We are not car fanatics. We drive compact SUVs 5 to 7 years. My previous vehicle was approaching EOL by our definition. It also had “skin cancer” – peeling paint. In the crazy auto market we live in, the dealer wanted a king’s ransom to fix that.
So we hired Deal Architect for his negotiation skills and gingerly walked in the new vehicle market. He somehow got us a great trade-in and a nice manageable net price. We did hear him cussing quite a bit😊
So we are accidental owners of a 2023 Tucson Hybrid Limited. It must have every feature the auto industry has been dreaming up in the last few years – panoramic roof, smart cruise control, connectivity via every channel, all kinds of safety sensors, wireless charging, a fob with as many buttons as your TV remote and lots more. It is a good looking car ripped with lots of lines which make it look pretty muscular. The inside has a very comfortable feel for a tall family like ours.
In the mobility chapter in the Business as Unusual book we recently helped SAP write, we talked about how the auto sector has been evolving with the CASE acronym = Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric. This vehicle has traits of each.
And bonus after bonus – like AWD, which would be handy if we ever go see Tommy in Colorado in the winter. The hybrid version has 40 more hp than the regular version and delivers 37 mpg. We did not look at plug-in EVs. We believe we are a few years away till utility grids support at-scale mass home charging and BEV prices drop significantly.
One caveat – the documentation of all these features is spread around the fat user manual, a slimmer quick reference guide, a sales brochure, in the BlueLink mobile app, in several YouTube videos and in the instrument cluster in the car. Nate, my really nice sales guy gave me a tutorial and has been helping me navigate the documentation via text messages. I have a feeling Margaret is going to wait a while before she drives it.
I wish I could tell you to run out and get yourself one. Hyundai took the Limited branding seriously and did not ship enough of these to the US and most dealers wanted a premium over the sticker. If you do go looking, call Deal Architect for negotiation assistance.
But if you get one, text me and let’s help each other enjoy the gorgeous look and feel and the zillions of features.
Three of my Instagram galleries of 10 photos each from the SAP event in Orlando. Google Drive has at least a couple of hundred more photos. Credit to Jennifer Pisani of SAP for some of the photos.
As we approach the end of our month long visit to India, Margaret and I took advantage of a WiFi-free day on a ‘Kettuvallam’ - a houseboat on India’s longest lake, Vembanad to discuss our top 10 experiences - intense, spiritual, picturesque, humorous - during our trip. Not an easy task from a very long list of candidates which included visits to tea plantations and spice farms and are cataloged in hundreds of photos and videos.
If Margaret had made the list by herself it would likely include many Shiva, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Baha’i and other temples and churches, mosques and synagogues we have seen. If I were to do the list alone it would include spectacular fruit buffets (mounds of papaya and muskmelon) and much more humble meals served on banana leaf and some of the wind farms and other technology we saw in our travels
Here they are in no particular order
Old Delhi spice market - the wild cycle rickshaw ride through narrow streets. The sinus clearing walk through lanes of red pepper and other spices. The admiration of workers who carry heavy bags while politely dodging the vehicular and tourist traffic
Taj Mahal under a full moon and next morning we saw its remarkable Makrana marble gleam as the sun shone at it from different angles
A boat ride on the holy Ganga along the ghats in Varanasi, supposedly the oldest city in the world. The steep climb down and up, the cremation fires and jostling with other boats to participate in the aarti - the fire ritual made for an intense experience
A visit to the spot In Sarnath where Buddha gave his first sermon after reaching his enlightenment
A ‘drivethru’ meal - on the way to Tenkasi the Zoho bus stopped for what looked like a traffic jam. Next thing we knew folks boarded and handed each of us a choice of packaged veg or non veg meals. Bags with very filling lunches.
A langur - long tailed monkey - hitched a mile’s ride on our vehicle in Rajasthan
A visit to the Zoho village in rural Tenkasi. Kids during traditional dances, songs and martial arts. A guided tour of schools, farms, local architecture and more from Sridhar Vembu, the CEO of Zoho and his team
A room In Haridwar where you could walk into the Ganga. Margaret took a dip in the fast moving holy river and was glad she could hold on to the metal cage
A room overlooking Munnar - rightfully called “God’s own country”
A pedestrian bridge in Rishikesh. The 1st and 3rd lane are for two wheelers but the walking humans opportunistically take advantage of them and the cows use all three. Brought home the hustle and bustle which defines India. Everybody is on the move all the time!!!
Bonus - the gentle houseboat ride through the Wetlands at 3 knots with room and board included. We went by countless snake birds and snake boats. On a busy Sunday the lake has over a thousand of these boats. At times, we felt an armada was coming towards us and headed to and from one of the ten rivers which feed the lake.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Dave Truch, a polymath who I have known for over 20 years and profiled in my books. His career has progressed from academic, to management, to digital technology to robotics, to futurist and beyond. He has been keynote, panelist, white paper author, and consultant on many topics. He currently dabbles in 3D passive technology.
He has a deep passion for all the above but adds hockey, music and humor to the list. First and foremost, he is a family man. He writes about hockey – the ice, not the grass, version:
I’ve had a passion for ice hockey from the age of three. I grew up in a small coal mining town, Coleman, in the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, Canada. The major sport during the long winter months was hockey.
I learned to skate on old CCM hand me down tube skates. The “ice” was an old slough behind our house which froze over in the winter. All the neighborhood kids there would go to play hockey and we often used the tufts of grass poking through the ice as our ice markers including goal posts!
As a youth, I played league hockey until the end of Bantams. The price of equipment became too expensive and although I continued to skate extensively, and play in University intramural games, I didn’t play in any league hockey until I moved to Anchorage Alaska. 38 then, I obtained my coaching certificate and coached my four sons, the two youngest of which inherited my passion for the game and along with myself, continue to play to this day. Now a lot of people are going to laugh at this but hockey, if played well, is a cerebral game! Sure, sure there’s body contact and yes, occasional fights, but think of this:
1) Skaters are extremely fast. Average speed is 10 mph, with accelerated bursts exceeding 20-25mph.
