Category Archives: Soapbox

Still relevant after ten years

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I am on vacation for the next month so I will not be writing new posts. Instead I have decided to delve into my back catalogue of more than 500 posts [see ‘500th post‘ on February 2nd, 2022] and republish posts from ten, five and one year ago. The short post below was published on September 15th, 2012 under the title ‘Innovation jobs‘. It seems as relevant today as it was in 2012.

Yesterday, I listened to an interesting talk by Dr Liang-Gee Chen, President of the National Applied Research Laboratories of Taiwan at the UK-Taiwan Academic-Industry & Technology Transfer Collaboration Forum organised by the British Council.  He presented some statistics from the Kaufmann Foundation, which demonstrated that nearly all new jobs in the USA are generated by new companies.  When you combine this with my conclusion in my posting on ‘Population crunch’, that we need a higher level of innovation in engineering, then we need to review the education programmes provided for our engineers to ensure that they include innovation and entrepreneurship.  These need to be integrated in engineering education programmes [see Handscombe et al, 2009].  We seem to have lost the plot in the UK and retreated to teaching engineering science, design and management orientated towards the employers with the loudest voice, i.e. multi-nationals, who are not likely to be the source of innovation jobs that will pull us out of the global recession.

Handscombe, R.D., Rodriguez-Falcon, E., Patterson, E.A., 2009, ‘Embedding enterprise in engineering’, IJ Mechanical Engineering Education, 37(4):263-274.

Space between the words

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I am an habitual user of a fountain pen.  It is the only writing implement that I carry with me since I enjoy writing with a fountain pen and because I can keep track of one pen but no more than one.  I have used it, and its predecessors, to make notes in a series of forty notebooks that stretch back to when I started as a research assistant forty years ago.  I used to record laboratory results in my notebooks but nowadays I have a research team who perform all of the work in the laboratory.  I still use my pen and notebook to record meetings, ideas and notes on papers.  I find the process of writing notes by hand to be conducive to both remembering detail and connecting fragments of information into new thoughts and ideas.  I am not alone in having these experiences.  Researchers have found that taking notes by hand improves the performance of students in answering conceptual questions compared to students who use a laptop to take notes.  When you write on a laptop, it is easy to delete words and re-start a sentence, whereas to create a coherent set of notes in a book you need to craft a sentence prior to committing pen to paper.  Perhaps the latter process allows a more persistent assembly of neurons to be formed in your brain [see ‘Slow deep thoughts from a planet-sized brain‘ on March 25th, 2020]; or maybe it is just the irregular spacing between handwritten words which creates a more distinct pattern that can be more readily recalled than the repetitive single spaces in typed text.  I certainly feel there is a connection between recalling the image of a page from my notebook and remembering the content even though I cannot usually read the words in my mental image.

Crumb RM, Hildebrandt R & Sutton TM, The value of handwritten notes: a failure to find state-dependent effects when using a laptop to notes and complete a quiz, Teaching of Psychology, 49(1):7-13, 2022.

Unrecognised brilliance of shy and fearless leaders

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Red tulips in a window boxAre you a quiet person? Perhaps shy would be an appropriate description. Do you have a clear vision of where you would like to lead your organisation but perhaps you are hesitant about stepping forward into a leadership position because you think that successful leaders are bold, self-confident, large-than-life and enjoy the limelight. You should think again. Research by Jim Collins and his team, published in the Harvard Business Review, has shown that the most powerfully transformative leaders have a paradoxical mixture of personal humility and professional resolve. They found that companies were transformed from a merely good performance to a sustained great performance in terms of their stock value only when led by a CEO who was both self-effacing and fearless. They called these class of people, level 5 leaders. They are ambitious for their organisation not themselves, assign credit for successes to others while accepting the blame for failures and have an unwavering resolve to do whatever is necessary to achieve the best long-term results despite the obstacles. So, if you worry that you lack the charisma to inspire your team then pause and consider whether you might be a level 5 leader with the rare combination of modesty and willfulness that, Jim Collins has suggested, are required to transform the performance of your organisation. Unfortunately, if you think you possess these characteristics then you almost certainly are not a level 5 leader because your humility would never allow you to entertain the thought!

Reference:

Jim Collins, Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve, Harvard Business Review, January 2001.

Exploiting complexity to help society adapt

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photograph of a flower for decorative purposes onlyI am worried that engineering has become a mechanism for financial returns in an economic system that values profit above everything with the result that many engineers are unwittingly, or perhaps in a few cases wittingly, supporting the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few capitalists.  At the start of the industrial revolution, when engineering innovation started to make a difference to the way we live and work, very few engineers foresaw the impact on the planet of the large scale provision to society of products and services.  Nowadays most engineers understand the consequences for the environment of their work; however, many feel powerless to make substantial changes often because they are constrained by the profit-orientated goals of their employer or feel that they play a tiny role in a complex system.  Complex systems are often characterised by self-organisation in which order appears without any centralised control or planning and by adaptation to change and experience.  Such systems are familiar to many engineers and perhaps they do not, but should, think of the engineering profession as complex system capable of adaptation and self-organisation in which the actions and decisions of individual engineers will cause the emergence of a new order. Our individual impact might be tiny but by acting we influence others to act and the cumulative effect will emerge in ways that no one can predict – that’s emergence for you.