Compression WordPress Website With MindMap - Meeting the Challenges of SustainabilityMarketing Eco developed a sticky post-enabled, blog style website for Robert W. “Doc” Hall, Professor Emeritus, Operations Management, Indiana University, and author of “Compression – Meeting the Challenges of Sustainability Through Vigorous Learning Enterprises.” The website empowers Doc to self-publish articles about Compression, create topics for online discussion, and contains an embedded DebateGraph.org mind map that Doc designed and DebateGraph.org founder David Price helped to get started on www.DebateGraph.org. The new website’s sticky post capability organizes content and serves it up in a modular format that makes it easier for his visitors to digest the complex components of Compression Thinking.

About Doc Hall:

Frequently called “Doc” by industry friends, Hall is a founding member of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and received its award for outstanding lifetime service. For 22 years he was editor-in-chief of AME’s publication, Target. He also received the SME Gold Medal for outstanding service to the manufacturing engineering profession in technical communications, technical writing, and lectures.

Hall has authored and co-authored six books on manufacturing excellence, with topics ranging from the improvement of manufacturing practice to organizational development and renewal. He also has an interest in innovation, and is a judge for the PACE Award (innovation by auto industry suppliers). A prior book, The Soul of the Enterprise (1992) touched on some of the topics in Compression, so he’s been ruminating about Compression thinking for almost 20 years – reluctantly concluding that there is no “easy out.” Compression thinking applies the best ideas seen in organizing for work to the manifold problems of the 21st century.

About Compression Thinking:

The 21st century must be a turning point. Physical economic expansion that accelerated with the industrial revolution cannot continue indefinitely. The earth has finite resources, but our legacy business and economic thinking promotes expansion, assuming that more resources are always available – somewhere. Transforming ourselves to limit consumption while simultaneously increasing human quality of life for everyone is the supreme human challenge of Compression.

What to do? The basics begin with eliminating waste, not doing that which doesn’t need to be done. Then reuse, repair, remanufacture, recycle and so on. Many individuals are doing what they can to decrease their personal waste of energy, water, and materials. But without working organizations creating systems that help them do it, that effect is minimal. And careful conservation is not enough. Every technology can have adverse consequences. Unless working organizations make a new kind of thinking practical, individual measures cannot offset the heedlessness stimulated by commercial incentives.

Compression calls for a change in fundamental economic thinking — a new mindset — Compression Thinking. This begins by contemplating issues so interrelated that single engineering fixes are unlikely to let mass consumption continue. Many different imaginative changes will be necessary, under always changing conditions. Most companies have barely started. Some do a little, but claim a lot, thus laying themselves open to charges of “greenwash.” Our technical and systems issues are unprecedented, but our biggest challenge, always, is us.

So start to look behind financial facades to see the physical reality of what we do. The transformation needed is so great that it amounts to redesign. Remediating excess consumption after it has happened is not good enough — expensive too. One can only go on from the present, devising operational methods that anticipate future problems and preclude them before they happen.

The goal of Compression is in short to greatly reduce global resource consumption while globally increasing human quality of life for everyone. It is a difficult challenge, yet it is possible.

To learn more about Compression Thinking, to download the free 55 page condensed version of the book “Compression” and extended footnotes, and to learn how to start thinking differently, visit Compression.org >