2) The puck is moving extremely fast. Wrist shots generally are 80+ mph while slapshots can exceed 100+ mph.
3) Passing and scoring are based on 3D geometry. The puck is often sliding on the ice, but when taking a shot on goal, the puck is most often moving in the air.
4) Not counting the 2 goalies, each team has 5 players and only one person is controlling the puck at any given time. So essentially, 90% of the time you are moving without a puck. The average time an individual holds the pack before shooting or passing is around 2-3 seconds. This translates to only handling the puck for a little more than one minute for an entire 60 minute (3 periods of 20 minutes each) game!
What this all translates too is that you have very little time to think of where the puck is, where you are and what is your next move! The best hockey players in my opinion, think of where you need to be rather than where you are. This in coaching is often called the “open ice” concept. Your object is to find the open ice where in a few seconds and with a good pass from your teammate, you can pick up the puck and not have the opposing players around you. This ability to “see the future” of the movement of everyone on the ice is a skill possessed by the most talented NHL players at the those speeds.
Thankfully, for us not talented enough to be in the NHL, we find that most people are considerably slower, and not talented enough to see where the puck is going to be so that we can enjoy the game thoroughly even at our snail pace compared to the pros.
When I lived in Chicago, BP had an internal company event called the BP Torch Classic. Employees of the company would get together and participate in sporting events. This quickly blossomed to become a way to pay back the communities where we worked. Employees would contribute time, money and effort into helping local community charities, local parks and recreation upgrades.
My favorite event was the hockey game played against the Blackhawks (the Chicago professional team) Alumni. Employees would earn a slot on the BP Dream Team by obtaining “donations” from themselves and respective supply vendors who would contribute to the AHIHA (American Hearing Impaired Hockey Association). This association was founded by Irv Tiahnybik, a Chicago businessman and Stan Mikita of the Chicago Blackhawks (he has been named one of the 100 Greatest NHL players). Irv had a son named Lex who was hearing impaired but loved the game. This became a school to teach hearing impaired children how to play the game.
I was fortunate to play in two of those games, one in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and one in Anchorage, Alaska, USA. I was even allowed to take the ceremonial opening face off against Keith Magnuson! The second game also included my two youngest sons on the Dream Team. Importantly. I was able to raise $25K for the association. I treasure to this day the friendship I had with Stan Mikita who served me beer and pizza from the Blackhawks alumni room at the Chicago Arena!
Technology has dramatically changed the game. Stan Mikita actually was part of that technology change. He was the first to introduce the curved stick to the NHL. They didn’t have rules for what he did so that first season he was able to lift the puck underneath the cross bar. The wrist shot became a dramatic new weapon. He told me that the only problem with his curve was that he couldn’t then do a backhand!
After that season, the NHL had rules on the size of the curve and that has continued to this day. From the early days, technology has changed in skates, sticks, goalie equipment and even the puck. New materials, including carbon fiber has been incorporated into the boots of the skate, the stick itself and much of the material in goal pads and other padding for the skaters. Helmets and hockey protective gear have been modified with new materials, made lighter, and most importantly made safer for hits and concussions. High tech tracking technology is implanted into the pucks and the jerseys of players; the data related above regarding speed, etc. is verified with this new technology.
My passion for the game continues to this day and surprisingly, even here in Houston, I can play ice hockey. I joined my team, the Ice Dragons, in 2008 when we moved here with BP. I am now retired but continue to enjoy the team camaraderie, teammates, game excitement, post-game beer consumption, and overall feeling of being a part of something wonderful.
We have even managed to win a few championships in our league and even though this year I will be 70, I am still able to contribute a few goals, especially those in a shootout.
The team I play on consists of individuals from all part of the globe and from all walks of life. The members are professors, engineers, construction workers, teachers, students, business owners; you name it we’ve had someone on our team who’s done that. Our post-game conversations in the locker room, of course accompanied by consumption of ice cold beer, varies from the scientific and relativistic discussions, mathematical challenges, energy related stories, fun facts from our past, etc. My mind is constantly stimulated both on and off the ice and I have maintained some very long-lasting friendships and relationships through this passion.
I wear the number 77 on my jersey as I wish to still be able to play league hockey at that age. As we say at the start of the third period - there’s still plenty of hockey left!
We are running a series of posts on the Deal Architect blog which
Excerpt from the text and graphs in the SAP Business as Unusual book. On average, they reflect about 10% of the content in each of the 10 chapters.
Take snippets from the video conversations we had with SAP, customer, partner executives and market observers. On average, they reflect about 2% of the videos we recorded for each chapter but should allow you to listen directly to many of the really smart executives quoted in the book.
Keep coming back - we will be updating this every few days.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Joe Little who is an emerging technologist, Honorary Professor at the University of Stirling Management School and a qualified Futurist with a 36 year career in BAe, BP and as an independent consultant at Ouijo Consulting based in Surrey, England. He writes about his passion for not just listening to or playing music but also producing it:
Throughout my career, I have always been impressed by folks, who if asked, shared their secret creative passion. To me, they also tend to be ones who have the biggest business impact.
I turned sixteen on January 23, 1980. The day after, I caught a bus into Glasgow city center and there, flush with my birthday cash, I started an obsession. I bought 4 albums played by bands that most excited me back then. Since then, I have purchased an average of 1.5 albums a week. But what also started that day was intense curiosity about how those albums were recorded, the technology and the people involved. What does a producer do? How about an engineer? And what the hell are synthesizers?
I guess being a technology geek that shouldn’t have been a big surprise but it was the creative element that most fascinated me.
Fast forward to 1985. Having spent 2 years as a radio DJ, I saw an opportunity to get time in the adjoining studio. A 4 week producer’s course gave me the opportunity to book time and play with the 16 track mixing desk and tape deck. I learned how to mix, overdub and tape loop and create fairly interesting (at least to me) sounds and fundamental musical pieces - all with very basic equipment. It was a welcome escape from the pressures of studying and the stresses of the world. Music creation would become my most satisfying cure.
