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Big data has the potential to cut operating costs by nearly 50% across all sectors of manufacturing.

Get Satisfaction makes several interesting claims about opportunities for big data in an infographic released this month. Market segments such as manufacturing are generating far more data (966 petabytes in 2009, according to the McKinsey Global Institute survey, from which Get Satisfaction drew its numbers) than the technology sector, and there is a massive opportunity here. However, there are issues to address before providers of big data solutions such as Cloudera and Splunk can explore these possibilities. McKinsey, for example, estimates that the United States will need 140,000–190,000 more data workers than it is producing. And among the potential beneficiaries in manufacturing and elsewhere, there may not be the recognition that their data is of value, or that big data tools may be able to help them.

For more information on the opportunities offered to big data companies by non-traditional markets, and the difficulties big data providers might have in realizing them, see my latest weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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A recent survey performed by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. for the Uptime Institute lays out a clear picture of what IT managers and CIOs can do to make computing less of a drain on the resources of both companies and the Earth. The survey concludes that the cost of managing a data center is rising to the point where it’s affecting the operations of companies’ core businesses.

The report dismisses the idea that new technology and equipment are needed, saying instead that conservation could be used to double energy efficiency in the next four years and halt the growth of greenhouse gases caused by data centers. It also suggests a few key things to bring costs and energy usage into line. Suggestions include making sure data centers increase the utilization of their servers from an average of 6 percent through the use of virtualization. Improving efficiency by decommissioning older servers is also recommended.

Another way to conserve costs and energy is to assign responsibility for conservation to the CIO and to get executives involved in making decisions about data centers and IT. Finally, the report calls for an industry-wide efficiency metric for data centers, although as we’ve previously argued, getting such a metric in place will be a challenge. Doing these things should both decrease energy use but also increase the bottom line, which makes conservation a green solution indeed.

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This week The McKinsey Quaterly asks: what does stimulating the creativity of animators have in common with developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs? Apparently, a lot.

In Innovation lessons from Pixar, McKinsey writes:

Brad Bird makes his living fostering creativity. Academy Award-winning director (The Incredibles and Ratatouille) talks about the importance, in his work, of pushing teams beyond their comfort zones, encouraging dissent, and building morale. He also explained the value of “black sheep”—restless contributors with unconventional ideas.

Steve Jobs hired him, says Bird, because after three successes (Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2) he was worried Pixar might struggle to stay innovative. Jobs told him: “The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency—feeling like we have it all figured out,” Bird quotes his boss as saying “…We want you to come shake things up.” Bird explains to McKinsey how he did it — and why, for “imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.”

The piece is behind McKinsey’s pay wall, but we extract its 9 key lessons below.

Lesson One: Herd Your Black Sheep

The Quarterly: How did your first project at Pixar—The Incredibles—shake things up?

Brad Bird: I said, “Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.” A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well. We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here.

Lesson Two: Perfect is the Enemy of Innovation

The Quarterly: What sorts of things did you do differently?

Brad Bird: I had to shake the purist out of them—essentially frighten them into realizing I was ready to use quick and dirty “cheats” to get something on screen… I’d say, “Look, I don’t have to do the water through a computer simulation program… I’m perfectly content to film a splash in a swimming pool and just composite the water in.” I never did film the pool splash [but] talking this way helped everyone understand that we didn’t have to make something that would work from every angle. Not all shots are created equal. Certain shots need to be perfect, others need to be very good, and there are some that only need to be good enough to not break the spell.

Lesson Three: Look for Intensity

The Quarterly: Do angry people—malcontents, in your words—make for better innovation?

Brad Bird: Involved people make for better innovation… Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.

Lesson Four: Innovation Doesn’t happen in a Vacuum

The Quarterly: How do you build and lead a team?

Brad Bird: I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person…. I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together…

Lesson Five: High Morale Makes Creativity Cheap

The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.

Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. [what's true for a movie is true for a startup!] If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

Lesson Six: Dont Try To “Protect your success”

The Quarterly: Engagement, morale—what else is critical for stimulating innovative thinking?

Brad Bird: The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. … “You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”

Lesson Six: Steve Jobs Says ‘Interaction = Innovation’

The Quarterly: What does Pixar do to stimulate a creative culture?

