Think Global. Act Local - after the scavenger hunt, of course.

Here we are in mid-April and I still haven't blogged about one of my favorite events that happened back in January... Just goes to show you how little time I have to reminisce when busy with a full System Design Management course load and while maintaining part time employment as a senior engineer at Raytheon.

It's only been three months since IAP (Independent Activities Period ... MIT lingo) during which the cohort of 2010 was put through "SDM bootcamp." Essentially, the month of January was dominated by cohort-building activities which consisted of early morning till late night (much to the chagrin of my wife and 18 month old son.) These sessions included Lectures, Workshops, and several team-based Design Challenges.

The program was generous enough to provide catered breakfast, lunch, and dinner during the whole month (In retrospect this was probably because they knew that we wouldn't even have time to run up the street for a sandwich) and I even gained a few pounds, prompting me to organize the SDM "Biggest Loser" weight loss contest with some of my fellow "gravitationally challenged" classmates... more on that later.

The Design Challenges were particularly interesting .. Here's how they went: The cohort was broken up into teams and assigned challengeas which were to be completed in a week or two. Teams were intentionally diverse and optimized for maximum conflict - I am kidding, but interesting team dynamics ensued -- a paranoid person might have thought that we were part of some social experiment and that there was a mad scientist observing us through a two-way mirror in a Zimbardo-like experiment.

We had three Challenges , each interesting enough to deserve its own blog post - Like a reverse polish notation calculator, I will pop my memory stack and present these backwards, starting with the one that's most recent and fresh in my mind : DC3.

For starters, DC3 turned out to be two challenges in the guise of one:

First, there was a scavenger hunt! This allowed, nay forced, us to discover the MIT campus and surroundings by looking for a mix of arcane and historic MIT-related landmarks and curiosities. The list of these is way too long to publish here. There were 50 items. In some cases you had to get a picture of the whole team in front of these places/items. I admit that, after having had knee surgery in December, the thought of running up and down the Charles river looking for "Nerd Crossing" didn't quite excite me, but I actually went through with "most" of it : we thought that we could meet the letter of the challenge requirements by photoshopping (hmm spell check didn't complain about "photoshopping," is it an official word now?) our team into the picture.

A few pictures from that hunt are below... we had to provide a charcoal rubbing of the plaque used by MIT students for good luck... Turns out that Rubbing the nose of the George Eastman plaque in Building 6 is supposed to bring good luck.

Another required item: picture of the team in front of the bar at the Muddy Charles Pub

There were several bar and pub-related scavenger hunt items, to our delight:)

Below, we found two Nerd Crossings:

After the fun and games it was time to get down to business. The real challenge!

The name of it was " Think Global. Act Local."

Each team gets a large systems issue to research. They must make a connection to a local organization. (Local organizations must be non-profit.) Each team will make a final presentation - a “sales pitch” for why SDM should support the organization they advocate.

Prizes for will be given for the top presentation in each category plus an audience choice award. Each prize is a $500 donation to the non-profit organization presented by the team.

Topics are intentionally broad. Each team will have to determine how they will decompose and or define the problem. E.g. For large scale disaster recovery, the team can identify major challenges, and choose to focus on one such as how to meet the need for potable water after a disaster. Topics :

· Improving Large Scale Disaster Recovery (e.g. earthquake, tsunami, hurricane)

· Enabling economic development with minimal carbon impact

· Promoting STEM subjects and increase participation at higher education levels

My team, team number 2 (or "team deuce" ) was assigned "Enabling economic development with minimal carbon impact."

It was amazing to see all of the team presentations and the ideas that were generated in just one week!

In my next blog post I will tell you all about my own DC3 experience in finding, connecting with, and pitching a non-profit that is all about helping build a sustainable future - How about that for a cliff hanger?

Toolkits, Platforms, Product Lines, and System Design & Management

Today I meant to write about Platforms, Product Lines, Product Line Architectures, and so on... I was especially fueled to do so after a particularly fruitful day back at the office, where I and a few other engineers at Raytheon NCS attended a rather interesting presentation describing a joint effort between Raytheon (my employer) and Microsoft termed "ASPEN" (Advanced Software Productivity Environments, I believe.) I hate to be a tease - but since it is almost all company proprietary, all I can tell you is that it had me thinking all day about toolkits, platforms and product lines... As if I needed that, after a week during which: a) "Mr Platforms" himself, Marc H Meyer (author of "The Power of Product Platforms" and "Fast Path to Corporate Growth") was a guest lecturer in one class. b) I started reading professor Cusumano's book, "Platform Leadership" c) Also started writing a paper related to software toolkits for Von Hippel's class "User Centered Innovation in the Internet Age."

But since I can't share my Raytheon-related thoughts with you, you're just going to have to trust me that it's some really cool stuff. Instead let me turn my ramblings towards the System Design & Management program (SDM) and try to start answering the question, nay cliff-hanger, I closed my first blog post with... It had to do with why I picked SDM -- Let me start with three simple facts:

1) System Design & Management is co-sponsored by the MIT Sloan School of Management and the School of Engineering (SoE), and resides within the Engineering Systems Division.


2) SDM is not an MBA program, but a program that offers a master's in engineering *and* management.

3) SDM Fellows can take advantage of the best of all worlds via a rich curriculum in engineering and management provided by Sloan and the SoE and even the Harvard Business School.

Innovation and Disruptive Technologies

Today, in my Technology Strategy class, I was delighted by our guest speaker for the day: Irving-Wladawsky-Berger. He was here to tell us about IBM's survival story, which I will not attempt to convey here as he does a much better job of it in his own blog. In the late 80s and 90s, he led the effort to formulate IBM’s Internet strategy and to develop and bring to market leading-edge Internet technologies that could be integrated into IBM’s mainstream business. He subsequently led a number of companywide initiatives like Linux, Grid Computing and the On Demand Business initiative. Under the leadership the Lou Gerstener, these strategies pulled IBM back from the brink of extinction. Gerstner is credited with saving IBM from going out of business in the early 1990s. In his memoir, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, he describes his arrival at the company in April 1993, when an active plan was in place to disaggregate the company. The prevailing wisdom of the time held that IBM's core mainframe business was headed for obsolescence.

This was a great lecture and I wish we had hd even more time to pick Irving's brain. I came away from this class with the following points in mind:
- Innovation is not only about adapting to changes in the marketplace/environment, but it is also about positioning yourself such that those changes work in your favor.
- Today's high level of attention to Innovation is attributable to the fact that the world is changing at an ever-increasing rate.
- One should hold a Darwinian view of competition. Most companies do not buck the trend.

- Most companies die because they either failed to Innovate or chose to do so too late in the game.

- Sometimes managers, no matter ow highly paid, are in over their heads.

Some sobering statistics:
- Of the 172 companies that have appeared on the Fortune 500 list between 1955 and 1995, only 5 percent grew their revenue above the overall inflation rate.
- Only 16 percent of 1,008 companies tracked from 1962 to 1998 survived.
- The average lifetime of a firm is now one-third of what it was in the 1930s; on average, large companies in North America and Europe now fail within just 20 years .

What must a business do in order to not just survive but thrive when facing a disruptive innovation?
. . . embrace the disruptive innovative . . .
. . . become the disruptors rather than the disruptees . . .
. . . and ultimately win over the established competitors . . .

Much more on Innovation and Technology strategy later. Have I mentioned that my professor for this class is none other than the James Utterback, author of "Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation," and of "Design-Inspired Innovation" ??? Jim inspired a whole generation of Systems and Innovation thinkers, including Clayton Christensen (a former student of Jim's, and author of "the Innovator's Dilemma") who will also be making a guest appearance in our class. Every single book or article I have come accross which talks about Innovation, Corporate Strategy, or any sub-topic therein (e.g. Dynamic Capabilities) cite or reference Jim Utterback's work. Personally, I put him right up there with Joseph Schumpeter.

We all more-or-less had this idea of "staying relevant" and are pretty aware that companies must innovate to stay alive. I think that these days, most self-respecting large corporations have some sort of Innovation strategy (mine does.) But coming from a pure engineering "design it, buil it, test it, and manage the process" background, this class has broadened my horizons and opened my eyes to a whole new world of Innovation Theory, Disruptive Technologies, Creative Destruction, and how enterprises must take these into account. I am sure that I will be blogging much, much more about Innovation before my time is up.

BlogDive

So, here I am: Recently volunteered-for/appointed-to the position of Communications Lead on the MIT System Design and Management Industrial Relations Committee (IRC.) My 'big idea' for spreading the word about the System Design and Management program was "publish, publish, publish..." Encouraging my colleagues in the 2010 cohort to blog and share their ideas, especially with respect to their experiences at MIT. I must note that this notion of "Inbound Marketing" was implanted in my brain by Brian Halligan, HubSpot CEO and founder, whom I met and briefly talked to after a guest appearance in Professor Cusumano's class, The Business of Software (get the book, it's good).

Not wanting to fall into the "do as I say, not as I do" category, I have decided to put my money where my mouth is and start my own blog. The first hurdle encountered when deciding to do so is "where am I going to find the time?" Well, let's just take the dive and see how long we can hold our breath... I think this s going to be a useful exercise - I needed somewhere to brain dump all the crazy ideas and novel notions floating around my head. Or maybe I will publish some of the papers I end up writing for some of my classes. One thing is for sure: I will use this to blog about all the interesting people I get to meet and hear in class, and all of the cool concepts and themes that I encounter along the way..

This year I started the System Design and Management program, a graduate program at MIT's Engineering Systems Division and the Sloan School of Management. There are around 50 others in my cohort, and from day one I was amazed (as I am to this day) with the depth and breadth of experience, culture, and background of this cohort. You name it, and someone in the System Design and Management program knows it. We've got representation from various engineering disciplines. We've got fellows from numerous industries. We're from all over the world. We have on average around 10 years of professional experience... Needless to say there is never a dull moment here.

So why MIT? That's easy and self-explanatory. But why did I choose the System Design and Management program? How does it differ from a traditional MBA? Those are questions I cannot answer in one post. But over the course of time it will become painfully obvious, as over the next two year I use this platform to share my experiences. But for now, I will borrow my favorite line from a presentation I attended last year: "System Design and Management is for those who want to lead engineering, not leave it."