 My name is Jesse Brogan and I am a performance engineer who wandered off the reservation. In more detail, I hold degrees in industrial engineering and law, and worked as an engineer for the Army and Navy for over three decades. In the past, educators have not commonly taught this material, so there is little common foundation for approaching the subject of human performance. Part of the educational effort is providing that foundation. In 1983, working at Fort Meade in Maryland, I noted where the Army's purchasing and property management system cost $15 to buy even a $2 item. As the local efficiency expert, I suggested a simplified method that would save the Army over $50 million a year. The people who were able to evaluate it were apologetic in response. They could appreciate the benefit. They were unable to make the change. There were too many people involved in the effort. They were also unable to initiate action that would bring all those many other involved groups to come together to implement the needed changes. It would have to address impacts on their areas. There were just too many players with diverse interests. And so I became a management researcher, seeing what could be done to remedy the situation where management could not do such a simple change for such an obvious benefit. It was soon apparent that this wasn't just Army management that had this challenge. Most larger corporate management efforts were using a similar property purchase and management system. Even hiring retired military members to run them. The answer was that modern management itself had not just embraced the inefficiency, but had built in limits by the way it was running organizations. And so I applied basic efficiency engineering to management and derived an alternative structure and operation that would perhaps cut the cost of large management organizations in half. By 1993, I had established an efficient new approach for the structure and operation of large organizations. I formed OEE Incorporated to present the results, structuring a course of study that would provide benefit to senior leaders. When I attempted to market the course, it was not so much rejected as uttered or ignored. There was no response at all. There was zero interest by those who would have to take action on changes. There was so little interest that leadership didn't even address it back to me. It was much like the response I got on the original suggestion. Neither business nor engineering schools showed any interest as those who hired their graduates did not promote it, preparation of students with new knowledge and skills that would not support graduate employment. It was not surprising, but I had hoped for at least some interest. I knew that any application would result in such proof of value that it would all but force response. Still, I was able to publish in technical journals and eventually even produced a course textbook, but there was no interest. I continued development, finding myself able to identify and present solutions to many of our challenges that were obviously not yielding to more traditional management approaches. It was good industrial engineering and quite publishable, but did not generate business applications. One common understanding in business is that there are two things that cannot be done. The first is to get engineers to communicate effectively. The second is to get management to listen to them even if they did. In 2009, I finally realized that the tools and techniques developed for management engineering would also apply to unstructured groups. I soon published articles addressing applications to our medical industry as a whole and our economy. I was off the reservation. There were no industrial engineers who provided technical support to industries and economies. The ones who commonly addressed such problems were in government. They operated departments and bureaus that addressed such things. I was addressing an audience that had no established need to listen to engineering and those who generally recognized other expertise as proper guidance. They were getting their information through economists and business leaders. I had a wonderfully valuable product without a customer base and so I applied what I learned, seeking for those who had something to accomplish through operation of industries and economies. I soon realized that those who need the technical support are people like yourselves, common people who are the effective owners of corporations. It was common people who own the United States and who own humanity itself. I found myself developing a whole new approach to civilization, one where people can set guidance upon those who they have empowered. That is the source of this course of study. It is the result of basic efficiency engineering applied to the structure and operation of human civilization. This course is not about the engineering but about applications that provide technical support for those who would own and operate humanity for their own benefit. Welcome to this course on human performance. In this class, you will be learning to accomplish things because you are human. You will be able to address performance both as individuals and as members of society and that is because you are both of these. Unique to the United States, you are not just citizens, you are we the people. You are the United States. You are a part owner of this nation, its government, and its economy. And beyond that, you are the customer of both the nation and its economy. In a very real sense, you are the only true party in interest. Our government and economy work for you. Our stated purpose in this course is student empowerment. It is empowerment to own and operate the United States, giving it the purpose of representing you and your interests and empowering it to deliver what you value. This diversion of performance approach from what we more commonly teach provides a good introduction to what this course offers. In our common approach to education, the lesson is that knowledge is power, that people in the know are those who are able to do things. In accord with this, the focus has been on student assimilation of knowledge, promoting personal future successes and what you choose to do. We will be using a different concept of success, a different concept of empowerment. It will not be based on what you are able to do. That is an activity measure. In this course, the measure is what you will be able to accomplish as a result of your efforts. We will be using scientific definition of empowerment. When we apply an effort to do something, to set something in motion, it is within the definition of work, not of power. Power is the capacity to do work and specifically to accomplish a result through a work effort. Consider that young Peter wakes in a dark room. He fumbles to the side table for a match, strikes it and lights a candle. In its glow, he can see well enough to step down into his slippers. Picking up the candle holder, he proceeds on his way, taking