In football there is an oft repeated saying that luck evens itself out over the course of a season. There will be points dropped that shouldn’t have been, and points won that were not deserved.

The sounders have had their fair share of bad calls that have cost them points (LA, Chivas and maybe RSL), last night went a long way to balancing out the ledger.

Last night falls squarely into the lucky column, and it was a good night for it happen as games don’t get much bigger than this.

Going into the weekend the play off picture was incredibly tight, 6 or 7 teams chasing the last 4 play off spots. Seattle have had trouble scoring, were travelling cross country to play the defending champions, who happen to have a 22 game unbeaten home streak and Sigi managed them to that championship.

Seattle did not play their best, but winning when you are not playing well is one of the ways to tell a good side from the rest.

Seattle’s defence was solid with a few mistakes (Marshall penalty excepted). The back four were under the gun all night, Keller pulled off a couple of great saves, Schelotto missed a penalty, the woodwork got rattled a couple of times and Marshall acrobatically cleared a shot off the line.

Seattle had few clear chances. The goal was made by Ljundberg battling through two defenders, gave the ball to Evans. Who set up Montero with a very nice through ball. The keeper came off is line to play the angle on Montero and was totally out of position when the ball came to Levesque to put away.

It was a nicely worked goal, and very much against the run of play.

With the other results this week the 41 points they have are probably enough to ensure the play offs. DC, Dallas, RSL and Toronto have to win all their remaining games to push the Sounders out the top 8. One more point is enough to make it mathematically certain that we will see playoff football at Quest Field this year and the Dallas game will be an awesome celebration.

In March the ECS said “Tonight our history becomes legend”, last nights 1-0 win over the defending champions is going to be a large part of the story.

Tonight our history becomes legend – ECS

There are three games left, the Sounders are in the thick of the playoff hunt. Yes it would be nice to have it all wrapped up before the Dallas game, but a big Saturday night under the lights with the playoffs on the line would be fun, the atmosphere will be electric. Nights like that are why I watch the game.

This has been an interesting year. Sigi Schmid and Adrian Hanauer succeeded in putting together an expansion team that has at times been very entertaining to watch, incredibly frustrating at other times with missed chances galore. The one thing it’s never been is boring.

I’ve loved every game at Quest, the season tickets were a great investment and there was no question about what was happening when the renewal e-mail arrived this week. Big thank you to the ECS and the other supporters for making the stadium the envy of the league. I can’t imagine how good it’s going to be in 2011 when Portland and Vancouver join the league. That’s going to be fun.

The question that keeps coming up in conversation is what’s been the problem with scoring?

Montero has more than lived up to his billing preseason, very exciting to watch, and while clearly not quite the finished product ready for the Premier league, I would not be surprised to see him playing in Europe after January transfer window. He would make a great goal poacher feeding off all the loose balls in the box.

Nate Jaqua is the enigma, moments of great play, his first touch is above average, but why can’t a 6’ 3” forward score with his head? He’s played for 7 clubs over the last 6 years and that is a telling stat. I wonder if he will go unprotected once again in the expansion draft in a couple of months. He is not a classic center forward able to take on defenses by himself, he seems to need players making complementary runs to create space for him to play into, and that’s not happening.

I’ve talked about Zakuani before, and it’s no secret I’m a big fan. He’s certainly on the radar of a lot of European clubs, another year in Seattle under Sigi would be great, but I think playing back in the UK is in his future. Exciting to watch, not afraid to run at defenders and as the season has gone on he’s got a better understanding of what’s going on else where on the pitch and that’s made him even better.

Then there is Ljungberg, unquestionably the best player on the pitch and perhaps the league. I love his passion and vision, whenever he gets the ball expectation builds and more often than not he delivers.

He has been asked to do a lot. Roaming in midfield close behind the front two from wing to wing is a lot of ground to cover. Close to every attack goes through him at some point on the way forward. I’m not sure if this is by design, or if he feels the success of the team rides on his shoulders.

This may have been part of Jaqua’s problem, as Ljungberg moves forward with the ball it’s forcing Jaqua out wide, out of his natural position and taking space away from Zac (or Le Toux). In turn gives less space to the defenders and Brad Evans to move forward to provide the second effort to regain possession and recycle it forward when the ball is blindly booted clear of the opponents penalty area.

