Sailing....takes me away

I recently learned that a colleague who I have known for many years will be leaving the company. It's not because he was the latest victim of a numbers game. Rather, it was because he decided that he had acquired enough toys and was willing to walk away. He plans to spend a few years on his fifty foot boat wandering where the wind and tides decide to take him.

I didn't get a chance to see him prior to learning about his fate. I can't even say that we're close friends. That said, I have nothing but respect for his decision. I think we all secretly wish we could just jettison all of our cares and set off in a different direction. He's actually doing it!

I must say that he leaves an enormous void in our organization. He had deep knowledge of our systems and people. He knew how to navigate in a very complex organization. There's something to be said for understanding the culture of any company. Each one is a different ecosystem and even someone with superstar potential can be swallowed up by a gulf in their understanding of their new environment.

I wish him nothing but smooth sailing in the days ahead. Hopefully, we can all follow in his footsteps on our own timetables.

Choosing gratitude

Original post:  Nov 23, 2015

Life continually presents us with moments that can cause serious uncertainty. All around us, there are reports of chaos and mayhem. It seems that there are threats and disruptions everywhere. It sometimes feels as if there is a global conspiracy to put everyone on edge at all times.

As we were driving home, I had the radio on and there were reports on the attacks in Paris. My son asked me why it always seemed as if there were only reports on bad things happening. I struggled with a response about how it's easier for people to pay attention to the one bad thing that happens as opposed to the 99 good things that happen. Still, it felt unsatisfying.

One mantra that I try to live by is that you find what you are looking for. I suppose it's another version of the "glass half full" view of life. Instead of allowing the negativity of the moment to overwhelm me, I'm hoping to place the emphasis on the many bountiful blessings in my life.

In Sunday's New York Times, there was an op-ed entitled "Choose To Be Grateful. It Will Make You Happier." I thought I would share that as we prepare in the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving. The author points to some scientific evidence behind this type of an approach.

But we are more than slaves to our feelings, circumstances and genes. Evidence suggests that we can actively choose to practice gratitude — and that doing so raises our happiness.

This is not just self-improvement hokum. For example, researchers in one 2003 study randomly assigned one group of study participants to keep a short weekly list of the things they were grateful for, while other groups listed hassles or neutral events. Ten weeks later, the first group enjoyed significantly greater life satisfaction than the others. Other studies have shown the same pattern and lead to the same conclusion. If you want a truly happy holiday, choose to keep the “thanks” in Thanksgiving, whether you feel like it or not.

How does all this work? One explanation is that acting happy, regardless of feelings, coaxes one’s brain into processing positive emotions. In one famous 1993 experiment, researchers asked human subjects to smile forcibly for 20 seconds while tensing facial muscles, notably the muscles around the eyes called the orbicularis oculi (which create “crow’s feet”). They found that this action stimulated brain activity associated with positive emotions.

There are other positive benefits that can accrue as well:

In addition to building our own happiness, choosing gratitude can also bring out the best in those around us. Researchers at the University of Southern California showed this in a 2011 study of people with high power but low emotional security (think of the worst boss you’ve ever had). The research demonstrated that when their competence was questioned, the subjects tended to lash out with aggression and personal denigration. When shown gratitude, however, they reduced the bad behavior. That is, the best way to disarm an angry interlocutor is with a warm “thank you.”

The article goes on to include some ways to incorporate this spirit into your daily routine.

I'm sure that there are co-workers and family that deserve your thanks. Over the course of this week, take a moment to let them know that you are grateful. I'm sure they will appreciate it.

Here is another link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/choose-to-be-grateful-it-will-make-you-happier.html

Reinvention through "design thinking"

I want to work with the fast company part of my organization!

 IBM faces a dilemma. How can they continue to reinvent themselves so they can meet the growth targets Wall Street demands?

IBM has more than 370,000 employees. While its revenues are huge, the company’s quarterly reports have shown them steadily declining in the last two years. The falloff in revenue is partly intentional, as the company sold off less profitable operations, but the sometimes disappointing profits are not, and they reflect IBM’s struggle with its transition. Last month, the company shaved its profit target for 2015.