his light with him. And then there is Frank. And he also wakes in a dark room. Reaching over, he finds the lamp, he flicks the switch and the lights come on. He sees the whole room, he sees both his slippers and where he is going. Perhaps you think this might be an unfair comparison. Peter has a lot more work to do because he doesn't have an electric light. Frank didn't make the light. He doesn't even know how to generate electricity or to make a light bulb. Having these is what made the difference. In fairness, I also point out that Peter didn't make the match, nor the candle. And yet he ended up doing a lot more work than Frank with less result. They each knew what to do with what they had in hand. This is part of what determines performance, not just what you do. There can be great differences in what we do to gain a valued result. This course is focused on presenting our general knowledge for minimizing what we have to do to gain what we value. It is other people who have made the match and the candle. It is other people who generate electricity and made the light bulbs. Our reality is that we are greatly affected by what other people are doing or have done. There are ways to approach new potentials that can yield remarkable results. Peter could have had a lamp available too, but just never learned to use it. If he was so intent on lighting a candle that he didn't think about the lamp, it would still be there waiting. Empowerment can be in terms of helping Peter realize the opportunities that are really available and giving him the choice of enjoying the intimacy of the candlelight or the lighting of the whole room. Consider pushing against an unyielding wall. It does not move, so you have no power to move it. If you push harder than others, you still have no power because nothing is accomplished. We will be dealing with a very different understanding of empowerment. We will be working to a different foundation than is commonly understood in our current environment. It is that there is great benefit in working smarter instead of working harder. If we gather with others working together, we may well be able to move that wall. In this course, it is all about you and what you can and will accomplish. This is not determined by what you do as an individual, but by what you both accomplish and value. And even that must be seen in light of your condition, your surroundings, and the people with whom you interact. And then there is the true potential for education. It's effect upon the choices that will be available for your election. As in knowing the lamp is there, it can remarkably increase what you are empowered to accomplish. For most of you, this will involve an unusual way to approach what we do, and a different purpose to be served by education. It does not fit easily into that pattern that has become accepted as normal. In most of our education, the focus is on you as an individual in what is normally a friendly competition with others in the classroom. The currently accepted focus is both on learning as a way to succeed and by becoming the best among all, or at least the best that you can be. It is based on learning as a way to better yourself or to become more valuable than those who are not as well educated. In this classroom, you are not to be rewarded for overcoming or besting others. That does not promote performance. Most of what we accomplish is done with the coordinated efforts of people, with people working together for what people value. And at first, this may seem strange, as it is a break from our regular educational format. This course is not easily evaluated in accord with the rest of our educational experiences, but will necessarily be judged in accord with your own needs and expectations. What I have done is to prepare a short questionnaire that will support your own eventual evaluation of what you are able to receive in passing through this experience. It begins with expectations, with hopes for the results of your own experience and the lessons that follow. I would ask that you fill in the first part of this form with an understanding that I will collect and preserve these for your use at the completion of the course. It is by these means that you will be able to have a fairly clear indication of whether you have achieved what you expected or address places where expectations were not met or were exceeded. Please take a few minutes now and set your own foundation. One of the lessons that is emphasized throughout the course is that your opinion is the one that really matters. Success is where you are empowered by what you gain. I have to tell you that I do not intend to look at these papers. I already know what is in the course and have some expectations of what I am able to provide for your empowerment. It is enough that you are able to revisit where you began this adventure in performance. Consider that there really are very few things we accomplish as individuals. We invent. True to invention, it always starts with a single person's idea. While we may attribute invention to a number of people who flesh out and bring invention to fruition, the initial concept starts in the minds of the inventor. We initiate. It is always an individual who takes the first step. There may be others who quickly join in and also invite others to do the same. But the initiation begins with some one person taking the lead or beginning an action that others join. We create artistic results. Art is in the human mind. It is an observation of usefulness, symmetry. In human enjoyment or the like, it has no form or norm. It is something that has an effect upon us rather than simply gaining some physical result. The rest is commonly achieved with the aid and support of others and often in cooperative efforts where people work together for common purposes. One statement of your personal challenge in this course is the general unfamiliarity of the whole performance approach. It is not the sort of knowledge we have been taught to apply, yet it is one that we learned in our youth because some of the basics are taught in the human family. Our approach to performance will start out feeling unfamiliar even though we all encountered it before. What commonly brings people together in their effort is shared purpose, something to result from a joint effort that is valuable to all those who participate. In this course, our joint purpose is student empowerment. It is personally valuable to almost everyone and achieving empowerment for all is a purpose that can bring us together in our personal efforts. It has value to me and I expect it to have value to each of you, sufficient for you to do your part. Your part will be to seek your own personal empowerment. Also, the prosecution of this course, we need to have a few structural rules to optimize what you get out of it. These include treating each other with respect, which will become more and more a part of the course as we continue. The way you treat each other is to become a methodology of