The team seems to play a more natural, flowing game when Ljungberg takes less upon himself, plays a more central attacking midfield role, the game still flows through him and he still gets to scare defenders when running at them. That’s when Freddie is at his best, and that’s when the team seems to click a little better.

It’s easy to forget that this is an expansion team, with a core of players that stay together for the next couple of years this team will only get better as they build the database of other teams and each other. Its been fun, and the product on the field is only going to get better and better.

As with any company, large or small, employees are the companies biggest asset and the Toyota Production System relies on them to link the components that together make the system work.

Employees are grouped according to specialization and year of entry. Through teaching relationships and a formal mentoring program Toyota creates vertical relationships cutting across conventional “entry level-mid career-senior” hierarchies.

I get that this is contrary to what I stated in a previous piece, where solving big issues puts a premium on crossing conventional boundaries to provide solutions. This has led to a culture with of horizontal links between organisations. People in power train are expected to know who to talk to in supplier management.

This has led to a complex web of informal and semi-formal social networks where “everyone knows everyone”. These links extend across functional and geographical boundaries. Toyota sponsors numerous employee organisations and clubs based on hobbies, sports and other interests that are designed enhance these social networks.

Communication across the multiple languages, time zones and cultures is another aspect that Toyota has put significant effort into.

The company insists internal communication is kept simple with little jargon and very straightforward language

For example when making a presentation the background summary, action plan and the outcome is expected to be on a single sheet of paper or slide. Groups are taught to think in simple terms that anyone across the company can understand.

It is a combination of standardization (both language and content) and relationship building that allows a company with a global footprint be so efficient in problem solving. Toyota puts a lot of effort, some of which it’s very difficult to measure any return on investment.

In manufacturing the Toyota Production System (TPS) is the benchmark that all others measure against. Many companies, engineers and academics have spend a lot of time examining how Toyota does what it does, and I’m no different.

There is a lot to be admired in Toyota and how they do things.  I spent a little time examining how Toyota moves forward and a very large part of the success of their product line may be the setting of tough goals. Just setting the goal and expending the necessary resources to make it happen is a small part of it, it’s allowing the people to own and take responsibility that makes their approach a little different.

Setting challenging or nearly unobtainable targets like “a full product line in every country” forces the company to look for new ways of doing things and break away from established routines.

The goals are purposely left rather vague, this allows organizations to explore different strategies. It can force groups to move outside their usual functional group and collaborate with others (both internally and externally) to find the beat solution as no “right solution” exists.

This teamwork has been always central to the TPS, on the functional level each member of the team is responsible for the sucsess of the team. Teams and the TPS see these obstacles not as problems, but as opportunities to be overcome and make the team and product better. Never settling for today and continually looking for incremental improvements to go along side the leaps in technology allows Toyota to make these big goals.

Toyota believes a car can contribute to a fulfilling a need , and by association making people happy. By wanting a full product line in every country Toyota links customer fulfillment directly to its employee’s endeavors.

Toyota says they don’t make cars, they enhance people’s lives. From my dealings with people from Toyota, employees really believe this to be true. It’s buried deep in the company DNA and is why they strive to be better tomorrow.

Other companies look at the TPS, transfer some methodology, empower people to own the process, but miss the part about making the customer happy being the most important part.

I’ve been in something of a non-fiction kick for a while and a conversation with Dad a couple of weeks ago brought me to Five days in London – May 1940”. It covers May 24-28 and examines the actions of the British government and the decisisons made during what may have been the pivotal moment of the 20^thcentury.

Churchill had been Prime Minister for two weeks after Chamberlain had been forced to resign and hundreds of small ships were just starting to lift the BEF off the beaches of Dunkirk and London was being bombed almost nightly. Belgium had capitulated, and during the week it became clear France would not last much longer, and then Britain and it’s Empire would stand alone before Germany.

The book argues rather convincingly that this was the week that the Germans were closest to winning the war. It was the determination of Churchill in dragging his coalition war cabinet into a policy of total war, whatever the cost to Britain and the Empire. His main opponent was Lord Halifax, who had not felt the cost of total war was worth the price.

It’s a fascinating and rather deep look at an incredibly important moment in British history by a very good historian.

Most team principles have engineering backgrounds, which works for supervising building a car and staying in the F1 technical arms race. However watching Adrian Newey take on John Barnard and Ross Brawn does not put bums on seats, people want to see Schumacher and Hill (Senna/Prost, Mansell/Piquet and so on) battle over a season.