In recent years, the company has invested heavily in new fields, including data analytics, cloud computing, mobile technology, security, social media software for business and its Watson artificial intelligence technology. Those businesses are growing rapidly, generating revenue of $25 billion last year, and IBM forecasts that they will contribute $40 billion by 2018, through internal growth and acquisitions. Just recently, for example, IBM agreed to pay $2 billion for the Weather Company (not including its television channel), gaining its real-time and historical weather data to feed into Watson and analytics software.

But IBM’s biggest businesses are still the traditional ones — conventional hardware, software and services — which contribute 60 percent of its revenue and most of its profit. And these IBM mainstays are vulnerable, as customers increasingly prefer to buy software as a service, delivered over the Internet from remote data centers.

Virginia M. Rometty, IBM’s chief executive, has warned that this will be a difficult transition year. It will take time, she says, before its new businesses are large enough to become engines of growth for the whole company. The strategy, she insists, is the right one. What remains is to move ahead faster. “People ask, ‘Is there a silver bullet?’” Ms. Rometty said in a recent interview. “The silver bullet, you might say, is speed, this idea of speed.”

One key strategy is called "design thinking". Here is a brief explanation:

Mr. Gilbert answers that question with something called design thinking. (His title is general manager of design.) Among other things, design thinking flips traditional technology product development on its head. The old way is that you come up with a new product idea and then try to sell it to customers. In the design thinking way, the idea is to identify users’ needs as a starting point.

Mr. Gilbert and his team talk a lot about “iteration cycles,” “lateral thinking,” “user journeys” and “empathy maps.” To the uninitiated, the canons of design thinking can sound mushy and self-evident. But across corporate America, there is a rising enthusiasm for design thinking not only to develop products but also to guide strategy and shape decisions of all kinds. The September cover article of the Harvard Business Review was “The Evolution of Design Thinking.” Venture capital firms are hiring design experts, and so are companies in many industries.

This laser focus on customer needs can lead to new insights. Here is an example of how IBM trains its personnel in "design thinking":

Defining problems more expansively is part of the design-thinking ethos. At a course in New York recently, a group of IBM managers were given pads and felt-tip pens and told to sketch designs for “the thing that holds flowers on a table” in two minutes. The results, predictably, were vases of different sizes and shapes.

Next, they were given two minutes to design “a better way for people to enjoy flowers in their home.” In Round 2, the ideas included wall placements, a rotating flower pot run by solar power and a software app for displaying images of flowers on a home TV screen.

IBM is competing for talent against top names in technology like Apple and Google. Here is how they recruit prospective college graduates:

The recruiting pitch made by Mr. Gilbert and his colleagues has been essentially twofold: First, you can make a difference in socially important fields because IBM’s technology plays a crucial role in health care, energy, transportation, water and even agriculture. Second, you can be part of a groundbreaking effort to apply design thinking in business.

At Stanford, the prevailing view of working for IBM, Mr. Burnett said, has shifted from “Are you kidding me?” to “This is a pretty interesting opportunity.”

Joe Kendall thinks so. Mr. Kendall, 28, finished a two-year graduate design program at Stanford and joined IBM in June. He chose IBM over Apple, where he would have worked in its iPhone business. At Apple, he figured, his opportunity would be to help make a great product a little bit better. At IBM, Mr. Kendall sees a different opportunity. “No one is using design thinking to solve problems on this scale,” he said, adding that he could be part of “changing the future of this giant entity.”

The article goes on to note that all of the top senior executives have taken the training. Here is an example of how the work is being executed with one customer:

That proved to be the case for GameStop, a video game and electronics retailer. Jeff Donaldson, a GameStop technology executive, recalled that IBM’s reputation at the company’s suburban Dallas headquarters was as a slow-moving corporate bureaucracy, dominated by a sales culture offering expensive hardware and software. The reputation, he said, was “certainly not positive.”