empowerment. You will come to see ever more clearly that your interaction with your classmates is a way to practice empowerment. My part in this class is not strictly as an instructor, an expert passing to you information and techniques to learn. You will come to see that my value to you is in being technical support, in serving you in finding and receiving the benefit of personal empowerment. I am someone with technical knowledge as to how people accomplish what they value. This tells you the value that I intend to promote by my part in our joint empowerment effort. The knowledge base for human performance is really not great. It is more principles than rules. It is more application than learned activities. It is more a matter of vision than of knowledge. It is more learning cooperative strategies than how to get ahead of others. In this class you will learn to see things and to understand elements of our cultural environment in ways that allow you to find new directions for your efforts, directions that can support application of your power as owners. Consider that the first duty of any manager is to bring his or her subordinate resources together to gain a productive result. And then look at our long term division between management and labor. Instead of curing this division, modern management seems intent on maintaining it. In this sense our business leaders have consistently worked to defeat the primary purpose of management. I am not making this stuff up. Just pointing out the obvious. And it is such obvious things that we have been taught not to see. Managers are taught that management cannot be measured. But any performance person can see how it is measured. It is how much it costs to manage those who perform the work. In the last 50 years the cost of management relative to the cost of performance has grown steadily with hardly a notice by our business leaders. I will not be presenting massive amounts of new knowledge. Our challenge is not so much what we know, but understanding how to see the performance aspects of what is right there before us. The same sort of challenge arises in political government. We have all learned that ours is a representative form of government. Our challenge is not knowledge. It is vision of what we already know. If our political leaders were willing to represent all the people who elect them, then it wouldn't really matter which candidate got elected. The challenge is which people are going to get effective representation and which are going to have their wants and needs kicked to the side. It is which part of we the people will get the benefits of representation at the expense of the rest. It is the us and them orientation of modern politics. This is nothing like the nation that we were designed to be. The very reason for election into political governance has always been to represent all the people. And then we have rules where representatives arrange their efforts so that long-term representatives have more effect on Congress than those newly elected. There are rules where congressional leaders are elevated to positions of authority above other congressmen. Who is it that decided that citizens in some favored voting districts are to receive more effective representation than citizens in other voting areas? We, including myself, have been taught not to see these things. If our orientation fails and we do see it for ourselves, then we are urged to accept that there is nothing that we can do about it because we, as individual citizens, are impotent. If you step out of line, those in authority will act effectively against you. This is where we have not been effectively oriented to the power of our ownership of this nation. When the owner finds agreement on a direction of action, there is no alternative. And here we are at one of the principles upon which this course is founded. In the late 1800s, an early economist named Vilfredo Perito examined wealth in a segment of Italy. What he discovered was that 80% of the wealth was controlled by just 20% of the people. As an evolved socialist, the inequality of this struck him as grossly unfair. It is not unfair. In fact, it is normal. It is normal in the sense of a normal statistical distribution. This concept has been put to use in business by industrial engineers. If a business finds a way to handle the most frequent 20% of the causes of customer complaints, they will eliminate 80% of the total number of complaints. If a production engineer is able to handle the most frequent 20% of causes of random errors in a production process, it will reduce the whole number of errors by 80%. This principle addresses characteristics of normal populations. And people are inherently normal. For us, this course is a general rule for finding our agreement as political or a social unit. Our use of it here is in recognition that if five couples go out together and four of the five, 80%, decide on a restaurant, the other two are most unlikely to raise their own preferences again. What 80% agree upon becomes what the group agrees, and all 10 will go where the 80% are agreed. In modern activity-based thinking, we can expect a concerted effort to discover if there were some exact points, say 81.1% or 79.99%, that was the actual number who must agree, and you would be urged to support one or the other. We are dealing with human performance, and there are no exact figures. The use of this 80-20 rule is effective. Performance approach is more interested in the results than in the exactness of the knowledge we apply to get those results. You will be urged to honor your agreements with each other, and I will most certainly honor them as well. Learning to find or develop agreements and to apply them to accomplish what we commonly value is the heart of this course. And in this, you will rediscover some of the lessons we all learned of the family as in the potency of common courtesy toward each other. Hostility and contention prevent coming to agreement. Arguments, even good ones, are more likely to prevent rather than to initiate common and coordinated efforts. When it comes to accomplishment, being right is less important than discovering when and where agreement is possible. Consider that our performance knowledge includes the ultimate consistency of the reality in which we would be empowered. The performance rule is that if nothing changes in what you do, you will get the same results as the last time you did it. If you wish changed or different results, then something has to change, and you may well have to change what you do to initiate that change. And then there is the human reaction to change, and it is negative. When you make changes, even to what you do, you will face some resistance. Changing what works poorly to some improved process is still a change. It is still going to be resisted as if it was a cost. This is the reality of human reaction. It is a constant for us, and we will expand on this understanding as we go along. We humans approach every change as a cost. What this