Traditionally priority has to be assigned by a person ‘in the know’ or by the team lead. He establishes the process and sets it in motion. The others follow the leader and work runs smoothly. So we hope!

Quite often people are slaves to old bad habits. And these habits die really really hard. We found that most people seemed to process materials on a first cum first basis instead of establishing priority. Since we knew we had to establish priority early, we came out with a monthly list of items with dates sorted from the immediate to later.

To have a check and make sure that we do not screw up anywhere we got people to sit together once a week and discuss the items to be taken up from the list, the following week. This is in sync with the PDCA cycle. We found that people invariably took up items which were the easiest to procure than the ones which had to be completed immediately.

Week after week we missed priority after priority until the ones marked immediate almost always bombed on our heads. Finally we decided to adhere to the list from top to bottom strictly in our weekly meetings. Things seem to have looked up since then. We are a tad slower and its difficult and a constant watch is needed to nudge the people in the right direction, but atleast we got it right this time.

No matter how I scaled or translated the spiral, it just didn’t expand at the same rate as the nautilus shell.

So I called up Google Images and tried a few different nautilus images — with exactly the same result. I just couldn’t get my Fibonacci spiral to come close.

Well, this Science News article entitled Sea Shell Spirals says I’m not the only one. In 1999, retired mathematician Clement Falbo measured a series of nautilus shells at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences, and he found that while they were indeed logarithmic spirals (like the golden spiral), their ratios ranged from about 1.24 to 1.43, with an average ratio of about 1.33 to 1, not even close to the 1.618… ratio of the Golden Spiral.

Also make your firefox look like chrome.

“Chrome is good but it’s not Jesus.”