Curious Rami

Bioengineering is the way of the future

Growing up, my parents always measured my performance in school by how I did in math and English. Although they encouraged me to learn music, it was only as a hobby and always next to math and English. As an engineer now, I very much appreciate what they did. However, after watching this very interesting and entertaining talk by Sir Ken Robinson, I wonder, what little Rami would have achieved if his creative mind had been stimulated further.

William L. McKnight (3M chairman of the board from 1949 to 1966) basic rule of management are:

“As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.

“Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.

“Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.”

Reference: 3M website

This is a good read too: A Century of Innovation - The 3M Story

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds and few have the imagination to see beyond them.

Here is an exciting commercial from BMW:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Ny5BYc-Fs

Integrated Circuit (IC) is one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century. As an engineer, I get to use them all the time and I am fascinated by how fast they are advancing. Here is an interesting article from Texas Instruments on the invention of IC by Jack Kilby:

Integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby

During the summer of 1958, TI shut down for the annual two-week, company-wide mass vacation. As a new employee, Jack Kilby had not yet accrued vacation time, so he stayed on the job and began looking for a viable alternative to the micro-module program, a miniaturization method for circuits. While studying the problem, he decided the only product a semiconductor house could make cost-effectively was a semiconductor. Perhaps other circuit components should be made from the same material as the semiconductors.

Kilby drew up a few sketches and showed them to his manager, Willis Adcock, as soon as the vacation period had ended. Adcock was optimistic, but cautious, about the new idea. He suggested that Kilby try building a working circuit, utilizing components made from silicon. With Adcock’s orders in hand, Kilby carried his sketches to the lab and asked the technicians to fabricate some silicon resistors and capacitors. He wired these parts into a transistor flip-flop circuit and demonstrated the working device to Adcock on August 28. Kilby was given the go-ahead to continue his project, and when he designed the next circuit, he integrated all the individual components onto a single bar of semiconductor material. He sketched in his notebook the complete circuit of a phase-shift oscillator on a bar of germanium.

Within two weeks, the first three oscillators were completed and ready to test. What TI managers saw on that historic day of September 12, 1958, was a tiny bar of germanium, measuring 7/16-x1/16-inches, with protruding wires, glued to a glass slide. It was a rough device by anyone’s standards. But when Kilby applied the voltage, an unending sine wave undulated across the oscilloscope screen.

It worked just as Kilby thought it would. He had solved one of the most perplexing problems associated with miniaturization. Once his invention was accepted, it would revolutionize the electronics industry. As Kilby said, “What we didn’t realize then was that the integrated circuit would reduce the cost of electronic functions by a factor of a million to one. Nothing had ever done that for anything before.”

Reference: http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/history/timeline/semicon/1950/docs/58ic_kilby.htm

Law 1 - Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
Law 2 - Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
Law 3 - Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.
Law 4 - Learn: Knowledge makes everything simpler.
Law 5 - Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.
Law 6 - Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
Law 7 - Emotion: More emotions are better than less.
Law 8 - Trust: In simplicity we trust.
Law 9 - Failure: Some things can never be made simple.
Law 10 - The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

By John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life), http://lawsofsimplicity.com/?cat=5&order=ASC

1. Poor goal definition
2. Poor alignment of projects to goals
3. Poor participation among employees
4. Poor idea generation and problem solving
5. Poor mapping of change to key processes
6. Poor reporting of results
7. Poor management of projects

By David O’Sullivan, Framework for Managing Business Development in the Networked Organization, http://cimru.nuigalway.ie/david/pdf/publications/ePaper.pdf

Yesterday, I lost my mechanical pencil at work, so I went to the stationary closet to get a new one. Of course in the interest of keeping track of the company’s consumption of mechanical pencils I had to write my name and today’s date in a logbook. In my endeavor to find a pen to write my name I discovered the coolest thing; the new mechanical pencil that I took had one lead! So I used the new mechanical pencil to sign it out.

What a great innovative idea!

I bet changing the production process to allow for adding one lead to each mechanical pencil wasn’t easy or cheap. However, the addition of the one lead is so worth the cost.

This idea is similar to shipping batteries with electronics. User satisfaction and first impression are very important; and the first step to accomplishing that is to allow the user to use the product straight out of the box.

So remember, always try your best to allow your customers to use your products straight out of the box.