It was around that time, that I realized that having a immersive, creative output not only provided me with a distraction but ultimately kept that side of my brain active when the rest of my world was routine and plain. Being an obsessive workaholic, this became an essential element in “my mix”. It also meant that side of my brain was activated and ready when called upon in a work situation to be innovative, to generate ideas, and to make projects more appealing in the eyes of the business.
In 1994 I was looking for a new project to channel my musical interest. I visited the music industry technology fair at the Olympia in London. I saw an exhibit by Akai where they showcased their kit in little home digital studio pods. I took photographs and notes and set about building the elements of my own digital home studio. In that initial instance, my configuration included a Roland D5 keyboard, Gateway PC with a sound card, outboard Casio keyboard, a little mini mixer and a Marantz DCC deck (remember DCC, as in digital compact cassette?).
Music software was prohibitively expensive back then but as luck would have it, I managed to get a license for a short-lived new comer. SeqWin v2 was undercutting the competition and for their sins quickly went out of business when no one would distribute it.
It was with this little MIDI studio that I set about recording a CD purely for my own pleasure. “Digital Delay” had a limited edition of 2! One for me and one for my mother. It was pretty much rubbish to be honest aside from a song or two but it was the start of a huge learning curve.
A year later, having played in an office band and been tutored in time signatures and essential rhythms by a work colleague, Steve Croston, I tried again. This time I deemed “Deep” worthy of sharing with friends and colleagues (it was still a limited edition of 100 cassettes). It was mastered at Royal Oak studios in West London. Hearing my own music played on other people’s hi-fi systems and not getting a thumbs down was a thrill.
For the next 3 years I continued to record with ever better equipment (synthesizers, V-drums, guitar synths) and moved to limited edition CD releases with “Destiny” (recorded in Madrid and Hamburg) and “In The Wake of Apollo”. I started to share these with New Age record labels. In 2000 I caught the attention of a producer at BMN who was looking not only for collaborators but material for their record company launch. This led to sessions in their High Barn studios in Essex and songs that were later to appear on several albums by their artists including a Ghanaian drum group, Aklowa.
BMN Music very kindly released my album called “Difficult Listening Hour”. At its core it had sample based technology using Sony’s Acid and Cubase DAW (digital audio workstation) that I used to mix orchestral, electronic and world music sounds. It was inspired by a small band in a market in central Japan triggering samples and thumping out compelling bass rhythms. At the time it felt very fresh but soon that trend became more popular and mainstream so its follow-up “Moving on Then” was less well received.
But with the advent of podcasts and platforms such as Podshow that year, led by MTVs Adam Curry, my music found an unexpected digital channel and audience. Songs from that album made it onto radio in New York, Israel and even made the top 10 on a Swedish Radio station for the summer of 2006. All of sudden my songs were being mashed together with poems, with Latin American superstar music and integrated into tech podcasts.
For the next 9 years. my creative brain was awash with new technology and futures in the day job and the little studio got packed up and unpacked many times but without any fresh music. Then, of all things, on a Daddy day, my kids demanded I write a song with them. I was toying with a refresh of technology anyway and had some ideas kicking around. But time was an issue, especially with excessive work travel. If I was to write new songs they would have to start on the road, in hotels, trains, airplanes and airport lounges. The iPad was fresh and new and the software on the device was conducive to making that happen. So I set about recording bits and pieces on the iPad that would then get assembled at home on a MacBook Pro using Logic X Pro.
I loved writing songs to themes and this one, “Hidden Meanings”, was an idea that had gestated for a while. Using archive recordings of presidents, priests, actors, dictators, explorers and radio friendly colleagues I layered an album of songs about saying things and meaning something totally different. My kids wanted to record “Jelly Donut” - it used JFK's Berlin speech with my kids having fun with his words. I released it on SoundCloud and quickly found a brand new audience interested in the novelty.
Using that method over the next few years “Chronicles of an Analogpunk" and “Between Two Worlds” got quickly assembled and released. By this time there were plenty more streaming channels available for distribution. And for once, they yielded some income. Not too much. but enough to meaningfully donate to local cancer care and palliative charities.
It also meant that if there was a need for a license free music sound track on a website, music for a virtual world installation, for a video or commercial ad, Joe became the “go to guy” for something that would fit.
Like most folks, the first few months of the COVID pandemic presented something none of us had much of before…TIME. Writing upwards of 50 songs was my savior. Spending an hour or two each day gave me an outlet that distracted from the world outside once again. “Cloud Formations” gave me a chance to mix video footage for a combined video/audio experience for those looking to remain calm in an anxious world.
“A Life Erased” then provided an even bigger opportunity to write for an imagined futuristic movie. This time I combined voices of friends and work colleagues also pinned down by the pandemic. It also afforded an opportunity to work with a professional singer, Ainsley Hamill, for the first time with the resultant song “I Thought I’d Find You Here’ a launchpad to a new project with her.
The pandemic also opened up a further collaboration with a former BP colleague, Martin Ingram. We have had the same weird taste in music and using pieces started during the lock-down created a new project called “The Unnatural Science Orchestra”. The resultant EP and CD “Zen Gardening on Ganymede” and “Unnatural Chemistry” with their early stage Midjourney AI generated imagery creating new and weirder soundscapes and a new audience.
My message in all of this is that there is value for all business men and women to create not only a physical well-being but also a creative well-being that naturally enriches the workplace brain. So never be afraid of having that secret creative channel - in fact, embrace it.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Charlie Bess, a serial contributor to this series with a long-time technology career at GM, EDS and HP. His LinkedIn profile says “Primarily retired - but always busy doing something”. No kidding – he is always tinkering with some gadget or another – as “IT support” for his kids, woodshop club or just to learn something new. The photo has his 3D printer and CNC on the table. His laser is directly behind him.
Here he writes more about lasers. Actually he used the hot new generative AI technology – ChatGPT to generate a post about lasers and wood working. You can see his Polymath penchant for tinkering with all kinds of technology.
