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Guy Kawasaki has a post on the TEDTalks from this years TED2007 being up on for your listening and viewing pleasure.  Looking at the speakers and the topics, this looks to be an interesting set of talks for anyone interested in trends and how the world is changing from the perspective of those that are changing it. I was not previously aware of TED (If you are not either, check it out here), but I will be working my way through these and some of the older talks. Note that both audio and video are posted. I will probably do a summary of a couple of these, so watch here for more.

I was exploring  who had viewed my site on MyBlogLog.com last night and ran across this entry while “visitor surfing”. The “in-your-face” nature of the images was what first caught my eye, but then I  realized that there was someone more important or at least interesting about these images.  Someone has innovated on the shopping bag. Here are a couple of the images:

Whether you want to call this an innovation or just a good example of marketing (advertising on shopping bags is not new)  is up to you.  Either way it is a great example of someone taking a shopping bag to another level in potential impact.  If you can do this with the shopping bag, something that each one of us has probably touched thousands of times in our lives, then you can probably do this in your own field.

Another interesting part of the images is that they are possible because of the well known functional interface that we all have agreed on for shopping bags.  In the first 2 images the advertiser makes use of the fact that he can count on people using the handle thus enabling his design to work.  Although the 3rd image may be strictly accidental, the same could be said for a shopping bag with long strap intended to be slung over the shoulder.  These images also shows that the most common items are sometimes difficult to improve on because we have all standardized on their use.  We all look and use shopping bags all the time just accepting the use interface, life expectancy, disposability, limitations, and level of usefulness.

• What is a common product, service, or method that use everyday that could be improved?
• What functional interface in your product, service, or method can be used to bring new/improved value?
• Where can clever or shock advertising be used effectively to sell your product?

(original images from max.blog.az)

Jeffrey Phillips has a story on his blog “Innovate on Purpose” entitled “The Empathy Gap”. It basically starts by talking about what one politician calls the Empathy Gap.

One idea in particular caught my attention - his concept of the empathy gap. “The Politician” suggested that there was an empathy gap - simply not enough empathy for people who have less, earn less, have fewer educational opportunities.

He then goes on to equate this to an empathy gap that exists between a business and its customers. In many cases we can’t shake our own world-view as the producer of a good or service, to really see through the eyese of our consumers.

This was a particularly thought provoking item:

Generally we think of empathy as something that is exhibited when others are sick or hurting in some way. We may think of nurses or caregivers as empathetic. How often do we think of product managers or product designers as empathetic?

I think he hit this spot on in that word  empathy has a connotation of weakness or at the very least something exploitable. On the contrary to really make products that win, we need to see through or empathize with customers instead of being confrontational.

If you thought like your customer, how much easier would pricing negotiations, sales, new product introductions, and customer support be?

Seth Godin over at his blog has a post on what he descibes as a population of “polar opposites” in the work place. His nomenclature for these two are “Thrill Seekers” and “Fear Avoiders”. It’s an intersting choice of labels. He goes on to describe a thrill seeker as:

Thrill seekers love growth. They most enjoy a day where they try something that was difficult, or–even better–said to be impossible, and then pull it off. Thrill seekers are great salespeople because they view every encounter as a chance to break some sort of record or have an interaction that is memorable.

and correspondingly Fear Avoiders as:

Fear avoiders hate change. They want the world to stay just the way it is. They’re happy being mediocre, because being mediocre means less threat/fear/change. They resent being pushed into the unknown, because the unknown is a scary place.

This is an interesting way of dividing up individuals. I have heard a similar designation for people where I work. The venacular however is a little different “Proponent of Change” vs. “Process Stabalizer”. The Process stabalizer is the individual who loves order and rigor and checklists and the lack of options that these things bring. The process stabillizer likes to churn through very efficiently “the process”. They love to run full out and “perform” The Proponet of Change is the individueal that lovers to mix things up, change course, try it differently, take the most direct path, and win. The end and goal is usually the prize and the chaos incurred is simply a cost of doing business.

I can see which of my co-workers fall into which category or “mode of operation” as a natural tendency. Not to say that on “any given Sunday”, as the saying goes, your actions can be seen as being in either of the camps.

Is the fact that both these types exist a good or a bad thing? On one hand the dicotomy creates a natural conflict, much like we have with our 2-party Political System in the US. The theory there is that some competition raises the level of performance. At the same time this dicotomy provides a balance. The trick is to prevent gridlock while allowing the gentle competition to provide better results. The other thing is to understand these natural tendencies when trying to influence someone.

