At Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center their's a new factor in innovation: teams of anthropologists who study how people interact with machines (and each other) in the workplace.
It's a movie classic-but not one you'll find on late-night television. The short film opens with a scene from "9 to 5." Jane Fonda's character arrives for her first day of work. Cold-hearted boss Lily Tomlin guides her to the Xerox room, fires off the incomprehensible instructions for operating a monstrous copier, then leaves an overwhelmed Jane to her own devices.
The scene shifts to real life: a time-lapse videotape of two men in jeans trying to make double-sided copies with a state-of-the-art Xerox copier. In growing frustration, the pair huddle repeatedly to scrutinize the instructions while a mountain of single-sided copies rises nearby. After an hour, they're defeated. One of the pair sighs: "We're S-O-L."
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Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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