"I’ve known Vinnie for a very long time and have collaborated and shared posts with him numerous times over the years. Here is a post on my recent passion for woodworking. I also have a blog that I occasionally post about my recent activities in CAM, ham radio, software development, electronics and whatever else comes to mind. Since one of my areas of interest is also Artificial Intelligence, where I worked at GM’s artificial intelligence group back in the 90s, I thought I’d have ChatGPT try at a blog post about lasers. ChatGPT generated 90% of this post (the portion in italics) and I just added the pictures and links to build context:
As a technologist for over 30 years, I've always been fascinated by the potential of new technologies to change the way we live and work. And one technology that has caught my attention in recent years is the personal laser.
When I retired back in 2018, I had the opportunity to explore new hobbies and interests, and I stumbled upon the world of personal lasers. I quickly realized that these devices have the potential to revolutionize the way we work on projects at home, from woodworking and engraving to cutting and marking materials.
I started off by experimenting with a small laser cutter and engraver, which I purchased for my home workshop.
I then moved to a larger model that could burn models into cutting boards…
I was amazed by the precision and versatility of the device, and I quickly began using it to create all sorts of projects, from custom signs and plaques to engraved gifts and home decor.
One of the things that I love most about working with personal lasers is the level of creativity and freedom it allows. With a laser cutter and engraver, I can create intricate designs and patterns that would be impossible to achieve with traditional tools. And because the laser is so precise, I can create projects that are perfectly finished and polished, with no rough edges or uneven surfaces.
In addition to wood, I've also started experimenting with other materials, such as plastics, leather, and even fabric. I've used my laser cutter to create custom coasters, wallets, and even clothing. The possibilities are truly endless when it comes to working with personal lasers.
One of the biggest advantages of using personal lasers at home is I can work on projects in the middle of the night if I want to, and I don't have to worry about traveling or waiting for my projects to be completed. This allows me to work at my own pace and to really focus on the details and nuances of each project.
Something that always puzzled me is that some people view woodworking and the user of lasers as craft, not art. If they knew how much imagination and creativity went into the design process, they would have a more enlightened view. The issue parallels the same discussions I had back in the working world of soft skills and hard skills. I always thought of this as: “If they can’t understand it, it must be a hard skill. If they can’t explain it, it must be a soft skill.”
While personal lasers are relatively new to the consumer market, they are becoming increasingly popular, accessible, and reasonable.
Whether you're a woodworker, a designer, or a DIY enthusiast, personal lasers are a powerful tool that can help you take your skills and creativity to the next level. I highly recommend becoming enlightened about this tool.
That was the end of the ChatGPT created content. Before I started, I fed ChatGPT a few posts from my blog, so it could understand my style. I then asked it to generate a post on how I valued a personal laser. Once I got the result, I read through and eliminated any incorrect content from the result generated.
Remember that even though the content was generated by an AI tool, the adage of GIGO - garbage in, garbage out - still applies. Phrasing and asking refining follow up questions can also help you significantly shape the content generated. I could have asked it to generate the result in the form of a Seinfeld script and it would comply.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Maggie Fox, a former marketing and operations executive who has spent most of her career in technology and software, often in ground-breaking spaces. She's also a two-time startup CEO who is passionate about small, sustainable family businesses and heritage crafts. Introducing consumers to the concept of "luxury scissors" (your scissors should be as good as your knives!) under the Ciselier e-commerce brand is a natural culmination of her years in digital and social media marketing, love for brand-building, collaboration and exploration. Maggie’s passion is to help celebrate Ciselier's traditional scissor makers and help them find new markets globally:
Have you ever stared for a while at a humble scissor? I mean, really considered it? When I was growing up, we had (what seemed at the time) a massive pair of old black-handled carbon steel shears. They lurked in the junk drawer, always at the ready to help in opening packaging, wrapping gifts or making crafts. My mother still has them; they’re called “the good scissors”.
They are a tool from another time – hot-forged and oil-hardened, not even in the same category as the scissors most people have today, which are cheap, plastic-handled and cold stamped. You can’t sharpen these mass-produced scissors, and when they dull or break, they’re thrown away. They’re literally garbage.
But how did that shift happen? And can you still buy really good scissors, serious tools made by skilled craftspeople?
This is a question I’d idly asked myself a few years ago. It was entirely random, and yet it stuck with me in a strangely persistent way. Until one day I decided I needed to know the answer.
If there’s one thread I can draw through my life, it’s exploration. I’ve taken on every new twist or turn based on one thing, “Well, that sounds like fun!” One person’s fun might be another’s torture, so a definition is probably helpful: if it’s never been done, no one can figure out how (or they tell you it’s “impossible”), I want to do it.
From my “first career” as a television writer and producer to starting Social Media Group (the world’s first social media consulting firm) in 2006, to joining the Senior Executive Team at SAP as head of digital marketing, I have always been drawn to technology, innovation and transformation. Most recently, that’s been at Smile.io, an ecommerce loyalty software platform in the Shopify ecosystem, where I sat on the board and spent a year running the business.
In August 2021, I decided I was ready to launch a startup again. I came up with a list of ideas, white spaces where I thought there could be opportunity for creativity and growth – for making something new, much like Social Media Group. Research and exploration narrowed the list, until I came to that very small question mentioned earlier: “Where can you buy really good scissors?” I thought I’d see if I could find out.
I was shocked to discover what felt like a secret: there are a small handful of heritage makers producing amazing scissors - as good as the best knives. Often in regions known for swords, many of these firms have been making household blades for centuries. But they are dwindling – fast. In Solingen, Premana, France, Spain… makers were practicing their craft in the traditional way, but their scissors were not making their way to global markets. These companies were closing, one by one.
Here's one of the artisans in Italy
I became instantly obsessed. High-quality household scissors did not exist as a consumer category, and there was virtually no content available on the history or making of scissors available online. I started looking for more makers, turning to export manifests and other documents in the public domain to track down company names and contact information. It was like a treasure hunt, and I began ordering samples. Google Translate was my very good friend.
By the fall, gorgeous scissors in hand – unlike anything I had even owned - I knew I was on to something really, really fun. So, of course I obviously (?) decided to start an e-commerce company, importing only the finest handmade scissors, with the tiny goal of creating awareness about this dying craft and hopefully saving the industry from oblivion. Ciselier (French for “Scissor Maker”) was born.