Seth also highlights a very important point in today’s world:

So why not call them risk seekers and risk avoiders? Well, it used to be true. Seeking thrills was risky. But no longer. Now, of course, safe is risky. The horrible irony is that the fear avoiders are setting themselves up for big changes because they’re confused. The safest thing they can do now, it turns out, is become a thrill seeker.

In today’s world status quo is a dangerous thing as you will get passed by.

What do you think?

I was actually watching an episode of “Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe” where he was working with someone making biodiesel from waste cooking oil. I was surprised at the relative straight-forward nature of the process. This started me thinking about the growth in awareness of biofuel.

For a while now I have been somewhat following the interest in bio-sourced plastics, biofuels, and carbon footprint as a factor in purchasing decisions and marketing. With Walmart including sustainability (carbon footprint and biodegradability) as factors in its Packaging Scorecard for vendors and the rise of interest in bio-sourced fuels and chemical feedstocks it is a good idea to keep an eye on this trend.  For example, in my inbox last week I noticed again that 10 of the top25 articles in Chemical Engineering on ScienceDirect are articles on biodiesel or biofuel processing.

So I decided to go to Google Trends and see what the search rates look like for some relavent terms: biodiesel, biofuel, carbon footprint, PLA.

For biodiesel I was wondering how much of thisinterest  is really linked to crude oil prices versus the publics commitment to eco concerns? So I compared biodiesel, Crude Oil, and “carbon footprint” in the same graph. (separate terms by commas to compare, neat feature). This is the comparison that came up:

(Blue=biodiesel ; Red=Crude Oil ; Yellow= carbon footprint)

I was shocked to see how tightly biodiesel and crude oil searches were linked. The cause:effect relationship is not clear however. Are people searching for biodiesel because of high crude oil prices or are they looking up crude oil prices to see how much they are saving by using the biodiesel that have already decided to use for environmental reasons? Either way the two terms are linked tightly. The other interesting thing to note is that carbon footprint is a farily new term emerging in late 2005, with press coverage picking up in late 2006. (bottom lines are news reference volumes.)

Some questions:

• Is biodiesel a hype tech  or the future?
• Do you pay more for eco-friendly products?
• Do you choose an “eco” labeled product over another product that you view have similar performance?
• Does bottom-line overrule “eco” every time?

I’d appreciate your opinions on the subject, drop me a comment or an email.

I just noticed that the comments had stopped working. Looks like they are working now.

I would really love feedback either on the post or through email as to:

• What Posts you like?
• I agree with that? but……
• You are totally wrong? and this is why…….
• What are your opinions on?
• Yeah I like more posts in that catagory.
• This or that doesn’t work, or the site would be better if.

I was reading my copy of NASA Techbriefs this morning and came across this article describing some work by Harish Manohara and Michael Bronkowski of Caltech for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. What really caught my attention was the image below (click to enlarge).

The image shows as array of Bundles of Carbon Nanotubes grown by CVD onto a substrate. Each of the pillars is a mass of carbon nanotubes. The inset image shows a close-up of one of the tips of the pillars. The original Article is here. An excerpt from which describes how the pillars were manufactured.

In preparation for the experiments, planar arrays of bundles of carbon nanotubes having various bundle diameters, bundle heights, and bundle spacings were fabricated. The fabrication process can be summarized as follows: Electron-beam lithography was used to form planar arrays of iron dots having various thicknesses and having diameters and inter-dot spacings corresponding to the desired diameters and spacings of the carbon-nanotube bundles. The dots served as catalysts for the growth of carbon nanotubes: Bundles of multi-walled 20-nm-diameter carbon nanotubes were grown on the iron dots by chemical vapor deposition. The average height of the bundles was 70 ± 2?m. The heights of the bundles were found to depend on the thicknesses of the iron dots. The tallest bundles (112 ?m high) were found on iron dots 8 ?m thick.

This work is targeted at constructing better field emission sources. The reasearches were looking to (1) understand the relationship between nanotube bundle size and spacing while also probing (2) whether bundles of nanotubes are more rubost to operation than single nanotubes.

This is worth a read. “Security Theatre” over on Seth Godin’s blog is a refreshing post. It talks about how there are many cases where we “put on a show” or a bit of theatrics for our customers. His primary example is the safety talk that we all hear before we take off in an airplane, where the speach is meant to calm and re-assure a potentially nervous crew. Excerpts concerning seating arrangments, the need to turn off electronics, and the effectiveness of that flotation device you are sitting on all gave me a good chuckle. I for one have always questioned the veracity or at least the motivation for some of the instructions you hear before you take off in a plane. What does turning off my mp3 player or cell phone have to do with the navigational system? I sure hope they have a system that is more robust than to be affected by my $100 portable music player. Should I even be on this plane if it were the case?