will come to mean is that you have a potential for investing in your own actions, and what we can accomplish comes with accepting a personal cost in order to gain what we value. It is the logic of investment. The technical support I provide in this is both clearly seeing the investment potential and then having tools to minimize costs while maximizing the value that can be gained from where you choose to act. We have effective ownership in the things that we do. We must accept the cost of change if we are to initiate changes. We will be applying investment logic throughout your time in this class. As I am sure you see, this course is not some repetition of what you learn in science or social studies. What you are to harvest from your efforts here is an alternative approach to your environment, one where you can be reasonably assured that you know how to enlist others or to join with them in gaining results that you personally value. It is a general course presenting human empowerment. It is my pleasure to introduce to you the Engineering Black Box. It is a general tool supporting performance and will be the subject in many of the lessons presented. It is, as you see, very simple and its power is in its simplicity. I first encountered this tool in an electrical engineering laboratory course. We were presented with a black wooden box that was closed and locked. It had two electrical connections on either end. Our task was to apply different electrical motivations to one end and to measure the effect on the connections at the other end. And then we were to design an electrical course to get that same effect. We turned in our papers and the instructor put the boxes still on open back on the shelf. We were not to see what was actually inside them. And why was this important? It was pure performance thinking. There was no need to see what was in the boxes and it didn't even matter whatever was in there. We had just designed its replacement. When we were able to work with converting inputs into outputs, we could do good engineering design without knowing what had been in there before. When it comes to performance, we can lock the details out of sight where they will not distract us from understanding how to accomplish the desired result. It was a visual tool. It was locking away those things that distract the young engineer from the performance that was accomplished by the box. Good engineering, technical support for others, was enhanced by focus on results instead of internal structures and processes. In the operation of this course, there are things for the student to gain. This includes elements of the history of performance, not only receiving the historical knowledge, but seeing what has and has not worked in our past attempts at gaining valued results. And it is every bit as valuable to know what does not work as what has worked because reality is consistent. If we do the same as in the past, we get the same results. We will specifically look at the foundation, knowledge, and principles of performance as they were developed in the study of productive work. That history, of course, includes a witness to denial of performance, showing where it has been effectively fenced in by our society. It includes the reality that it has not been previously presented as a basis for learning. It includes a number of reactions, both type and extent, that witness to how performance matters have been treated by others. There are known reactions to efforts for gaining performance that took place in the family and in the production of environment. Even beyond this, there is a study of how these tools, techniques can be used in other forums, as in general society, education, business, and even civilization as a whole. We will also be addressing processes of change, of management, and of exception management as they might serve those who come together to gain valued results. And most specifically, that empowerment involves the concept of efficiency with efficiency a measure of how much it costs us in our resources to accomplish what we value. This will be tracked through the development of business and economic applications, though that is no limit to where it is useful. Our knowledge of efficiency provides a general tool of performance approach. The basic concept is an expansion of the black box approach just introduced. When we apply it to a business effort, we need to include a second black box for customers. The business produces economic products that get purchased by customers. Customers pay for those products that they value, and their payment is incoming resource for the business. This is the performance cycle for any economic operation. The life and livelihood of the economic entity is inherent in maintaining a value-based performance cycle with its customers. The function of the business is using its income from customers to create new products. Those are the products that are delivered to the valued customers. The function of customers is sharing the products that they value from the business. What they pay becomes business income based on how those products meet their wants and needs. It is a symbiotic value relation. More on point for this class, the support of application is also able to define general interruptions in the value cycle in terms of waste. Type 1 waste is required of customers to get products but does not contribute to the operation of the business. If the customers have to wait in long lines to purchase the product, it discourages the performance by adding personal time as a cost. It would reduce the incentive for people to buy the product. Type 2 waste is where output from the business does not go to or is not valued by the customer. If people do not purchase that product, it has no contribution to the performance. It becomes a cost that earns no income. Identification of waste is one of the best ways to minimize cost and increase results. As a matter of history, far more benefit comes from eliminating waste than from improving performance processes. This will be a general theme in the course. Eliminating waste is a performance generality that will be useful in every forum. As a general rule, waste can be eliminated without any effect on performance. It is equivalent to eliminating work that contributes nothing to what gets accomplished by those who are creating valued results. The cost of failing to do this is not simply the waste, it is that those who have only orientation to doing things are likely to spend a great deal of their limited resources trying to improve those waste processes right along with those that do contribute to performance. It can markedly increase the cost of doing things without good effect on what is accomplished. This concludes our first lecture and introduces some of the concepts and techniques that will be of general value in further study of human performance. Our next lesson will start the study of historical performance. It all begins with the common family purpose of caring for family members.