http://robtone.mine.nu/

This is a site about Detroit innovation. Graham, my boss, was down at Dagenham yesterday and the subject of Focus Hope came up. Fortunately I visited this amazing place a year ago and I passed my observations onto Graham at the time. He remembered enough to be at least as well up on FH as anyone else in the room. So � after NYC its Motorcity for me. I am shuffling dates and locations just now. (Graham had a good story about how one of the Ford guys had to help out with food parcels at FH � one of its co-founders was a nun � but it has this amazing string of supporters including Clinton B.) I have given my ticket for Hughes Hall lecture on Monday week to Graham and discussed that with Nick who says there should be some interesting people there for him to talk to.

I need to do some work on MC5

I think Dearborn Heights may be the place rather than Windsor over the river in Canada. There seem to be a number of promising blues and jazz clubs thereabouts, the student radio is a blast and I can remember some of the people in the music shops so I can ask about this or that band is getting on. The Institute of Art is open 10am to 5pm and its not too far away and there is a decent bookshop in the vicinity where I got the Coltrane biography and Danto on Warhol last time. Its not too far from the airport. The flight from NYC to DTT takes about two hours and there are plenty of overnight flights back to Heathrow or Gatwick.

Dance music by and large is not involved with its own history. The exception was The History of House which emerged in 1996 and changed my life. I read it at about the same time that I was reading Eno�s Swollen Year and also the St Ives stuff on studios � a heady combination. I was very very taken with the idea of what Derrick May and his friends in Belleville had done getting old gear and pushing it in completely new directions. It was that way that I got my CZ101 for �100 � the instrument that underpins Fifths. A commentator reminds us:

�I'd say, that techno is a way to research sounds in a context of Art and Research, matching the fast impressions we take in an exponentially developing world. Some outputs are hard, straight into your face - but still minimalistic. Some outputs are rather smooth landscapes to let you stop for a moment and listen; hard music from a hard town - Detroit.�

Well that�s a nice sentiment. The core Detroit dance mentality seems to have a lot to do with Future Shock and the Third Wave. Themes which Paul W often brings out. And also you occaisionally get references to Parliament and Funkadelic. I think my starting point on that is the thought that anything can play the bass line.

Meanwhile, I have got a package of CDs to send to Seaview Music and also a draft of a letter for Charlie Alexander at Jazzwise asking for his views on one of the business propositions we are developing for MftHV. If I can get those two things away then I will feel that at least some corners have been turned.

Lots of interesting material for www.kwase-kwaza.org - especially Robert Byrd�s speech in the US Senate a week ago. I was so impressed I tried to mail a brief message of encouragement but it go bounced back.. Wow even the net has turned isolationist.

I have been advising a neighbouring organisation on a procurement path that it might follow. Kind of tricky because one of the people that might get the contract is this business. Anyway last week I wrote quite a sharp piece saying effectively that there is problem X � one way round it is to go single tender with us. Another way is to go open tender and see if anyone else has any bright ideas and that if that was the path I would suggest some people who know their way round who may well be able to think of some alternatives.

Stefan dropped by to see if I could think of some updates on an issue for next week�s Board meeting. I asked if he thought that my advice had been too hard-edged. He said he thought not as they had just rung up asking what our national contractor number is.

I have been looking at the American Management Association site which I think is rather good. For example it has some quite powerful material on competences which we may be able to recycle on the contract just mentioned (if we get it).

The professional landscape is different in the USA from the UK � one of the things that you wouldn�t necessarily appreciate if you weren�t looking hard at the issue. The Detroit Conference I am going to is run by the Society of Automotive Engineers. If you looked at the UK engineering institutions you would get the wrong idea of what SAE is like. At its simplest UK institutions are stuffy and concerned with status. The SAE is open and concerned with moving into the future � I set up a meeting with their President and Graham last year which went quite well � and indeed at the last Conference there was a large scale UK presence forefrounding UK thinking on the future of automotive. I think the AMA may be similar .

The USA was the first country into precision mass production in the second half of the 19C � mainly because of skilled labour shortages and as a result they started thinking about production engineering much earlier than everyone else. Ironically some of the artefacts that benefited from this were the Colt revolver and early operationally effectivc machine guns.

The USA management/production specialists were also the first to get to the questions surrounding the human dimension of mass production � and have been thinking about it more consistently than most other countries. The one thing they missed was Demming�s ideas which were picked up by the Japanese after WW2. I think actually there was a parallel stream of thought in the Toyoda family to be honest. The Toyota production system was used on textiles before it was ever used on cars.

I mentioned to Graham today some research that I found about 20 years go � and it was old even then � on the human impact of budgeting. We all take budgets for granted � but the budget system was a new idea once. Some US social scientist looked at the introduction of budgeting in manufacturing � in the early 1950s � and accurately observed the kinds of non-productive debate that resulted. We have an accountant here who is doing related research on the financial impact of shopfloor process improvement � and when I found this stuff in a box recently I have him a copy. He was interested to see someone adopting a similar research methodology to himself.

I have a book published in 1916 for English engineers. The plot is � hell there is a war on and we need to make our productive processes work better � a lot British shells aren�t exploding on impact. I know what we�ll see if some of the productive disciplines that the US engineers have refined might not make things better.You might ask what happened to these ideas. I am not sure anyone knows. My father was the in the second cohort of engineering apprentices to be selected for the new Royal Air Force in 1925 � the bloke who invented the jet engine (Whittle) was in the same group.

I am trying to get up to 10 Longer Stories � so far the total is 9.