He goes on to make an anology to how many companies do the same thing when relating to their customers. Sometimes selling “customer experience” is much like that speach in the airplane.

• Are there situations in your interactions with customers where by eliminating these “theatrics” and getting to the truth you can provide improved customer satisfaction?
• Are there other situations where you are selling these theatrics on a commondity product and extracting more profits by doing so?

I was reading the January 11, 2007 copy of Machine Design Magazine last night. I know that was printed a while ago, sometimes I get behind on my trade publication reading. Machine Design is especially one that isn’t directly related to my day-to-day role, but I usually always at some point make sure to read it.

In that issue there was an article by Phillip Trotter of Right Hemisphere Inc. entitled “A Better way to Accelerate Learning” that caught my eye (Here is the Link). The article talks about “Just in Time Training” for mostly mechanical devices. The concept is that a person who is called in to install/fix/service a piece of equipment can, through digitization , pull up 3-D accurate diagrams of the equipment, instructions for procedures, troubleshooting information, and the like. So instead of training someone for every possible contingency this JIT training allows a technician to become productive more quickly and continue operating efficiently. The article goes on to talk about how this is brought about by a convergence of computer advancement (portability and power), increasing re-use in 3D CAD (supplier to user), and advancement in web and database technology delivery of training. Naturally, Right Hemisphere produces products to help implement this type of JIT training. Another interesting note was through open-source like sharing of CAD data from the manufacturer to the user, the cost maintaining and updating instruction/training material is severely reduced.

What really caught my eye was this image that accompanied the article.

A similar diagram is also availible in this write paper on Interactive Training at Right Hemisphere.

I have heard mention of the relative effectiveness of various training types, but this diagram and the relative amount of course design that goes into each one is particularly interesting. As I read through this chart, I looked back on my time as a student and tried to internally validate this with my own historical knowledge. I had some difficulty in validating the we only remembering 10% of what we read for example. The 90% retension of a something that you have learned through simulation and games was easy for me to grasp. I look back and vividly remember to this day my undergraduate and graduate controls courses where we learned about various types of process control through simulation. It was a computer based learning excercise where small teams and individuals would be posed with real chemical processes with their control systems. It was your job to choose between several different control implementations (P vs. PI vs. PID, or standard feedback, feed-forward, or cascade controls) and then tune these controllers and look at the realtive performance. To this day I still re-call correctly the information I learned in these simulations. At the time it was very frustrating because you could not fudge your way through it. You had to learn by trying various stategies, looking at the results, identify your failure points, correct them, and then not finish until you had proven to yourself that you had a robust solution. (Dr. Smith, you were ahead of your time)
This also reminded me of a podcast I listened to a while back on Dan Keldsen’s Blog that discussed “Learnertainment” and learning through simulation.

So taking this a step further, what are those areas in your business that could benefit from education or training by simulation?

• Are there core competencies that usually can only be learned by “time in job”?
• Are there tasks that can only be learned by doing?
• Are there mission critical or safety related items that are candidates?
• Are there large-scale systems with long time cycles that would benefit from simulation where you can see the results of your actions in a time less than years?
• Are there situations where competitive strategy elucidation by game-play could be useful?

I can think of quite a few candidates. Now is that caveat about the increasing time in training curriculum development we see as the horinzontal arrow in that image above.

Do you have a real world example of when you learned through simulation?

Do you know of an example of how your company or you are using simulation in employee training?

Write and tell me. I’ll post the good ones here.

Guy Kawasaki has a great Post on his website about the book Founders at Work. I’m gonna have to go buy the book now. If you look at the first three sentences on Amazon you get a quick idea of the book contents:

“Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? “

So Guy puts up some of his favorite passages. My favorite one from Guy’s list is:

James Hong (Hot or Not) on his first beta site. “My dad was the first person that ever saw Hot or Not besides Jim and me, and he got addicted to it! Here’s my dad, a 60-year-old retired Chinese guy who, as my father, is supposed to be asexual, and he’s saying, ‘She’s hot. This one’s not hot at all.’”

The first part of the post was also about how Guy draws inspiration from books like this, notice the picture of all his bookmarks. (I am glad to see that others do that with postits)

It is also amazing that some of these people are houshold names now, but at that stage they were just guys with an idea and the passion to make it happen.