But in the last year or so, the two companies have worked side by side — often in IBM’s Austin studio — to figure out better ways to serve GameStop customers with mobile devices and data. The floor staff at GameStop’s more than 4,100 stores in the United States can now tap iPads to look up the past purchases of customers who have downloaded the GameStop app or joined the company’s loyalty program. Coupons, trade-ins and loyalty-point rewards can be offered on the spot, as well as game recommendations.

The cloud software to make it happen was built in a few months, tested in a small group of stores and then quickly rolled out nationwide. Further projects are in the works to study how online behavior affects buying patterns.

“They’ve completely turned us around,” Mr. Donaldson said. “We’re working with the fast company part of IBM.”

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/business/ibms-design-centered-strategy-to-set-free-the-squares.html

Perfecting Pixar

Original post:  Nov 9, 2015

We recently took the boys to the Boston Museum of Science. There is an exhibit now on "The Science Behind Pixar". It discusses the incredible amount of research that goes into creating the wonderful movies Pixar produces.

The exhibit shows the entire process of moviemaking from the original idea to the first sketches to the animation to the final finished product. Behind it all is incredibly sophisticated technology that at its root relies on a combination of standard film processes merged with powerful processing using extremely complicated mathematical models.

Interspersed throughout the exhibit are video interviews of the team members who work in each of the various disciplines. I found their stories inspirational as a way to show how an education in science and technology can actually be merged with an interest in creative arts to come up with an entirely new career.

The team at Pixar also does an enormous amount of work behind the scenes. They research their subjects in painstaking detail. This helps provide the films with grounding in the basic science of the real world. The exhibit gives some of this background in a variety of multimedia displays. This article in Wired also helps explain some of their work.

Pixar is as much a research firm as it is an animation studio, and a new exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City does an expert job at showing us how. For Pixar: The Design of Story, the movie studio supplied Cooper Hewitt with 650 renderings, mockups, illustrations, and storyboards of its characters and landscapes, along with background. Taken together, these artifacts illuminate the painstaking level of research that goes into the creation of every character, right down to the folds in an old man’s jacket sleeve, or the texture of the curls in a heroine’s hair.

Take Carl Fredricksen’s house in Up. The residence is as central to the movie’s plot as Russell, the dog Dug, or Carl himself, and Pixar’s designers treated it as such. It’s based on a Victorian-style home in Berkeley, California, and an annotated diagram on display at Cooper Hewitt shows where the designers specified nearly microscopic details like patina’d copper at the base of the chimney and the scale and frequency at which cracks in the paint would appear.

“When the house floats up and you’re looking at the infrastructure, it was really important that pipes connect in the right way, so if a plumber was watching the film they wouldn’t go, ‘oh, they took a lot of license,’ ” says Cara McCarty, curatorial director at Cooper Hewitt. Same goes for designing something as everyday as water: “In Finding Nemo the water is so incredible, but it’s hyper-realistic,” McCarty says. “If it’s too realistic, like a realistic painting, it almost becomes dead. They find ways to tweak it so that if someone who knows a lot about water is looking at it, and they’re already seduced by the movie and along for the ride, they don’t think, ‘it’s so phony.’ ”

Keep all of this in mind the next time you watch your next Pixar film.

Here is the link to the full article:  Perfecting Pixar's Movies Takes a Crazy Amount of Research | WIRED

Simpler may be better

Original post:  Nov 4, 2015

In a fastidious quest for optimal mechanisms to substantiate your intellectual influence, some suppose it proper to larder their prose with flowery and elaborate phrases plucked out of a thesaurus. According to this article in Fast Company, they may be wasting their time.

It might sound counterintuitive, but using four-syllable textbook words to demonstrate your smarts will actually make you appear less capable.

"So often, our intuitions about what will impress others are wrong," says Daniel M. Oppenheimer, professor of psychology at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He led a series of studies on how the use of language can make one appear more or less intelligent.