For the first time in a long time, Ciselier has given me the chance to make something net new from end to end: product selection, branding and positioning, packaging, systems and processes. After years of training myself to delegate to people far smarter than myself, it’s been an education and a re-education in marketing. And e-commerce software, metal forging, supply chain logistics, copywriting, packaging design, vendor management, importing… the list is overwhelming when I look back at it). Not to mention the rush of founding a company with a mission to help our heritage makers (who craft such beautiful scissors). They’re under huge economic pressure from low-cost, low-quality products; it’s truly an industry that could be gone before most people even hear about it, which would be a terrible loss.
I’m still obsessed with technology, but this time it’s very, very old technology! Scissors are a tool that are used almost universally; everyone has a pair. Our point is that your scissors can - and should be - as good as your knives. It takes up to five years of apprenticeship to learn how to assemble a pair of high-quality scissors, and the number of people who can do so is fewer than 100 globally. Everyone instantly appreciates the difference when they handle a pair of hot-forged, hand-assembled scissors, but sadly, most of us never get the chance.
We decided to keep our focus narrow, on just four categories of scissors: kitchen, embroidery, paper/craft, and left-handed use. Kitchen are by far the most popular. We find that anyone who appreciates a fine knife or cooks with any serious intention immediately falls in love. Scissors are an incredibly efficient kitchen tool, but not as commonly used in North America as abroad. To that end, we've started publishing a video series about uses for kitchen scissors. Truly - once you have a pair, you simply cannot go back. Similarly, our other categories offer the finest quality tools specific to the tasks at hand: tiny, deadly-sharp embroidery snips, powerful slicing fabric shears and a great selection for lefties. Here are the Pallarès Primera Everyday Kitchen scissors, made in Solsona, Spain:
Ciselier was founded to raise awareness of the world’s heritage scissor manufacturers and make it easier for quality-minded consumers to find them. We had the great good fortune to visit our heritage makers last year, and we plan to make another trip this coming May. We’ve had incredible uptake and coverage in the media, and now we’re more concerned about our supply than demand. At the moment we sell only within North America, but we’ll eventually expand to Europe.
We're extremely active on Instagram as well as Twitter and in order to fill the huge void of information about scissors (there are literally only three books available in English on the topic, and they are extremely slim) we have also been doing a lot of research and conducting interviews with makers, publishing articles on our blog and via our email newsletter. We've been building up a good library of information, but there's much more to document.
It's been an incredibly fun startup to build – creative, innovative, challenging and meaningful. When I tell my acquaintances in the technology space what my new company does, they often give me an odd look. They must think I’ve lost it or wonder what the software angle is. But then I show them a pair of hand-assembled, hot-forged and oil-hardened stainless steel kitchen scissors… and that look instantly disappears.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Kate Murphy who calls herself a lifelong learner, change leader and communicator. Her career has centered in the tech/software sector. Her motto is “I focus on what is, and what can be - not what is not or can't be”. She writes about her incredible organizational skills and passion to transition people, places and things to a better place.
"Along life’s journey I became adept at making positive change happen. This realization inspired me to dig into the structural and cultural aspects of organization design and change management. I spent a chunk of my career in roles where I led transformation and change initiatives and/or served as an internal practitioner helping teams across the business landing changes into practice.
Once I saw the power of systems thinking and how simple tools and solutions enable change management, I was hooked! My knowledge of how to make change stick eventually spilled into my personal life where it has helped my life’s journey and serves my passion to help people.
We all have moments that call for us to reflect and revise our 3 Ps: purpose, priorities, and practices. It might be due to a major life event like getting married, becoming a parent, getting divorced or the death of a spouse. You know, the big stuff that has us rethink and reset how we live.
I now regularly reflect and revise, but for a time I did more floating and reacting than planning. For years. my husband Dennis and I made unconscious, daily decisions which eroded our financial outlook and slowly sabotaged our health. We both spent way too much time working (and caregiving) and too little time focused on healthy eating, exercising, and keeping up positive daily rituals. For me years of unconscious practices resulted in compounded weight gain and diabetes. Years of paying for outside services led to overspending and saving less money for the future and fun experiences. We talked about saving more, having more fun but the reality was – we had no structured life plan. Our conversations lacked direction on how we spent our time and money. When the kids were growing up, it felt like we too frequently navigated life on automatic pilot and based on their lives.
As I became professionally adept at translating strategy and change management, I started to bring key aspects of strategic planning, change management, and communication into our home. We took a step back and built a life plan. We discussed and I mapped to key changes across all aspects of our lives. We were not perfect – some old habits die hard. Over time we increased focus on health, how we made decisions together and our future. Progress was made! We had a framework to make life decisions.
Nearly 30 years in, life threw a curve ball (as it will) – Dennis was diagnosed with terminal cancer. After two years of working and caregiving, he passed away and I was widowed. Those two years and the aftermath were tough. But we were thoughtful about our decisions. We prioritized health, seeing family and friends over our professional roles. We slowed down. We both liked to keep commitments, so we upheld our professional responsibilities – but not above other priorities. And when work became too much for Dennis, I managed my career and caregiving, but not at the detriment of my priorities!
When Dennis passed, I recognized an opportunity to transform my identity and life as a single woman in her 50s. I defined what that meant to me. But before I launched “Kate plan #1”, I needed to make the emotional and physical transitions – I needed to grieve and literally undertake the legal (loathsome) processes when a spouse passes away. It may sound crazy, but I scheduled time to grieve. I treated my transition strategically. I whipped out MS Office tools to plan out immediate, midterm and long-term goals. I planned, I made timelines, lists, I tracked, and I adjusted along the way. The structure and focus on execution served me well. I was focused on making progress, not achieving a certain date. I celebrated all wins – small to large.
I hired a financial planner, revised my will and other legal documents. Over time I cleaned out closets and reimagined how to use the space in our home. I leaned into making the changes (big and small) and I role modeled a mindset of reinvention for my adult children.
