The family business(es)
My brother Roger created a board game, "Trailer Trash Wins the Lottery" (pictured). There are only a limited number of copies out there, because he didn't feel it was worth the risk to have a large number printed. (I will sell you one for a mere US $10, and I can guarantee that nobody else you know will have it.)
He was probably right about the risk. Not because the game isn't any good, though -- that's in the eye of the beholder. His problem is that with only one product, he can't support incorporation or anything that heads in the general direction of incorporation. He'd have been a "one-trick pony," and would have had difficulty attracting investors or even first-time customers, much less repeat customers. His plan would have had to include beating the bushes for distributors to carry his game, and there aren't enough hours in the day to go to that level of effort -- not unless there were some investment money already in place.
My cousin John is an Internet DJ on
. To tell the truth, I just found this out, and I have no idea whether there is an intent to make money doing this. What I can say is that whatever
the local top-40 station may be doing in advertising on the air, BGL Radio is doing exactly the same thing on its Web site. In terms of its listener audience, however, BGL looks just a little bit like public-access television, and as such has a few things to do to even be considered more than a hobby. Nevertheless, stay tuned. I can't help but feel there will be more to say here. Top-40 radio these days is corporate-owned, cookie-cutter stuff. There is room for Internet radio to compete, if its people have enough brains and imagination.
Labels: young entrepreneurs
"Engineer as Hero" for the holidays!
You, too, can enjoy fine examples of "Engineer as Hero" fare at home this holiday season.
Serenity, featuring
Jewel Staite (pictured) as engineer Kaylee Frye, will be available on DVD starting 12.20. Just in time!
Serenity is the movie version of the cancelled Fox Network sci-fi western
Firefly, and is directed by
Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Joss Whedon. You don't have to have enjoyed
Firefly to understand
Serenity, but it helps. (If there is any weakness to this movie, that's it.) Staite's Kaylee is a different kind of space flight engineer than, say,
Star Trek's James Doohan. You don't hear any "she canna take any more!" though you do hear quite a bit about Kaylee's sidetracked love life. What makes
Serenity work is the combination of fast-moving sci-fi action, including a space battle as good as any in
Star Wars, along with a steady stream of one-liners from the veteran ensemble cast. Consider:
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Jayne, how many weapons you plan on bringing? You only got the two arms.
Jayne Cobb: I just get excitable as to choice- like to have my options open.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: I don't plan on any shooting taking place during this job.
Jayne Cobb: Well, what you plan and what takes place ain't ever exactly been similar.
I wish I could offer news as good about
Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which appears to be unable to make the shelves in time for the holidays. This movie will please the whole family, as
Peter Sallis voices Wallace, the inventor with a Rube Goldberg style. There are so many inventions in
Were-Rabbit that you can't count 'em all! If you can't wait, there are, of course, several Wallace and Gromit shorts out there, each very good.
The old standbys are all to be had as well. If you need an engineer fix and don't have one on your shelf, there is always
October Sky or
Apollo 13.
Labels: diversions, engineering
Somebody needs a visit from three spirits!
Target,
Mervyn's, and
Safeway are three store chains who have banned Salvation Army bellringers from their storefronts. Our first inclination,
when we hear about this, is to assume that these stores are cruising for
a visit from the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future:
Without their visits, you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first to-morrow night, when the bell tolls One. Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third, upon the next night, when the last stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!
But the fact is that these three companies reach out to their communities quite a bit, and of course don't hesitate to tell us about it. Target, though they won't allow solicitation on their walks, has a corporate partnership thing going with the
Salvation Army. There are two problems with this system, however:
- The bellringers are a visible symbol of the holiday season, and many Americans associate their presence not only with a pleasant -- if somewhat vague -- feeling of holiday cheer, but with generosity as well. When the bellringers are not present, there must be other ways to remind us as customers that we have a responsibility to the poor, just as Target thinks it has that responsibility as a corporation. If we're not reminded, we might not think to chip in. And Target doesn't compensate for that with corporate partnerships.
- There is such a thing as bad advertising, no matter what others may tell you. When the media covers the Target exile of the bellringers, and the numerous small companies and stores who offer their storefronts to the Salvation Army instead, it's a black eye for Target no matter how noble their intentions are in the community otherwise.
It's up to the stores to impress upon their customers -- if only to avoid boycotts -- that the stores are still active in the community, bellringers or no. I wonder, by the way, if the bellringers are invited to participate in other storefronts with less foot traffic, do they take those offers...?
Labels: office space
The Meeting that Went Very Well
I was once the polar opposite of one
Joe Rasmussen (pictured), then a partner in
GreyPilgrim Inc. He was, as his current Web bio suggests, "CFO and primary business leader" for the company. His bio paints a picture, however, that's a bit of a stretch. The site says
He was instrumental in building this new company from concept to products and markets, creating and implementing financing and strategic plans to obtain $100M revenue potential.