In one study, the researchers took essays from online college admissions essays and replaced words using an algorithm to replace shorter words with longer words and asked participants to evaluate the quality of the author. Surprisingly, participants rated the authors as less capable and less confident. Concerned that the replacement strategy used made the essays worse, the researchers took sociology dissertation abstracts, which tend to be dense in long words, and replaced the longer words with shorter words. Participants judged the authors as more capable and intelligent if they were reading shorter words.

He goes on to explain:

The reason for this phenomenon, Oppenheimer explains, is that the ease of processing information is strongly associated with positive qualities such as confidence, intelligence, and capability. "To the extent that you use long words, you make it more disfluent to read your prose, people will judge you disfavorably," says Oppenheimer.

The secret is to be clear and concise in your communications. When your co-workers require less strain to understand you, they are more likely to value what you are saying!

Here is the link to the full article:  The Secret To Sounding Smart? Using Simple Language

Past the headline

Original post:  Oct 29, 2015

We live in an age geared towards spectacle. In order to attract our attention, content providers create ever more dramatic headlines to steal our focus (if only for a moment). Earlier this week, the World Health Organization (WHO) released their findings on a certain food product and here are some of the ways that news was reported:

As you can see, the headlines just get more and more dramatic as you go on.

While they are all based in a nugget of a fact, there is a certain sleight-of-hand going on. Most people will only note the headline. It's easier to remember just the lede and forget about any level of nuance buried deep within the story. The real truth remains well hidden.

These reports started with the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). This team of scientists actually has a narrow task.

The IARC is an organization of scientists, not policy makers. It publishes monographs to identify hazards and sift them into five piles: group 1 (carcinogenic), group 2A (probably carcinogenic), group 2B (possibly carcinogenic), group 3 (not classifiable), and group 4 (probably not carcinogenic.) Group 1 includes processed meat, and also asbestos. Also alcohol (boo!) and sunlight (yup!).Identifying hazards involves looking at existing data—lots and lots of it—to do essentially a meta-analysis of studies already out there. And it’s relatively objective.

....

What the IARC doesn’t do—and where things get a lot fuzzier—is risk assessment, or figuring out the danger to humans in the real world. Risk assessment involves looking at different scenarios, finding out real-world exposure levels, and weighing possible benefits. (Useful drugs like Tamoxifen—used to treat breast cancer—are also  carcinogens, for example.) Those factors can vary from person to person, country to country.

When IARC looked at the evidence to see whether or not substances in processed meats caused cancer, they found clear and convincing evidence that it could. But there is a critical distinction missing from all of the headlines:

Here’s the thing: These classifications are based on strength of evidence not degree of risk.

Two risk factors could be slotted in the same category if one tripled the risk of cancer and the other increased it by a small fraction. They could also be classified similarly even if one causes many more types of cancers than the other, if it affects a greater swath of the population, and if it actually causes more cancers.

So these classifications are not meant to convey how dangerous something is, just how certain we are that something is dangerous.

But they’re presented with language that completely obfuscates that distinction.

Group 1 is billed as “carcinogenic to humans,” which means that we can be fairly sure that the things here have the potential to cause cancer. But the stark language, with no mention of risks or odds or any remotely conditional, invites people to assume that if they specifically partake of, say, smoking or processed meat, they will definitely get cancer.

To give you some idea of how that might change the reality of their findings, here is another tidbit:

That latest press release offers only this by way of numbers: “The experts concluded that each 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent.” But without context, that information is useless—increases by 18 percent over what?—and says nothing about how processed meat compares to other Group 1 carcinogens like smoking or asbestos.

And what are those odds?

The scientific evidence linking both processed meat and tobacco to certain types of cancer is strong. In that sense, both are carcinogens. But smoking increases your relative risk of lung cancer by 2,500 percent; eating two slices of bacon a day increases your relative risk for colorectal cancer by 18 percent. Given the frequency of colorectal cancer, that means your risk of getting colorectal cancer over your life goes from about 5 percent to 6 percent and, well, YBMMV. (Your bacon mileage may vary.) “If this is the level of risk you’re running your life on, then you don’t really have much to worry about,” says Alfred Neugut, an oncologist and cancer epidemiologist at Columbia.

