February 9, 2011 Of all the things that need compressing, the most urgent is the time wasted connecting the dots of global “issues” with decisions that working organizations need to make today. We need to get on with them. Compression Thinkers have to be alert...
February 9, 2011 Scott Brinks’ has a systems view of logistics after 30+ years’ experience in all phases of it, including at the C-level doing turnarounds. He’s moved all kinds of loads, thinks lean, postponement, reverse logistics, milk runs ... He has an idea: We...
January 27, 2011 Soil, teeming with microbes and mystery, like sex, still works about as it did millennia ago. When managing soil, technology gives us more options, but not wisdom. If we use it only to prop up soil until it wears out, we’re foolish. Depleted...
January 27, 2011 Making Time to Think Many of us work in a whir – no time to ask why; no time to explore any future consequences far removed. We do what is immediately necessary, like that line in the Charge of the Light Brigade, “Ours is not to question why; ours is...
January 12, 2011 A small group of Compression Thinkers met last weekend. We decided to form the Compression Institute to make the ideas more operational. This thumbnail version of Compression Thinking came from that meeting. Vision: Assure survival and well being...
January 13, 2011 Marvin Klein and Syd Weisberg founded PortionPac in Chicago in 1964, selling to the institutional and industrial janitorial market that typically bought 5-gallon pails and 500 pound, 55-gallon drums of cleaning detergents. Decades before the book,...
December 29, 2010 Picking through obscure news, prospects for significant “pushback” by dispossessed people seem on the rise. Pushback refers to NIMBY movements, involuntary relocations, and so on, triggering social unrest, and even violence. The UN reports that urban...
December 29, 2010 We marvel how individual ants with very limited skills collectively build complex hills and social systems. But human organizations must also collectively accomplish feats much too complex for any one of us alone. So what is a better way to meld our...