I just read an interview in Harvard Business Review by Edgar H. Shein (Coutu 2002). The article was of the type where you feel at home and learn something. Because it is Thursday and I'm ready for the week with all cases on service operations management thought I share my thoughts Shein.

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Anxiety can be translated as fear or excitement. These are two words where one according to me has a negative connotation and the other sounds more positive. For how is it, is the eagerness or anxiety that drives learning? To look to myself, I think I study of both excitement and anxiety. I think it's fun to learn things but I do it also because I have to get an education. Shein says that learning does not happen by itself for most want people just to be, eat and run around. This is true, or what do we do when we take a vacation? Learning takes place according to Shein at the following conditions:

Learning anxiety (change in resistance) <Survival anxiety (survival threat)

Where learning anxiety is to our motivation to not want change, not wanting to learn, to just be tough and some if nothing has happened and survival anxiety is the requirement that we have to learn because the world is changing and we need to keep up with in development. According to Shein can not anxiety translated into excitement. It is much more pressure and have from one or another direction. Shein argues that management often takes the easy route and pushing pressure learning in an organization by threatening to terminate or cuts (whip instead of carrots). For some, this leads to change and learning, but for some it can also lead to a passive wait-and-see attitude. What many organizations fail is to provide security to the security required to reduce resistance to change. Management must lead by example and use carrots to drive innovation and development.

I think definitely not the false sense of security. While I agree with Shein. I think it is better to build up excitement than anxiety. It is that small innovative companies are good at and where we as operations managers have a role to play in our large industrial companies! The old quality guru Edward Deaming's 14 points for effective leadership includes Drive out fear - drive out fear. For it is not going to be afraid of changes and improvements. One must always look ahead. If you are afraid and do not dare to evolve, competitors and drive on, and then smoke the employment and security that you were so afraid of anyway!

References

Coutu, DL (2002), The Anxiety of Learning, Harvard Business Review, 80 (3), 100-106.

As a 16 year old students and industry, it feels natural that a company must produce a product, which we did. It was a evighetsspeg for Golf-angle. How would this be designed in as simple a manner as possible? Our budget was zero, which made major constraints and opportunities limited.

ever tees first prototype

We thought that ordinary pegs has two problems:

1. They fly away and be lost.
2. The breaking, typically in the hat or breaks in the shaft

The solution was tvådelningen, ie a split peg with the top and snap together. The base remains in the ground and the top is hooked out. It always goes "off" in the linkage between the parts so that other tee is not deformed. A string concatenates the parts so that the top is not to be lost and fly away. Our first prototype was made in model clay with a standard push-button between (→). It worked pretty well, except that it went in the material. The mud was too brittle. A number of requirements was therefore the choice of materials and construction:

1. The material would be extremely durable and withstand large instantaneous strain
2. EverTee would be possible to mass produce at low unit cost
3. EverTee would meet current requirements from the Swedish golf courses on rules and environmental

Survey

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