I don't think I'm giving up bacon any time soon!

Here are some articles for reference:

Bacon Causes Cancer? Sort of. Not Really. Ish. | WIRED

Why Is the World Health Organization so Bad at Communicating Cancer Risk? - The Atlantic

Coachability

Original post:  Oct 25, 2015

Parenting sometimes seems like a continuing series of life lessons. That said, it is also filled with hidden pleasures.

Over the weekend, my nine year-old son had two key events. The first was a three mile run that he needed to complete in thirty minutes as part of his preparation for black belt training in karate. The second was a hitting clinic in a small class to work on improving his baseball swing. He had no trouble at all with the run, finishing in 25:12. (I think he would have beat me at the recent Mansfield 5K at his pace!) He did quite well at the clinic. Based on what I can tell, he seems to be swinging with much more confidence and power than he did over the summer.

After the lesson, I spoke to the coach about additional lessons once the current session comes to an end. He asked what training my son had had previously. I first admitted that since I had never played baseball, he hadn't learned his swing from me. I also told the coach that my son had never really had direct lessons before but that he did listen well and worked diligently with any instruction he was given. The coach went on to say that he had a good foundation and displayed solid technique. I was quite proud of him.

Later, I began to think about the importance of coachability. There is a certain humility that you have to have. You have to admit that there may be others who know more than you and can guide you in the right way. This is much obviously easier in some fields than in others. If we can let go of our pride and the stubborn refusal to believe that others can teach us anything, there are some surprising things that we may be able to accomplish!

In our own worlds, there are going to be many occasions for us to stretch beyond our comfort zone. If we are fortunate enough to locate a mentor or guide who can help us navigate the Medtronic matrix, it will be important to accept any advice gracefully. Perhaps someday we can even find ourselves in the role as a mentor or guide for others!

Be consistently good

Original post:  Oct 22, 2015

We're all seeking for success. Everyone wants to be a winner. While no one can guarantee that we will reach the ultimate prizes that we seek, we can certainly maximize our chances by giving our best efforts.

In this article, "Secrets to Success: 6 Tips From the Most Successful People", you might be able to pick up a tip or two that can help you increase your odds of winning.

The first tip talks about the need to be creative. I found it rather eye-opening. The city of Chicago in the 1800s was suffering from serious disease because of its sewage problems. They also realized that they couldn't dig tunnels under the city for new sewers with the existing technology. Ellis Chesbrough came up with a novel solution:

But here Chesbrough’s unique history helped him come up with an alternate scenario, reminding him of a tool he had seen as a young man working the railway: the jackscrew, a device used to lift multiton locomotives onto the tracks. If you couldn’t dig down to create a proper grade for drainage, why not use jackscrews to lift the city up? Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure. Sewer lines were inserted beneath buildings with main lines running down the center of streets, which were then buried in landfill that had been dredged out of the Chicago River, raising the entire city almost ten feet on average.

Nothing was shut down. As a 750-ton hotel was lifted, people went about their lives inside — perhaps only taking a second to marvel at the surreal experience going on beneath them.

The title of this post is picked up from tip #2. Steve Martin, the brilliant comic, discusses the importance of honing our craft through diligence and hard work in his autobiography:

I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.

Here is a summary of the tips for success on a grand scale:

• When the going gets tough, the tough get creative. Don’t do more, do different. Lift a city.
• Don’t be great, be consistently good. Don’t worry about the big break, worry about being good enough.
• Use rejection as motivation. And remember the compliments you receive. You’re charming, right?
• Working hard is the best way to network. Bring coffee and tea.
• Don’t wait for permission. Don’t poison anyone, but test and prove.
• If you can’t be #1, be clever. Energizing others with style can beat “the best way.” (Mimes are nodding right now.)

Early lessons to use at work

Original post: Oct 20, 2015

While computers are becoming more and more talented, there are still many things they do not do well. Perhaps the most critical skill they lack is the ability to relate to humans.