...but since GreyPilgrim never got really close to that revenue potential, what Joe did turns out to have been more theoretical than actual. (Of course, all my engineering work on the EMMA robotic arm -- and I did a bunch -- falls into the same category, since EMMAs were never shipped out the door until
GreyPilgrim resurfaced as a new business. By then I was long gone.)
All this is just water under the bridge for the same reason. But what I really remember Joe for is for conducting
meetings with potential customers and clients and funding sources. Seems like he had a meeting with someone every few days. And when I would ask him how a meeting went, he'd smile and say "it went very well." And that's all I ever got out of him. Joe, what does "very well" mean exactly?
In retrospect, the dynamic works like this: I'm an engineer, he's a financial guy. He made the assumption that we didn't speak the same language. Since he didn't speak his language to me much, I'll never know whether or not his assumption was on target. And now that I have a teaching certificate in ESL, I think my ability to understand the speech of others whose English isn't the same as mine is really pretty good. :-)
If you work for an entrepreneur, you have to ask the right questions. The more specific, the better. If the partners don't want to give you a straight answer, you can at least force them to tell you so with specific questions. Try these, if you work with a guy like Joe:
- How soon will we be receiving a check?
- How much did you get them to commit to?
- When will they expect their first order to ship?
- Did they have any questions for me?
You have to wring answers out of these people. Don't settle for a meeting that Went Very Well.
Labels: rhetoric
On the value of human life
We talk about human life as being priceless, and it is. But you can't run a business that way. Any business that offers products or services that are hazardous assigns a price to human life, based on the likelihood that someone will be killed or seriously injured from using these products or services, and then that assigned price is built into what we pay as customers.
You can see that if human life is treated as priceless in this context, that value has to be passed on to customers as well, meaning that we can't afford to buy or do anything. The result is that when we buy potentially hazardous products or services, no matter how unlikely death or injury may be, we are entering into an implicit agreement with the sellers on the value of human life. Including our own.
If the sellers are callous and unfeeling because they don't treat human life as priceless in their business models, then so are we, because we don't take that value into account when we decide what we are going to buy. To avoid being hypocrites ourselves, we have to hold companies blameless for assigning finite values to human life.
Mother Jones magazine, while writing a fine expose on the Pinto in 1977, is guilty of this hypocrisy. Unless its staff refuses to drive cars or buy insurance.
BUT... there are other possible sins that can be committed by businesses in this relationship:
- Assuming that we as customers care only about the best price. Specifically, we saw in the case of the Ford Pinto accidents a version of Lee Iacocca (pictured), the Hero of Chrysler in the late 80s, tell us all that "safety doesn't sell."
Ford Pinto design at the time was constrained by then-Chairman Henry Ford II to no more than 2000 lbf in weight and no more than US $2000 in cost. But we will often make buying decisions for many reasons other than price, and safety surely is one of them. - Making a business case for design features that are known to be unsafe. Products and services sometimes have hazards built-in; that's why we have warning messages. But why would we deliberately design features that are unsafe and then push them through to the market, possibly ensuring that those features are the first things to go wrong?
In the Ford Pinto case, Ford had a better gas-tank design, and decided not to use it for reasons that included an assembly line that already set up for the dangerous design. - Ignoring the customers -- and the media -- when things DO start to go wrong. Ford concentrated instead on the government, lobbying against relevant government safety standards for eight years. While somewhere between 500 and 900 people died needlessly, a number even greater than Ford's estimates of the loss of life they could absorb, Ford fought against the need to recall 1.5 million Pintos.
The issue is not that we place a dollar value on human life. The issues are that we don't calculate that value correctly; that we aren't willing to change that value when our mistakes are brought to light; that we instead try to pass those costs on to everyone else; that we really believe this is what our customers want us to do.
Labels: character
Brian's Camaro in action!
Here you can see video footage of Brian Holcombe's Camaro at the drag strip! I talked about this with Brian, and here's what he had to say:
It's my Gold Camaro going 11.41 [elapsed time, seconds] at 115 [maximum speed] MPH with a 1.50 [seconds] 60-ft time.
This "60-ft time" pertains to the first 60 feet of the race, and is used to measure acceleration efficiency. It can reveal traction problems. Brian goes on:
It's extremely quick for a pump-gas 385" small block-powered 3300-pound Camaro. As far as the suspension goes, I've been tuning [British Columbia's racer-chassis designer] Alf Wiebe's Camaro traction bar setup. Through suspension tuning I've improved my elapsed times from 11.60 to 11.34, and improved my 60-ft times from 1.65 to 1.50. My traction has improved over competition engineering j-bolt traction bars.
Labels: engineering, young entrepreneurs
Erin Brockovich: the entrepreneur in a larger context
One of the things
my former NASA mentor Ted Porada used to tell me was "ya gotta make yer own job." Now, this was back in the mid-80s. Then along came the 90s, and business gurus everywhere were telling us to
have the mindset of entrepreneurs, even if we worked in larger companies -- or agencies like NASA. (That line of thinking is still going on today, and it's really not surprising, as it's entrepreneurs -- not larger companies -- who are creating jobs and opportunities and new ideas.) But the business gurus were just putting pretty packaging on the Tedism above. You make your own job. Maybe you're hired to fill a position, but it's you making a niche for yourself, making yourself indispensable, creating value. In short, doing the things an entrepreneur does. The better you are at doing what entrepreneurs do, the more successful you are at your job and the more likely you will keep it.