My parents’ finances and health declined. I helped them until each passed away. And my daughter’s disabling health conditions brings with it responsibilities and a housemate! I realized that my role as a caregiver needed to become more ingrained with my life and financial planning. Another “ah ha” moment which required a revision in my plan.
It has been seven years since Dennis passed away. And the Kate plan has been revised seven times based on life’s curveballs and opportunities. During 2020, my daughter Jill and I made a move to the coastal city, Newburyport Massachusetts. The main driver for the move was to serve Jill’s health and healthcare. It also moved us closer to some family and closer to Boston sports. I wanted to live in a coastal community where I could slow down, be close to water, walk more and drive less.
A downside, besides the cold winters, is the cost of living. Both are brutal and required a revision in how we spend and save money. I started following Shang and her story and advice: at Save My Cents. Her advice serves as reminder to be conscious about where every cent is going. And she draws some tight boundaries to achiever her goals. Her life is different from mine, yet she offers ideas and inspiration.
Professionally speaking, my work “Kate plan” aligns with my personal plan. I added spending additional time to help colleagues, friends, and family to my list of priorities. It is time to give back more.
I have always been an active listener. When I take a step back, what I hear are things like “I am stressed”, I am overwhelmed”, “I have no idea what I would do if…”, “I have no time for me”, “How do I do more of what I love to do?”. I can relate. Sometimes people just want acknowledgement. Sometimes they want practical help to change their circumstances or get started. I have started to be more attuned to help others in practical ways.
Over the few years, Jill and I created and/or use systems of work (spreadsheets and apps) to live more efficiently. I have moved 19 times (I don’t recommend it). The upside is we know how to move – the budget, logistics, timing, services, gotchas and all. We designed a system that scales for interstate moves. Jill coded each box. We tracked all contents using a spreadsheet and colored/numbered labels. Our project management was managed tightly.
Before the move, we sold and donated a ton of stuff using multiple storage units over time. We prepped for an eventual move for many months. So, when the opportunity arose, we needed a week to list our home and six weeks to make an interstate move (during COVID-19 pandemic)! The logistics were complex given a temporary apartment in the mix. I factored into the budget external moving help twice.
Real estate, house and space upgrades, simplification and designing rooms are side passions of mine. I love the process of prepping to put a house up for sale including letting go of stuff, upgrading, de-personalizing and staging a home.
Making a career change is another area where I help friends and family. At work my “side hustle” (as I jokingly say) is helping colleagues develop and evolve their careers. I have reinvented my SAP career several times. I have been a strategy auditor in Corporate Audit. I led a transformation and change team in HR. I ran point on various aspects of corporate communications including M&A, financial, crisis and internal comms. Today I am running integrated storytelling for our Global Sponsorships organization in Marketing. It is a mix of digital marketing and communications based on stories told with our sports and entertainment partners.
Big transformations and life changes like career changes and moves can be successful with the right mindset, a plan and daily attention to choices and practices. If you want to be a marathon runner, poor eating is counter intuitive. Turning intentions into daily practice can sometimes feel like building a sandcastle during a sandstorm!
I find that starting small helps. One of my daughter Jill’s (and my) go to books is called Atomic Habits: an Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. After reading this book, Jill vowed to read a chapter a day. At year-end she has read 30+ books, far beyond a chapter a day. Reading is now a part of her daily practice. This is monumental for someone who, amongst her many maladies, suffers from multiple types of headaches daily.
In 2023 I will turn greater attention towards helping people make smooth [life] transitions. I will focus where my passions lie: homes/real estate, career development and reinvention. I am a geek at heart. I will continue to use tools, apps, and the wisdom of others as inspiration to enable smooth transitions.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Ed Maguire who has worked in equity research since 1999, both as a publishing equity and supervisory analyst, with a focus on software and innovation at CIBC, Merrill Lynch, CLSA and SMBC Nikko. He is also a musician and composer, recording and performing on bass, violin and mandolin. He is profiled with a 5 string Vecchio workshop violin.
"I like to make music whenever I get the chance. I’ve released three albums in 2021-22, with more on the way in 2023. I’ve included links to a few recordings below.
A Little bit of Background
Growing up in a household where both parents were musicians (father plays piano, mother sings), I was immersed in music from the beginning. Parental tastes ran towards classical music, so from very early on I was familiar with Chopin, Scarlatti, Beethoven, Rachmaninov and others. Violin lessons began at age 7, followed by piano, with participation in school and youth orchestras a constant activity. At age 13, rock and roll beckoned with a far cooler social cachet, and I took up the electric bass as my main instrument.
By age 16 I was playing in bars and clubs with different bands in the DC area, playing rock, funk and blues. A summer session at Berklee in Boston before 11th grade introduced jazz - and as I explored jazz fusion bands like Weather Report and Return to Forever. I was hooked. Majoring in Music at Columbia rounded out the classical theory and history foundation, while I pursued bass in R&B bands, played mandolin and fiddle in country and bluegrass bands. In my senior year I started working with computer sequencing (Voyetra Sequencer Plus on early DOS PCs).
In the 90s I worked in the music business for a distributor of indie labels and worked with an amalgam of diverse bands – African, Brazilian, Flamenco, jazz and funk with a variety of musicians. In 1997, I released my first solo album “Jasmine” – with the synths and drum programming recorded on a Mac with Opcode Vision. I overdubbed bass, violin and mandolins and had a number of guests overdubbing percussion, guitar, keyboards, sax and bass clarinet.
In 1998, I started my MBA and with a career transition to finance and starting a family in 2000. I set aside playing music for the next decade. Working as a tech equity analyst covering software and innovation at Merrill Lynch and CLSA was a lot of fun but a polite nudge from an old friend induced me to get back into playing actively. When I bought a new Macbook to start recording with Logic in 2011, much had changed: no longer did I need the rack of hardware synths, mixers and effects that I had relied upon in the 90s for recording. Everything went virtual, putting the power of music making in hand for a fraction of the cost a few years prior.
