After 33 years with Monsanto and Solutia, I can’t help thinking like a user. Even as a contractor, the user view pervades my motivations and goals. I would make a lousy sales and marketing person.

The tuning of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control loops was an important change at HollyFrontier’s Navajo Refinery in Artesia, N.M. Its hands-on, “mandraulic” culture was no longer cutting ...