Flav Briatore understood better than anyone that the money coming into the sport did not depend on the technical side of things. Flav was different, he did not understand the technical side, he employed people for that. He got that it was the product on the track and the personalities that led to the fans and TV contracts that gave the teams fat bank accounts.

Flav understood that having one of those drivers led to the backing to produce the best equipment. After his debut at Spa in ’91 it was clear the Michael Schumacher was going to be one of those drivers, and Flav wanted him in a Benneton no matter who he had to screw over to get him.

Michael Schumacher was poached from Jordan on the eve of the Italian GP. This came up in a conversation I was having with racing friends a couple of weeks ago in the UK. Flav replaced Roberto Moreno with Michael, with out actually mentioning it to his current driver.

The first Roberto knew about it was when a journalist called his hotel room in Italy to ask him what he thought about this. Roberto ended up driving a Jordan that weekend as he was about the only person available at such short notice that could do the job.

When people outside hear some of what goes on (industrial espionage, trying to fix races, tampering with drivers and so on) and while it’s been going on for a long time the sport does not look good. But now, as an outsider, it’s fun to watch.

Nice article in When Saturday Comes (a long running monthly British football dead tree magazine), I tried to find an online reference, but with no luck.

It talked about Steve Zakuani and examined his choice to play collegiate football and take part in the Generation Adidas program rather than try to learn the trade in the lower divisions in Europe. It’s certainly more lucrative, the magazine claims and income of around $160,000 (both MLS salary and Generation Adidas “retainer”). Zakuani had significant interest last year from a few lover division British clubs, however had he taken that option he would be earning a fraction of that.

A number of specifically British younger players are going to colleges in the US for a year or two before trying their luck in MLS. Stuart Holden (Houston), Andy Iro (Crew) and John Culliffe (Chivas and San Jose) all took the same route to professional football.

Zakuani, like Montero is probably good enough to make a very nice living in Europe, a couple of years in a lower pressure environment with quality coaching under Sigi Schmidt will prepare him very well for that future.

Nice piece with a picture of the Sounders post goal.

One of my current projects is undergoing something I’ve not come across, at least not on this scale – scope being reduced to match the time available. I’ve heard that such a thing exists, but have never actually encountered it in the wild.

One of the predecessor events I was waiting for to complete slid a number of weeks, in a project that had no additional float time. To make the nominal non-negotiable finish date I had to my part of the project (restoration). I went to the sponsor and program manager, made my case to take some items off the deliverable list and was told “OK, show me what you have to do to make the date”

While setting the scope I included a few ground rules and assumptions for the sponsor to sign off on. It contained he usual roles, responsibilities, reporting structure and so on. One ground rule was that we had zero float and a late start would mean a late finish.

I do know my sponsor is smart enough to understand that with a fixed end date and a late start something had to be given up to pull the overall program to the left.

The project team had done a very through job during the scope and planning parts of the project, we were confident that we had the deliverable very well understood, identified the risks and felt our work breakdown structure was both accurate and realistic. It helped that we had time to be very thorough in our preparation for the project and had visibility early on that the predecessor events were starting to slide.

By tracking the predecessor events we knew a couple of weeks before the meeting with the program manager that we would be pressured to compress and were able to identify some possible options.

To begin the “what if” process we made a thorough requirement analysis. We took into consideration what was essential and got the program managers involved by prioritizing the deliverables. Understood the short-term and long-term program requirements and see how we could reduce the duration and still address them effectively and efficiently.

Once we had some initial thoughts and rough compression estimates we engaged the subject matter experts (commodity owners and factory mechanics) and ran various scenarios past them. These are the people who understand the nuts and bolts of what we were doing and were invaluable in finding additional efficiencies. Through a combination of combining similar operations, eliminating duplicate inspections, reducing set up time (30% of the time savings) and finally eliminating a number of the “not as vital as other things” (70% of the time savings) we were able to cut our flow enough to meet the project date. Again there is no float an should the .

When the WBS is created we never dug down to understand the individual jobs as a team. We rely upon the SME’s that understand their product and to give real world detailed work statements that are fed into the WBS. We had taken each commodity individually and flowed through. We had never taken the time to break the jobs down to individual operations and look for duplicate work and inspections at that level.

