How does your engineering design process stack up? or down? MIT's Steven Eppinger who is the Deputy Dean of the Sloan School of Management was recently interviewed on what aspects of product design are needed by successful companies. Professor Eppinger also leads MIT's executive seminar: Product Design, Development and Management. He is also authors a text on this subject.
I have added this to the Engineering Learning Wiki podcast page.
My alma matter, Dartmouth (albeit Tuck ... my MBA is from elsewhere) has an excellent podcast, Information as a Strategic Asset. Just this weekend I presented at Minnebar 2008; my topic was social search within the enterprise. What are you doing to leverage that knowledge? Can you imagine querying external Google, but securely receiving both internal and external results? I can!
Remember, information and knowledge comes from people. Some additional research on the Dartmouth web site brought me to this white paper, Web 2.0 and the Corporation (pdf). The information and comments are from an executive roundtable co-hosted by IBM and Tuck last year (CIOs and other senior execs from 3M, BT Group, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, DISA, Eastman Chemical, IBM, ING, Ogilvy, and Time Warner Cable). Some companies get it ... some don't. Which camp are you in?
Finally, here is a photo of me presenting at Minnebar 2008. I was doing a lighting demo on the Engineering Learning Wiki. My thanks to Luke Frankl and his camera! He also caught this nerd in the front row of seats at the very end of Minnebar 2008... using his Nokia N800 tablet! You may wish to read my other Minnebar 2008 post.
The United States Air Force's chief scientist, Mark Lewis, spoke at the 15th American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' space planes, hypersonic systems and technologies conference. During the interview he speaks to the topics of hydrogen fuel, space tourism and other issues.
After downloading the podcast, just rename the file extension from aspx to mp3. It will play fine.
Toyota has changed the economic and business landscape. Author and professor Jeffrey K. Liker explains that this success was the result of consistently applying four key management principles for organizational excellence-Philosophy, People, Problem Solving, and Process. The Lean Blog has now published a three part series / podcast of interviews with Professor Liker on his new book, Toyota Culture. In this book he notes that a key aspect to Toyota's success is culture ... in fact it is the "heart and soul of the Toyota Way"
Last night we put down my son's enrollment deposit to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (#1 ranking from US News). Erik is excited about his choice (read my entire series ... the college search from a parent's perspective). I'm also thrilled with his choice, but as a father I must consider this issue: What's the future of engineering in America?
For an answer, I'm going to pull upon my alma matter, Dartmouth. Dean Helble notes that American Media has taken a sensationalistic approach which makes it seem like "the sky is falling". In fact, this year's graduating class at Rose-Hulman had on average 5 job offers per newly minted engineer! If one keeps current, there is plenty of engineering work in the U.S.A.
Here is a quote and podcast from Dean Helble which further expands upon this subject:
Finally, some of Dean Helble's article is based upon the report written by the former president of the University of Michigan, James Duderstadt: Engineering for a Changing World.
I think Erik made a great choice, and has an excellant future!
As some of us push the concept of open access to knowledge with initiatives like Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, we are all just a "Johnny Come Lately" compared to Gresham College in London, England. They describe themselves in this manner:
For over 400 years Gresham Professors have given free public lectures in the City of London. The College is named after Sir Thomas Gresham, son of Sir Richard Gresham who was Lord Mayor in 1537/38 and who conceived the idea of building an Exchange modeled on the Antwerp Bourse. This was brought to fruition by Sir Thomas, on land provided by the City of London Corporation, and was given the royal appellation by Queen Elizabeth I.
Each month Gresham hosts five to ten new lectures, and makes them available online without charge. You may even download most lectures for optimized off line viewing. Topics range all over the spectrum, from "Proving Einstein right!" to "Debussy - Quartet in G minor, Op 10". Although not strictly engineering content, but given the value I have linked Gresham College on my Engineering Learning Wiki Seminar Page.
Do you have a varied interest in music? Are there days when you appreciate listening to Bluegrass? or Classical Piano Music? or Folk Music? Then the Northstar Nerd has a tutorial which will expand your musical horizons, and just as importantly help you find safe, free, music downloads.
Take five minutes and watch my cNet Music Download Tutorial. A valid question is: "Why focus upon cNet?" In this instance, there is a simple answer. cNet is a safe and trusted web portal / company. They insure that any download from their web site is virus, worm, and spyware free. This is important. I also use cNet for software downloads for the exact same reason.
Their music download site allows the user to browse by musical genre, and find fine musicians and groups who have made some of their music freely downloadable. In this manner, you can access and obtain excellent music ... just not from "today's popular artists" as defined by the media. Given cNet is trying to make money, and has numerable links to paid content, the tutorial will help you focus upon music in which you have interest and is free! (access cNet music download site)
For the purposes of this learning module, I used the Stationary Willberries. This excellent folk trio heralds from the Isle of Mann in the U.K.
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WNYC and NPR (On The Media) just posted a podcast of the new business book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. If you still are trying to understand the power of new collaboration tools, take a few minutes and listen to this podcast. The author, Clay Shirky, gives some excellent real world examples.
If you found this podcast of interest, link to my entire collection of Innovation and Networked Economy Podcasts.
When I first started with my present company, over 23 years ago, I became the Apple IIe expert. This required me to learn CPM/DOS, Visicalc, and beware of bending fragile hardware connectors. In a few years the IBM compatible PC came along, and I needed to learn Assembly code for installing hard drives. While these technical changes were occurring my company was exiting the mainframe computer business, entering into the internet era, and merging with another large Fortune 200 company. The one constant was change on both the technology and corporate culture fronts. I remember the day an email was sent to all research labs employees instructing us not to use the words "red" or "blue" while referring to our former companies. Obviously there was not a corporate vendetta against these two colors. My company was trying to change, and it was difficult (still is).
If you've had any similar experiences, browse on over to the Lean Blog and listen to the first of a three part series of interviews with author and professor Jeffrey Liker (University of Michigan) who just published: Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way. His book is all about the necessity of change and culture in building lean organizations.
As lean operations are imperative to successful engineering design and operations, I will add this series to both my engineering podcast search engine and engineering learning wiki (podcast page).
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If this seems remotely funny, or your curious on the efforts to teach computers humor, then link to the Scientific American's Knock, Knock, Hal's There Podcast. My final question ... does a really bad joke violate the "Three Laws of Robotics"?! Here is a link to Scientific American's full podcast series.
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