Showing titles in Industrial & Manufacturing

First, businesses discovered quality as a key competitive edge; next came science. Now, Donald A. Norman, former Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of California, reveals how smart design is the new frontier. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how - and why - some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

"Reduce, reuse, recycle," urge environmentalists. In other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in this provocative book that this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates back to the Industrial Revolution, a model that casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. They challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world.

One of Michiko Kakutani's (New York Times) top 10 books of 2016. A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed. Businesses that once looked outdated, from film photography to brick-and-mortar retail, are now springing with new life. Notebooks, records, and stationery have become cool again.

In this New Thought classic, Atkinson looks at the law of attraction in the thought world. He points out the similarities between the law of gravitation and the mental law of attraction. He explains that thought vibrations are as real as those manifesting as light, heat, magnetism, and electricity. The difference is in the vibratory rate, which also explains the fact that thought vibrations cannot usually be perceived by our five senses.

In a world of evolving competition, economic challenges, and technological advancements, the success of North American manufacturing hinges on one critical element: leadership. In Tradition Meets Transformation, authors Laurie Harbour and Scott Walton emphasize the pivotal role of leadership in driving transformation and generational improvement within the industry.

In Rust journalist Jonathan Waldman travels from Key West, Florida, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to meet the colorful and often reclusive people concerned with corrosion. He sneaks into an abandoned steelworks with a brave artist and nearly gets kicked out of Can School. Across the Arctic he follows a massive high-tech robot, hunting for rust in the Alaska pipeline.

We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills". Many factories that operated over the last two centuries - such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn - were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production.

In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions - clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips - and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer.

Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We’re rebelling against technology that’s too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte “read me” manuals. The iPod’s clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that’s simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do.

After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other - even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand. And, incredibly, we're running out of it. The World in a Grain is the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with it - and sometimes, even kill for it.

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried 58 shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

Take a tour with the author inside more than 30 world-class facilities to experience the most remarkable innovations and highly sophisticated robotics and automation in action. Capture a front-row seat to top-brand, big-budget manufacturing in action with complex machines communicating with other machines. However, you can also learn from small-to-medium size manufacturers. Discover how some simple, tried-and-true, old-school, low-budget manufacturing processes can be game changers for industry.

This book makes publicly available for the first time the same inclusive design process used at Google to create user-centric award-winning and profitable products. Author and Head of Product Inclusion Annie Jean-Baptiste outlines what those practices look like in industries beyond tech with fascinating case studies. Listeners will learn the key strategies and step-by-step processes for inclusive product design that limits risk and increases profitability.

If you are looking to start developing your data self-defense and critical news consumption skills, this book is for you! It reflects a long-term collaboration between a statistician and a journalist to shed light on the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. The only prerequisite for enjoying this book is an interest in developing the skills and insights for better understanding news stories that incorporate quantitative information.

The audio edition of this Shingo Prize-winning bestseller provides critical insights and approaches to make any lean transformation an ongoing success. It tells you how to implement a sustainable, successful transformation by developing a culture that has your stakeholders throughout the organizational chart involved and invested in the outcome. It teaches you how to successfully navigate the politics in cross-functional process improvement projects, and to engage executives in ways that are personally meaningful to them.

In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women’s rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this audiobook unpacks the ways in which the world has been - and continues to be - remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.

Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era - the Golden Age of Apple. Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple’s creative process. For 15 years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser.

A just culture is a culture of trust, learning, and accountability. This third edition offers new material on restorative justice and ideas about why your people may be breaking rules. Supported by extensive case material, you will learn about safety reporting and honest disclosure, retributive just culture, and the criminalization of human error. If you learn to look at accountability in different ways, your impact on restoring trust, learning, and a sense of humanity in your organization could be enormous.

The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick W. Taylor introduces the concept of applying scientific methods to manage labor and operations within industries. Taylor, known as the father of scientific management, argues for efficiency and productivity through the optimization of work processes and a scientific approach to labor management. His work laid the foundation for modern organizational theory and management practices, emphasizing task standardization, time management, and worker training to increase productivity and economic efficiency.