To me, the perfect example of this kind of entrepreneur, working in a larger context, is
Erin Brockovich-Ellis (pictured), whose story is the basis of the movie
Erin Brockovich, which stars Julia Roberts. In this movie, we see Roberts' character wriggle her way into a job that didn't previously exist in Ed Masry's law firm, find an area of real estate legal paperwork that she didn't understand and nobody could -- or would -- explain to her, and turn that into her personal niche. As she gained experience, using wiles and beauty ("they're called boobs, Ed"), she found people who were severely hurt by a polluted civic ecosystem, and championed their cause, doing the "right thing" and making herself essential to the firm at the same time. She made her own job. (And made it better since
the movie.) She became an entrepreneur without having to own the company, in the context of someone else's company.
Labels: consulting
al-Jazeera: seeking the truth?
There's a news network out there that claims to value truth and objectivity over "the scoop," although in some regions of the world, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, they get the scoop anyway. Am I talking about
Fox News? No, it's
al-Jazeera.
If I do a brief comparison between the two, the first thing I notice is: al-Jazeera doesn't tie up my computer's resources with annoying Flash animations. (Something I don't much care for from anyone.) Fox doesn't have a "code of ethics" or an "about us" linked from their home page; al-Jazeera does. Where I favor Fox is that they have room to talk about sports and entertainment of unique interest to Americans, but al-Jazeera doesn't have that in their mission -- they believe the whole world is their audience. Admittedly, to some Americans that may seem boring -- even to me when I want to read about sports.
It's fairness that grabs me about al-Jazeera. They pull no punches, whether they are talking about terrorists or the American military. To me, this is far more difficult than being fair in coverage between Democrats and Republicans, and Fox News doesn't do even this particularly well. I mean, Democrats won't shoot you if you don't give them equal time or a positive spin. (Well, not most of them, anyway.)
One place where the two organizations are closely related: they both got off the ground in 1996. That makes them both very young businesses in my view, even though news moves so fast they may be growing old. They both faced struggles from the outset -- Fox claims they started up "amidst predictions of failure" and al-Jazeera claims that their television network "sent shockwaves through the whole Arab world from its very first day on air." I could argue these two networks are both entrepreneurial in their way -- except that we know Fox's money comes from a conglomerate, and could guess that al-Jazeera gets its money from someone near a lot of oil.
I'm just saying that for my money, since I care about the whole world, and a fair spin on the news, I'd go for al-Jazeera ahead of Fox News any day.
Labels: character
The race to the patent office!
Randy Reali is a rare student, as far as I'm concerned. And he agrees: when I asked if I could use him in my Web log, he said "as long as you paint a picture of me with your words that shows the true genius and stunning amazingness that is me." :-) :-) :-)
Anyway, Randy is pictured
from an article that appeared in the TCNJ student newspaper, the Signal, using ProEngineer to arrange his dorm room -- dorm rooms at TCNJ, without computer layout assistance, leave you without enough room to change your mind.
For my class, he's developed an alarm clock that delivers a "mild electrical stimulus." I dunno -- I thought it was novel and innovative. So I asked him to talk to
IMET about a second-generation prototype, and to rush to the
Patent Office with his claims. He says "as soon as I can get to it."
That's the trouble with entrepreneurs: so many claims on their attention. I can only remind him what history says about inventors: if you have a good idea, somebody else is having it too. Like Elisha Gray, who almost beat Alexander Graham Bell to the Patent Office with the telephone. And probably should have.
Randy has a classmate who claims to have invented "Book Sox" (pictured) -- but he didn't get the intellectual property rights in place. "All I can say is that it's a true shame that I wasn't able to make in to the Patent Office in sixth grade. If that were the case, I may not even be attending [Dr. Graham's] class today!" So I hope Randy learns the lessons of the guys who finish second.Labels: engineering
The need of Abracadabra Magic
These guys were very close to hiring me for a position as a
Web designer/
e-commerce assistant manager, but I had something else come up. It may be that you live in this area, and have a friend or former student who'd be interested in growing with a very small company. The work they do is very interesting -- they are a provider of magicians' supplies. Not exactly
Harry Potter, but interesting. :-)
The job description's high points are as follows:
- They are looking for a hard-working, career-minded person with a pleasant, easy going personality
- they offer the chance to get involved in growing a business (so you should have some marketing and/or business experience)
- they need someone to assist with managing databases (so you have to have some database experience, especially with Access), e-commerce Web sites (so you have to have that experience too, and/or know HTML) and order-management software
- whoever gets hired might also help create new catalogs, vendor contacts, internet advertising and more
- it's full- or part-time
Labels: young entrepreneurs
Site Feed
