D.Murali

Chennai: Know your HPOs, urges Dan Coughlin in ‘Corporate Catalysts’ (www.jaicobooks.com). The abbreviation is not about any ‘process outsourcing,’ but the ‘highest priority business outcomes,’ explains the author.

“These are not activities. These are specific outcomes for the organisation to achieve,” he elaborates. “Work with your boss, peers, direct reports, and staff members to clarify the three most important outcomes. You can’t provide effective management and leadership unless you know the most important desired business outcomes for your organisation.”

Managing your time is not a panacea for improving your HPOs, cautions Coughlin. “You can have a clear checklist of what needs to be done today and tomorrow and next week, you can execute everything on your checklist flawlessly, and you can still get terrible results.” Reason? “Good time management does improve efficiency, but it doesn’t necessarily improve effectiveness.”

Useful lessons.

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Intelligent transport

When you can think of ‘clever clothes’ with wearable computers, or ‘smart buildings’ that are energy efficient the e-way, why not intelligent roads? “Traffic on a modern road system is driven by many human intelligences that selfishly compete with each other to optimise the use of the road for the individual benefit of each vehicle. The result is an inefficient system prone to accidents,” rue John Tiffin and Chris Kissling in ‘Transport Communications: Understanding global networks enabling transport services’ (www.vivagroupindia.com).

A road infrastructure can be managed with AI (artificial intelligence), they argue. “Traffic control AI would link to road infrastructure AI to control the interval between vehicles and how they switched lanes and got on and off the system across the whole network. The overall intelligence of the system would have the computing capability to perceive from digital data where there were traffic build-ups and to adjust flows across the entire system to draw them down before they became critical.”

There would then be no need for cars to drive with sufficient distance between them for the driver to react, explain Tiffin and Kissling. “Cars would be able to drive with only a few centimetres between them because the system would know what was happening across the whole network and the same intelligence would be driving all the vehicles.”

Making traffic intelligent involves the ‘conjunction of RFID, sensors and observation cameras linked by telecommunications to computer hubs.’ What is made possible, in the process, as the authors note, is the quantification of ‘the status of traffic, cargo, and passengers at a global level so that interventions can be made at every level of a supply chain.’

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Tailpiece

“Our new attendance system is so smart…”

“It sends spammish-SMS alerts to staff who are yet to check in for the day?

“Also, it doesn’t allow exits before closing hours!”

**http://BookPeek.blogspot.com