Complacency

 

Complacency is all about being unoriginal and repetitive. There is nothing worse than having no ambitions or trying to move a project ahead while being complacent. Complacency is often seen in the business world when managers ask people for confirmation of their assumptions rather than seeking and using constructive and innovative ideas to proceed.

The boiling frog syndrome often catches up to corporations who are at the top, they fall due to inability to perceive the changes around their environment and react. So don´t become complacent, always challenge the way things are done…

Building Bridges

 

Some people say “its not what you know, its who you know” and they speak with truth. One of the ideas from my Ralph Katz class during IAP had me thinking about this topic and it makes a lot of sense to share with you and that is the importance of building bridges.

Everybody wants to build their powerful tower (figuratively speaking) but they forget about the bridges. The illustration speaks about having a lot of powerful towers that are not connected and as a whole is less useful than a set of towers that is connected with bridges. The interconnected towers form a system that is larger than any of the other towers (individually) and more importantly the bridges provide the means of carrying information, goods, news from one tower to all the others. We can apply this concept in business as in life. Most of the time you can get more done by relying on the bridges you have built than in your tower.

We don’t need to rely on ourselves all the time to come up with the answers. It is highly likely someone knows the answer to your problem or has expertise in that area. People with good communication skills and networking skills often leverage their connections to accomplish what on their own would be impossible. So remember, build bridges not towers.

 

Blog Trouble

 

Ok, so I have not written anything in a while and I had some blog trouble. I was trying to setup my MIT domain blog but I can´t format it so I will keep using this blog instead. It´s too bad I am not located on campus otherwise I could ask someone there how to do it. It also was a shame that since I am a distance student I could not attend the workshop to help set up the MIT domain blog.

Anyway, summer was busy with lot´s of work and as for school; well courses are a little more intense than in spring since there is only 3 months in the summer term instead of 4 like in Spring and Fall. I had some very cool experiences this summer, some of which will be the topics of the upcoming blog entries I am going to make.

Also, I am getting prepared for the Fall term. I am reviewing Ed Crawley´s material from the IAP sessions because that class resumes in the Fall and I need a refresh of the material and key concepts. I have been working on my principles list for this class. We were assigned to create a list of personalized principles we would use for designing architecture so we would have a personal tool set we can apply to system design when the course is over. Some of these principles and my thoughts on them will also be subject of future posts.

So this entry is really to inform my desire to keep blogging and resume where I had left off. It can get difficult sometimes with so much work and school and also in this case the summer (can´t blame me for wanting to go out and being active instead of sitting in front of my computer). So I will keep my readers posted  bye for now…

Uncertainty

 

     I learned a lot about uncertainty this month. I still do not know where I am going to live next month, I don’t know what my new responsibilities at work will be or how my classes will span out and how it all comes together these next two years. Ed Crawley, my Systems Architecture professor, told our class that most of the things we learn from him will not sink in until 2-3 years from, if it is true I don’t know. Maybe in a couple of years it will all make sense but right now there is too much uncertainty about everything in my life. This is all kind of ironic because my job is to reduce uncertainty for the managers to be able to make decisions. Uncertainty is a big part of our lives, how we deal with it is what makes the difference.

     When facing an important decision in business as in life, the less uncertainty we have means we can make better decisions to lead us forward. That is why people and tools that reduce uncertainty are so important. Take the weather channel for instance; the predictions help reduce uncertainty about the temperature and climatological conditions therefore it is useful. Anytime we find something that helps us reduce uncertainty, we should learn to value it highly.

Detroit coming back

 

Being here in Detroit I have noticed a large city wide campaign to raise Motor City back to its former glory. Well maybe not its former glory but definitely the scene here is picking up as the economy and auto industry recovers. In case you missed the Superbowl, here is the Chrysler-Eminem commercial.

Some people argue that Chrysler, a company that was bailed out with tax-payer money, should not have spent millions on a Superbowl ad. But actually I am quite pleased with it and it clearly shows Eminem´s support of Detroit and the auto industry. The commercial is deeper than just a Chrysler ad for its 200, it is a demonstration of something larger: the US auto industry and what Detroit symbolically represents for manufacturing in America.

I am sure the next two years will be an exciting time here in Detroit as much is happening and mostly good things.

Challenger Explosion

 

In the Human Side of Technology, one of my January session classes, Ralph Katz discussed the challenger incident. Last week was the 25th anniversary of the accident. It was really interesting to see an inside perspective on how the events occurred. We only saw part of the story of course (we never get the full story), the best part was when the Morton Thiokol senior VP tells Bob Lund (VP of engineering) to take off his engineers hat and put on his management hat….ouch. The decision of giving NASA the OK to launch in such cold weather knowing there could be an issue with the O-rings led to one of the most well known Shuttle explosions in history. Also this story illustrates how sometimes the technical knowledge is not always the most relevant, knowing how to communicate and making sound decisions by taking into consideration the human factor is critical.

You can checkout the story here: http://history.nasa.gov/sts51l.html

And some videos: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/movies/movies.html

Design Challenge 1

 

   Below I am posting some links to Design Challenge 1 that has some videos one of the SDM 10 students made. We were tasked to build a robot out of Lego NXT´s to compete in several tasks. Around the end of the event we realized the challenge had less to do with building robots than it did about building relationships. The team went through the High Performance Team phases: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing rather quickly and helped us get to know our cohort better. My team was Team 9: Astroboy, the challenge was titled battle of the superheroes so we had to name our robot after a superhero. My favorite part was the presentations or Demo/Parade.

   The challenge made me realize how important it is to build relationships in order to work effectively as a team. The task put into perspective some of the personal network building principles we were taught. In order for networks to be useful, one must actively participate in the network, in other words: give your personal network maintenance. I think that will be the real challenge more than forming a personal network.

Cheers!!