The biggest leson learnt is clearly that when we need to compress we can go in and get into the details and probably find a saving. The question we need to ask, is it worth the project team going to that level of detail for maybe 3-5% flow savings? And I’m still thinking about how to quantify that.

“The penalty that we’ve imposed is the harshest one we can but because Renault have demonstrated that they have no moral responsibility for what took place, it would be wrong in the circumstances to impose an immediate penalty.”

The charge was leveled against Renault, because Flav Briatore and Pat Symonds (and Piquet Jr) did this alone and had left the team, the FIA let Renault off with the two year suspended ban. Essentially a “don’t get busted doing anything this bad again” slap on the wrist. No fine or point deductions means the FIA understands the current fairly perilous state of the manufacturer’s commitment to the sport.

Flav does not have many fans in the pitlane and the FIA found a way to severely punish him by effectively banning him from any involvement with F1 or any other FIA sanctioned series. If the ruling survives the inevitable appeals FIA will have successfully removed all of Flav’s influence over the sport.

Looking at the broader picture, Renault has other problems. The team’s main sponsor, Dutch bank ING, had already announced their departure. Renault are expecting to make a loss this year and decisions about racing are not made by engineers and enthusiasts, but by suits in board rooms based on numbers, and bad publicity around race fixing will not help there.

Honda left F1 last year, BMW have stated this is their last year and the FIA is very aware that they can’t afford to loose another manufacturer backed team. The two teams that are usually mentioned as questionable are Renault and Toyota. This would leave Mercedes and Fiat (through Ferrari) as the only two car companies left in F1.

If the sport were to loose Renault and/or Toyota then the engine supply suddenly gets really tight. Cosworth reentering makes it a little easier, but Brawn, RedBull, Williams and Toro Rosso don’t have contracts with engine suppliers at a time when packaging and final design for next years car is in full swing.

Renault did not help calm things down with a statement that ended “We sincerely hope that we can soon put this matter behind us and focus constructively on the future. We will issue further information in the next few days.”

With 3 or 4 new teams and the return of Cosworth, this off season promises to be as interesting as the championship has been this year.

Today is the birthday of H.G. Wells and Google celebrated with Google-Doodle with UFO’s and Martians razing the countryside.

Brought up in a working class household he apprenticed as a draper and chemist before returning to school and eventually gaining a scholarship to what become the Royal College of Sciences (and now part of Imperial College London) where he became politically active and furthered his interest in literature before graduating.

About every article I’ve read about H.G. Wells at least mentions his politics. He described himself as a socialist and indeed was a candidate for the Labour party in the 1922 and 1923 elections. How

The one constant was his belief in a world state or government. He was part of the group that wrote the charter of the League of Nations, interestingly he opposed any mention of democracy in the charter and imagined a world where suffrage was limited to people of merit like scientists, engineers and so on. He felt that the average person could not be educated to the point of having an educated opinion on world issues and therefore could not be trusted to be part of making those decisions.

However he did believe in personal freedom, as long as it did not infringe upon the freedoms of others. He felt that the people of the world should have freedom to grow, advance by merit and fulfill their potential in a society driven by science and logic.

This view was shown time and time again in his writings, not least in probably his most famous work, The War of the Worlds. Here the unnamed artilleryman describes a utopian society hidden underground. After the defeat of the Martians, H.G. Wells envisioned the world (or certainly the UK) as a blank slate to be rebuilt. The War of the Worlds was first published in 1898 and in print ever since.

“And before we judge them [the aliens] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”
Chapter I, “The Eve of the War”.

This utopian society was reflected in a number of his books, most well known is probably “The Shape of Things to Come”. Where a world council made up of scientists; take over after the devastation of the world by war and disease.

Clearly Wells was controversial in his views, never less so in his promotion of eugenics. He was clear in his belief in selective breeding and the “sterilization of failure”. There is a suggestion that he saw the “men-creatures” seen in his book The Time Machine to be the result of world not embracing eugenics.

War of the Worlds was one of the first science fiction books I recall. I read it after it being recommended by my father. It was followed by Asimov, Arthur C Clark, Ben Bova and many, many others, but it was H.G. Wells that started my love of science fiction. Thanks Dad.

During his lifetime he was primarily known as a socialist philosopher, and he made significant and lasting contributions to contemporary politics. His writing was well known, but often overlooked during his lifetime. It’s arguable that only since his death in 1946 has he been seen as one of the true pioneers of science fiction and taken his place among the elite of the genre.