Some Musical Influences
Having spent years exploring many different genres of music, there are a few standouts that characterize my musical taste. Fundamentally, music that appeals to me has to stimulate one of three areas of the body – the head (intellectually interesting), the heart (emotionally rich) or the booty (the groove). My favorite music checks all three boxes. A few representative favorites include Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Mahler, Steve Reich, Earth Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Kahn, Take 6, Prince, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorius, Marcus Miller, Ivan Lins, Marisa Monte, Salif Keita, Esperanza Spalding, Jeff Beck. Van Halen, the Beatles, Steely Dan, Snarky Puppy, Jean-Luc Ponty, Didier Lockwood, Eric Dolphy, John Scofield, Milton Nascimento and many many others.
The Process
Since the early 90s my approach to music creation has involved tracking multiple instruments, often a one-man band, sometimes bringing in soloists and percussionists. My more recent music incorporates keyboards, percussion and drum samples, basses, violins, mandolins and guitar. I like to characterize my music as “funky jazz” = funky on the bottom, jazz on top with R&B influenced grooves and complex harmonies
Usually I will sketch out chords, melodies and form with pencil and music paper as a guide. This generally starts with a core rhythm, with harmonies and chord changes blocked out with keyboards. Bit by bit I like to add textures, whether using keyboards or live instruments. For melodies, I will often double up a lead instrument with two or more different sounds to get a richer tone. Bass lines are usually multi-tracked and doubled – one of my favorite sounds is the combination of fretless bass playing low roots doubled with a clavinet, with finger style and/or slap bass filling out the bottom end.
One of the fun parts of recording is creatively using effects to find a good sound. This may include some kind of compression, delay, modulation (chorus or phase shifter), some reverb, and sometimes pitch shifting or stereo panning effects. The goal in mixing a final version is to place the different elements of the composition in the mix so there is clear separation of distinct parts and blending of different sounds to enhance specific voices. Mixing is a bit of an art and science, and the product improves with practice. Since most of what I create is multi-tracked I do the engineering myself. However for the final versions to be released on streaming services, I use a professional mastering engineer, who provides great feedback on balancing the different elements of the mix and polishes the sound so that it renders clear on playback.
Gear – an Evolving Collection
Over the past few years, I have been incrementally building up my home recording capabilities. A bit about my gear: I use a 27” iMac with 68GB of RAM to run Logic Pro X, which provides both sequencing and digital recording capabilities. The digital interface is a Universal Audio Apollo X4, which converts audio to digital and back again, through a Yamaha mixer and powered monitor speakers. I use an array of third party virtual instruments and effect plug-ins from Roland, Korg, Spectrasonics, Arturia and Eventide.
Generally, I run electric instruments direct into the interface, though sometimes I will use a Fishman preamp for acoustic instruments to get a good recording level. Apple has done a fantastic job with Logic – there are a bunch of great sounds (including Alchemy synth sounds) that come out of the box, along with some great effects and music loops. I’ve also invested in third party royalty-free percussion and drum loops, which make the music sound “almost” live.
Instruments
Since the pandemic hit I have upgraded my collection of instruments. For electric bass I have several 4, 5 and 6 string instruments both fretted and fretless from the likes of Fodera, Alembic, Godin and Fender, along with a couple of boutique makers.
I have several violins both acoustic and electric, from a variety of different makers. Recently my go-to instrument is a carbon fiber 6 string violin made by Glasser (there’s a low C and F string that extends the range over an octave below a traditional violin); I also have a 5 string Realist acoustic with electronics built in and a Zeta 5 string Jazz solid body with a synth pickup (I can connect to a Roland GR-55 guitar synth). I have several electric mandolins, including a 5 string Kentucky I got in 1989 and played in the band Chainsaw Jazz. I recently have been playing 5-string baritone mandolin (tuned an octave below a traditional mandolin with a high B string) from Jonathan Mann.
One of the fun things to do with electric instruments is to run the signal through effects and loopers (to get a one-man band layered sound live). The effects chain includes compression, distortion, pitch shifters and wah filters. After cycling through a few different makers, I’ve found that the Boomerang looper offers the most musical options. I like to combine different delays from Strymon and Universal Audio (with tap tempo controls) to create textures that can be combined into jammable sequences. Next project I am looking to capture some of this live and with other musicians.
When I was working in the 90s, one could still monetize music by selling physical media – CDs mostly – while chains like Tower Records prospered. With the advent of P2P file sharing (Napster’s piracy) then streaming services, the economic payback from recorded music has been eviscerated for all but the most globally popular music creators. Of course there are royalties from airplay and licensing, but per stream revenues are de minimis at best for the vast majority. As a jazz influence musician creating instrumental music whose appeal is “highly exclusive” to say the least, there’s not a commercial incentive to the music I make. Ironically the cost and quality of home recording equipment has made it possible to replace professional studios that used to cost $100/hour and up 30 years ago to record (and you had better have a big budget or be able to get it right in a few takes).
So the journey becomes the destination with home recording. I still love to play live with other musicians but it can be so rewarding spending time to focus, create and polish music for its own sake. I’ve been studying music with a fantastic teacher, Kenny Werner the jazz pianist and composer since 2021 and he has opened up so much new language that I am looking forward to using in the future. I hope everyone can find similar paths to personal reward.
CES in Vegas is always a nice way to kick off the tech events year. However, the NRF show in New York and WEF in Davos in the next few days are no slouches.
So, I thought I would share related megatrends from the new SAP book, Business as Unusual. Even though it is a book written by SAP execs (with our assistance) it is bigger than SAP, bigger than any industry or country. It truly reflects megatrends
For NRF, two of the megatrends are particularly relevant
New Customer Pathways – which looks at how retail has been transformed with COVID and lockdowns and how eCommerce has both helped and hurt – with massive volume of returns and as micro-fulfillment logistics have taken off and CPG companies are becoming better at direct-to-consumer channels
While nothing beats reading about the megatrends in the book (each averages about 30 pages of commentary from SAP, customer, partner, influencer commentary and use cases), these two posts provide a Reader’s Digest and a YouTube Shorts version of the text from the book and videos from interviews for the megatrend.