We learn how to work with others at a very young age. Many of us learn these lessons as early as preschool. The ability to perceive the emotions of others around us and adjust our behavior to cooperate with the larger group is not easily replicated in silicon! In this article from the NY Times, there are some surprising findings with important future implications:

Yet skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work. Occupations that require strong social skills have grown much more than others since 1980, according to new research. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills.

The findings help explain a mystery that has been puzzling economists: the slowdown in the growth even of high-skill jobs. The jobs hit hardest seem to be those that don’t require social skills, throughout the wage spectrum.

Some of the most important lessons may actually be learned in those early years!

Preschool classrooms, Mr. Deming said, look a lot like the modern work world. Children move from art projects to science experiments to the playground in small groups, and their most important skills are sharing and negotiating with others. But that soon ends, replaced by lecture-style teaching of hard skills, with less peer interaction.

Work, meanwhile, has become more like preschool.

Jobs that require both socializing and thinking, especially mathematically, have fared best in employment and pay, Mr. Deming found. They include those held by doctors and engineers. The jobs that require social skills but not math skills have also grown; lawyers and child-care workers are an example. The jobs that have been rapidly disappearing are those that require neither social nor math skills, like manual labor.

Perhaps the best news is that most of these skills can be taught to others.

James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, did groundbreaking work concluding that noncognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are as important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.

These conclusions have been put into practice outside academia. Google researchers, for example, studied the company’s employees to determine what made the best manager. They assumed it would be technical expertise. Instead, it was people who made time for one-on-one meetings, helped employees work through problems and took an interest in their lives.

There was a book series many years back built on the theme "Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." I see that there is a lot of truth in that premise!

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/how-the-modern-workplace-has-become-more-like-preschool.html?_r=0

The difference between data science and scientists

Original post:  Oct 15, 2015

Some of us really enjoy working with data. Others might have special names for these individuals, but we soldier on, nonetheless.

With the advent of big data and a proliferation of sites dedicated to the art and science of parsing data, there are interesting new career paths opening up. One such category is "data science". Practitioners of these dark arts are called "data scientists". But what does that mean?

This graphic might help explain the concept a little more clearly:

It's taken from this article:  http://priceonomics.com/whats-the-difference-between-data-science-and/

Here is that article's definition of statistics compared to data science:

Statistics was primarily developed to help people deal with pre-computer data problems like testing the impact of fertilizer in agriculture, or figuring out the accuracy of an estimate from a small sample. Data science emphasizes the data problems of the 21st Century, like accessing information from large databases, writing code to manipulate data, and visualizing data.

Why was there a specialized need for such persons? Part of it grew out of the computers that humans developed to deal with massive amounts of data:

Several factors prompted these innovations: First, people needed to work with datasets, which we now call big data, that are larger than pre-computational statisticians could have imagined. Second, industry focused increasingly on making predictions about markets, customer behavior and more for commercial uses. The inventors of data science borrowed from statistics, machine learning and database management to create a whole new set of tools for those working with data.

Statistics, on the other hand, has not changed significantly in response to new technology. The field continues to emphasize theory, and introductory statistics courses focus more on hypothesis testing than statistical computing.

The article goes on to provide a brief description of the data scientist:

Statistician and data visualizer Nathan Yau of Flowing Data suggests that data scientists typically have 3 major skills:

(1) They have a strong knowledge of basic statistics and machine learning—or at least enough to avoid misinterpreting correlation for causation, or extrapolating too much from a small sample size.

(2) They have the computer science skills to take an unruly dataset and use a programming language (like R or Python) to make it easy to analyze.

(3) They can visualize and summarize their data and their analysis in a way that is meaningful to somebody less conversant in data.

Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, writes that it is “fair to consider statistics… as a subset of data science” and probably the “least important” aspect. He suggests that the administrative aspects of dealing with data like harvesting, processing, storing and cleaning are more central to data science than hard core statistics.

As we try to bring aspects of this important new field to Medtronic, it will be fascinating to watch how existing personnel can grow into these types of skills. We may also need to bring in some others to help us learn these new skills and cultivate centers of excellence built around the meaningful presentation of data findings!