Brad Bird: If you walk around downstairs in the animation area, you’ll see that it is unhinged. People are allowed to create whatever front to their office they want. One guy might build a front that’s like a Western town. Someone else might do something that looks like Hawaii…John [Lasseter] believes that if you have a loose, free kind of atmosphere, it helps creativity.

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

Lesson Seven: Encourage Inter-disciplinary Learning

The Quarterly: Is there anything else you’d highlight that contributes to creativity around here?

Brad Bird: One thing Pixar does [is] “PU,” or Pixar University. If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system. Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. [and more creative].

Lesson Eight: Get Rid of Weak Links

The Quarterly: What undermines Innovation?

Brad Bird: Passive-aggressive people—people who don’t show their colors in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away—are poisonous. I can usually spot those people fairly soon and I weed them out.

Lesson Nine: Making $$ Can’t Be Your Focus

The Quarterly: How would you compare the Disney of your early career with Pixar today?

Brad Bird: When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain…. The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery—how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”

Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.

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Ubuntu Mobile is an Ubuntu edition that targets an exciting new class of computers called Mobile Internet Devices.
UbuntuMobile, based on the world’s most popular Linux distribution, and MIDhardware from OEMs and ODMs, are redefining what can be done in mobilecomputing.

Ubuntu Mobile, a fully open source project, gives full Internet,with no compromise. Custom options may include licensed codecs andpopular third-party applications.

• Full Web 2.0/AJAX fidelity, with custom options of Adobe Flash®, Java, and more
• Outstanding media playback so you can enjoy videos, music and photos with superior quality and easy navigation
• A suite of applications that work seamlessly to meet every need of a digital parent, student or anyone who is on-the-go
• Facebook®, MySpace®, YouTube®, Dailymotion®, 3D games, GPS, maps,in short, the full Web 2.0 experience delivered into your hands as acompact and powerful device that’s easy and fun to use

The product of Canonical collaboration with Intel® and the opensource community, Ubuntu Mobile is the software that makes it allpossible.

Head over to the web site and see how complete this flavor of Ubuntu is for mobile PCs.

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McKinsey offers specific guidance on how to do this in Preparing for the next downturn. Having studied 1,300 companies, the article details the winning strategies used to survive the last economic lull by Starbucks, Verizon and Talbots, and highights others in this handy chart.

I know what you’re thinking: Verizon, Starbucks and Talbots are all far larger than your company, and you’re neither an industrial shop nor a bank. It’s true that “balance sheet adjustments” might not apply to you, but the “operational flexibility” tips sure do.

We’ll break it down. Start by thinking about 3 things:
* do cut SG&A by hiring more part-time staff
* so you don’t need to cut R&D
* so that you can continue to invest in diversifying your product offerings

Here’s how it works:

Talbots, for example, increased the flexibility of its workforce in the years before the recession, adding part-time workers during the growth period of the 1990s at almost double the pace at which it added salaried workers … Then, as the recession took hold in 2000 and 2001, Talbots also radically shifted its advertising mix away from TV and catalog operations and toward focused activities targeting customer groups with the highest sales potential. Although this strategy somewhat reduced the company’s ratio of advertising expenses to revenues (from 5.5 percent of revenues in 2000 to 4.3 percent in 2001), Talbots maintained advertising levels far above the sector in general [and] helped Talbots emerge from the recession as a leader in its sector, though it entered the recession as a challenger.

And…

… less successful companies cut their R&D and advertising more deeply [than SG&A overhead], putting them at a disadvantage for tapping the opportunities these expenditures might create. Before the recession, their productivity per employee was lower than that of the leaders, and so they had to lay off more employees during the downturn, perhaps damaging their ability to attract and retain talent in the future.

There’s plenty more the in the McKinsey piece to help you “succeed in the face of decline.” Read and learn. Several months on, we’ll bet this is knowledge you’ll be very glad to have. “Preparing for the next downturn” was authored in April by McKinsey partners Richard Dobbs (London) and Tomas Karakolev (Prague), and consultant Rishi Raj (Delhi).

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Check it out as he talks about why he went to Joost, working with Hollywood, and answers a question we’ve asked here: What is a hit for Joost?

Watch part one here, then jump over to AllThingsD for part two.

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