Resilient Supply Networks – which looks at how companies are moving from reactive to resilient supply chains and how Industry 4.0 robotics and other technology are reshaping commerce
For WEF and its focus on Sustainability , the Circular Economy megatrend is particularly relevant. It points out that only 9% of the 100 billion tons of material produced globally is recycled every year, and looks at innovation at many companies to design less wasteful products, to recycle them and to move to business models that encourage re-use.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is all-around nice guy, Jeff Stiles who has spent over 30 years focusing on all aspects of enterprise software and analytics with notable companies including Cognos, Peoplesoft, SAP and Oracle where he most recently led the Supply Chain and Manufacturing Product Marketing as well as Industry Solution Marketing teams. He is pictured with 2 of his other passions – his 1968 RS SS Camaro (with 23K original miles) and his 3 Australian Shepherds. That is Bowser, the middle boy:
“Don't take for granted the love this life gives you
When you get where you're going don't forget turn back around
And help the next one in line
Always stay humble and kind
--Tim McGraw"Humble and Kind"
I’m certainly not where I would like to be, but I am one of those people who cares deeply about helping others in their careers and lives. It’s been a great experience mentoring people in very different stages of their careers, and it is incredibly rewarding to see their growth in skills, competencies -- and in life. This post summarizes a few key learnings, essential techniques and the power of helping people capitalize on their potential and includes links to helpful resources and some of my writing on these topics.
With intent and a will to grow, Mentorship is rewarding and fulfilling for both parties if there is a solid connection, a similar moral compass and aspirations for growing and learning. If you're seeking a mentor, know why you are seeking help and guidance, and look for a person with specific experiences that can help you grow. And don't be afraid to ask! I've learned through the years that people are generally willing to help. As a person seeking guidance, know what experiences, skills and competencies you want to develop and use that to narrow the potential list. Interested? Get Started and Choose Well.
The best mentoring relationships are lasting and transcend a fixed scope and duration. The foundation of these successful partnerships is long term investment on both sides. To be a great mentor, you need to commit to give, to help, to be direct, honest and constructive... and you need to be willing to openly share you own experiences, successes, failures and learnings.
Helping someone grow and actualize takes time, effort and perseverance. It takes intent and a willingness on both sides to do the work, to be authentic and direct... It takes commitment to grow. There's a Yin and Yang in this. By helping others, you grow as a leader and as a person. For people seeking or beginning to work with a mentor, please have an open mind, check your ego at the door, and commit to put into practice the things you learn.
Great mentors teach people how to think, not what to think. The most important approach I use (in mentoring as well as in business) is working backward from outcomes to determine how to make a difference. This requires honest reflection and humility on both sides. A technique you might consider is asking someone how they want to grow and asking them to write a series of 'headlines' that reflect what the impact is going to be in each area. I also encourage you to think about this over time; people grow at different paces, and it's important to calibrate the expectations and results so they are realistic and achievable.
It's amazing to me that (at least in Western cultures) we are taught to read, write and speak... but most of us do not receive formal training or guidance on listening. The result? Most people I come across listen to respond, not to understand. That's why the most important and impactful thing I talk with every mentee about is Active Listening. The key is paying attention to what the speaker is attempting to communicate and elicit clarification where necessary for comprehension. It also requires shedding our inherent biases… and the deep-seeded bias toward response.
Remote work and reduced in-person interaction can get in the way, but fortunately, technology advances in video calls and collaboration help bridge the gap. I insist on using video wherever possible, but it’s also helpful to use other communications techniques appropriately. A quick text or instant message can offer words of encouragement or an expedient answer to a simple question. My rule of thumb: fit the medium to the message.
This post shares more about Active Listening, including seven essential techniques:
Focus on the intent of the conversation
Watch the speaker's body language
Give encouraging verbal cues
Clarify and paraphrase information
Ask questions... and most importantly,
Refrain from judgment, then you can
Summarize, share, and reflect
Active Listening is a crucial part of getting people to agree, and it is helpful in every relationship and situation. I encourage you to learn more and put these techniques into practice, not only with folks in mentoring relationships... but in your business and personal lives. You'll end up with a better shared understanding -- and better results.
The whole notion of having to sometimes push and sometimes pull applies to different mentoring situations. With early-stage mentees, I have a good idea of what I and my teams can offer and what the impact can be for both the person and the collective. I am very intentional with folks like this to help them understand global business, product, solution and channel marketing, and how to deliver value by addressing customer needs in a repeatable way. The interactions with folks like this tend to be more ad-hoc and focused on sharing lessons from things going on around the person and team as well as working on specific skills and competencies.
With folks further into their careers, there is great joy to be had in helping them actualize. One person wanted to learn the solution marketing discipline and to develop her impact as a marketer. We worked on very specific growth and skill areas, and I was able to help her most by modeling the behaviors and competencies she needed to develop. Directly editing and providing detailed feedback for both written content and presentations accelerated her learning curve and I found her very quickly modeling these techniques and approaches with others. This requires candor on the part of the mentor and an open mind and thick skin from the mentee, but the results are spectacular.
PushMePullYou. Know when to push, know when to pull, and make sure you're working together in the right ways move forward.
I had an uplifting revelation at my father's recent celebration of life. Among the other gifts I received from my dad, I learned that more than half of his former employees reached out to my stepmom after his passing, sharing stories of how he had helped them. And I got to reconnect with someone I met through him 40 years ago. She shared that he had been her mentor early in her career when she was looking to change occupations. Apparently, he gave her sage advice, helped her land that very job a year later, and became a true friend, advocate and inspiration for life. I love that I learned this from him and can only aspire to do the same for others. The Power of Advocacy shares what I’ve learned about playing the role of advocate.
Advocacy builds trust, deepens personal relationships and creates opportunities for people you believe in. Seek opportunities to celebrate both the accomplishments and potential of the people you are leading or mentoring. Be genuine, authentic, and real -- it's vital to grow your own reputation and credibility as a leader and a mentor -- the promise must come with a payoff.
I hope you will reflect on some of these important concepts: commitment to grow, long-term investment, working backward from outcomes, active listening, pushing and pulling and advocacy. