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Wearable Technology and the State of the Art in Fabrics
Wearable technology, as defined by Wikipedia to the right, integrates electronics into a wearable item, often into conventional apparel. There is often an electronic device, housed in hard plastic...
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Policy and Innovation History (Radar, Manhattan Project and Apollo)
Innovation is a newborn baby that politicians love to kiss – regions and municipalities want more of it, but are uncertain of how to proceed. Metrics are challenging – for the politician and...
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Doing the Math: Munitions & Nonwovens Production
Running numbers is crucial to understanding where you are with a new technology, especially if it is a physical product or tied to heavy industry. Even if you’ve only got three numbers in that initial...
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Personnel Strategies & Revolutionary War
O’Shaughnessy’s The Men Who Lost America (21 hours) follows the Revolutionary War theme and contains two great personnel stories; the value of concentrating a team and managing a team’s utilization....
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Fraud in Industrial Technologies
Go on, take the money and run. GigaOm’s article on green energy snake oil highlights the challenges faced by investors in any industrial technology. We’re not investors, but over the past six years of...
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Seven Red Lines (2): Technical Sales Meeting Mistakes
The biggest mistake made by the vendor involved in the Seven Red Lines / “The Expert” video is that from a strategic standpoint, they are failing to defend their technical resources. However, there...
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Seven Red Lines (3): Anderson the Expert’s Failings
“Anderson, it seems like you and Walter aren’t getting along very well.” Anderson the Expert is in a tough spot, his value as an expert wasn’t well defended, but he doesn’t do very much to help himself...
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CrossFit is for the Cheap and Lazy (Like Me)
From SNL – “Talking to Putin “is like being cornered at a party by a guy who just started CrossFit.”” I was/am that guy. CrossFit entered my life two years ago while working as an advisor with The...
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Building the Right Team
In our management meetings the other week, we talked about what we want our teams to look like. Running our commercial organization, my ideal team needs to reflect the needs of the market and be able...
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Vendor Selection: What Works
The Bay Bridge’s Newest Section The California DOT’s selection of a partnership with Fluor and Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industry Co., Ltd. (“ZPMC”) to build the new section of the Bay Bridge hasn’t gone...
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Tech Forecasting: Comments on 6 Years of Forecasts (3 of 7)
Perfect forecast = Widespread Uber acceptance Over six years of prediction shows, when the hosts were right, they were very right. When they were wrong, it was usually because they were too early or...
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Is that a Disruptive Prediction? (6 of 7)
“And two years later, what come out? PlayStation 2.” – Ali G Linear predictions are important, but it is unlikely they are disruptive. Some predictions are linear – like that made by Sasha Baron...
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Project Planning: Stay out of the (San Francisco) Mud
San Francisco’s $350 MM Millennium Tower is sinking into the mud beneath it. Finished in 2009, some now believe that it could sink as much as 3 feet – greater than initial estimates of ‘possibly an...
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Growth by Document
The current business has experienced pleasant success despite a challenging market. We grew our ASP from $40,000 by nearly 20x, increased our industrial installation base by similar numbers and have...
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Under Bidding a Bridge to Nowhere
Bridge between North Korea and Dandong, China in disrepair following the Korean war. [Source: Huseyin’s flickr photostream, used under a creative commons license.]If a customer isn’t 100% certain about...
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Nice Pants: Tactical Office Wear
Comfort is difficult to quantify. We tend to use air perm as our primary metric when working with water barrier materials. There are many high-end pants now on the market from non-traditional vendors...
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The Best SaaS Product I Ever Saw was built by a Towtruck Company in 2006
Towtruck-as-a-Service in 2007. In 2002, after joining a former customer in the electronics industry which had raised $30 million, we went through a CRM evaluation. The VP of Sales and VP of...
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Biology, populations and VC
The meadow voles we found each morning in our traps were tiny, hardy animals who endured the weighing and tagging before being re-released. There were thousands of them in the fields of Blandy Farm or...
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“What does [did] it take to be[come] CEO?” Answer: Goals / Failure / Reality
StrengthsFinder is a great way to talk about personal motivations (Learner, Activator, Strategic, Context and Input). DiSC profiles (Persuader / Inspirational) are also helpful – but this tool still...
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Trust: “We’re not following rules, but expect you to.”
Catton’s Civil War History lays out many social and ethical concerns There are many great political and social points in Catton’s histories of the American Civil War. In his 1961 book The Coming Fury,...
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