies, or crisply-argued chains of logic. What he’s looking for is keywords…particular words and short phrases…like “nice doggie” or “here” or, especially, “dinner.”

It strikes me that, increasingly, the way in which politicians address the American people is very similar. It’s enough to say the words that are supposed to elicit the conditioned responses…”jobs” or “health care” or “education.” There is increasingly little effort to specify exactly what cause-and-effect relationship will cause these good things to come to pass, and why one approach might be better than alternative approaches. This behavior is most noticeable among Democrats, but is by no means totally absent among Republicans.

Interesting Automotive News

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A little less than a year ago, I wrote a post titled Any Color as Long as it’s White, about the project at Tata Motors (India) to create the cheapest car ever built–cheaper even, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the Ford Model T. Here’s the car. See commentary from India, here and here.

And in China, a company called BYD Auto is launching a plug-in hybrid which is supposed to be available for sale (in China) this summer. Interestingly, the parent company of BYD is a battery manufacturer.

These cars won’t be available in the U.S. anytime soon, and will likely never be available in the U.S. in their present forms. There are issues of regulatory compliance, of consumer expectations, and of the need for a sales and support structure. But any U.S. auto executives who think that these announcements aren’t very relevant to them need to do some remedial reading. In their book The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor point out that disruptive innovations–those destined to change the structure of an industry–tend to attack from below. They usually first appear in a form that is in some ways inferior to the existing dominant technologies, and hence are unlikely to get the attention or respect of industry incumbents. I think it is quite likely that innovations developed by companies such as Tata and BYD–whether product design innovations or manufacturing process innovations–will in the not-to-distant future have a significant impact on the U.S. auto industry.