Oct 8 2017
Don’t Get Too Comfortable at That Desk | Steve Lohr | The New York Times
“First there were individual offices. Then cubicles and open floor plans. Now, there is a ‘palette of places.’ New office designs are coming to a workplace near you, with layouts meant to cater to the variety of tasks required of modern white-collar workers. Put another way, it means people don’t sit in just one place. […]The new model eschews the common dogmas of work life: Everybody gets an office, or everyone gets a cubicle, or everybody gets a seat on a workbench. A diversity of spaces, experts say, is more productive, and the new concept is called “activity-based workplace design,” tailoring spaces for the kind of work done.”
Sourced through The New York Times
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Management at companies like GE, IBM, or Microsoft has just made a stunning discovery: office spaces should be designed around the work. Duh! While engineers need to concentrate undisturbed for hours, customer service reps are on the phone all day and human resources needs privacy. Product development teams need collaboration and immediate, face-to-face communication, along with confidentiality, while traders thrive in the noisy, competitive atmosphere of the trading room.
May 9 2018
Inside Toyota’s Giant Kentucky Factory | Willy Shih | Forbes
“Japanese Production Techniques, Made In America. Last month I had the opportunity to visit the Toyota facto y in Georgetown, Kentucky, which is the largest vehicle assembly plant in Toyota’s global production network. I had last visited Georgetown 15 years ago, and the site has grown considerably since then. At 8.1 million square feet, it is the largest vehicle assembly plant in Toyota’s global production network. Not only can it produce 550,000 vehicles per year, it can make more than 600,000 engines annually.”
Sourced from Forbes
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Besides the above picture and the lead paragraph, there is essentially nothing in this article that couldn’t have been written without setting foot in the plant, which is disappointing from a publication like Forbes. For informative reports on factory tours, see Christoph Roser’s Grand Tour of Japanese Automotive Factories.
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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings, Uncategorized 2