One size fits none
Written by: Ray Brimble on Decmeber 23, 2017
It’s a paradigm: "One size fits all". At once it’s a moniker of industrial age mass production marketed as flexibility, and also a harkening back to a past age when everything had one design and it was your job to fit it, rather than it fit you. Before I spent a day at the MAC museum just outside of the Ringstrasse in Vienna, I did not fully appreciate the radical departure of "choice”. At the MAC I discovered a small room, with a small glass case full of forks and spoons which looked exactly like the ones I had in my own utensils drawer at home. Why, pray-tell, would this great museum bother to showcase cheap looking forks which anyone could buy at Target? The answer was that these were some of the first modern designed utensils, custom formed to be both comfortable and elegant, while at the same time more practical than those that came before. They were designed to appeal to individual choice- personal preference was their unique sales proposition. In a way, the Target spoons I found at the MAC signaled the dawn of modern consumer/industrial consciousness.
The problem with appealing to the individual, of course, is that it costs money. So, for the next 100 years, everyone tried to strike a balance between making and selling cool stuff, and their ability to make and sell it at reasonable prices. The compromise could be stated as "Ten sizes will fit most".
Now comes the age of customization. From medicine, to transportation, to spoons and forks, we will be seeing an increasingly infinite variety of offerings, and companies' ability to provide you with just what exactly you want, when and where you want it will be their most strategic position. We are entering the age of "One Size fits none".
This all became of interest to me because I invest in the business of logistics warehousing, specifically AIR logistics facilities. Warehouses are BIG, airports are HUGE, and even the aircraft that fly our stuff around the world have become ENORMOUS!
Moreover, the people that manage all of this, seem to only want to do things big. Many of their careers are built around the metric of how expansive and expensive the things they create are. The one who dies with the biggest stuff on their resume wins.... right?
Here's the problem: many things that will go through the air logistics supply chain will become smaller, and require much more specialized handling (think bio-medical treatments designed and prescribed for one specific individual).
Big infrastructure assumes one size fits all; however, for high value/small volume stuff, one size fits none.
I submit that this seemingly obscure example is a parable for a force that ails our economy. There is nothing wrong with scale, per se; there is often economy in it. But when it ceases to provide the value and the power of customized approach, we should consider other options. Getting back to my air cargo logistics facilities example, the ecosystem is designed for big: only big gets designed, approved, financed, and bragged about in the board room. I often boast that I built 850,000 sft of air cargo facilities at Bogota, Colombia, the LARGEST air cargo facilities in Latin America. Yea me- big is bad ass! The problem is big is not the only metric creating value for the customer even though the customer is paying for big, because in real estate we charge the customer by the square foot. What if they could do more with less, perhaps through automation, maybe by utilizing height as well as floor space, or how about better flow-through and space design? Here, the value metric is not necessarily size, but rather a combination of volume and velocity: how much can they do in that space, rather than how much space do they have? Another metric is utilization; what can they do in the space, rather than the size of the space. In this example, location plays a prime role, particularly on airports where time and trajectories mean money. A final value metric example is one that is become increasingly important in today's age of customization; how agile is the space? Can it grow and shrink to accommodate varying commodities and volumes? Do its space layouts, mechanical systems and proximate relationship to other places of collaboration lend themselves to handle lots of very small, delicate operations as well as larger, commodity type transactions?
As we think about revitalizing our infrastructure in this country, we should consider these principles. Imagine building schools which could expand and then shrink and perhaps even go away over time as neighborhoods evolved? What about flexible mass transit which was not fixed on one way of moving people, but had the ability to adapt without massive additional public expenditure? Our stewardship of air, water, energy production and transmission, and food should reflect a confidence that we will continue to incrementally learn how to be more efficient as well as economical. In all of these cases we should take special care not to lock in the infrastructure principals of the present at the expense of the infrastructure of the future. Often one size fits none. Let us go forward in both our personal and public enterprises to create good things, valuable things, beautiful things, and points of pride which can evolve as we and our communities grow.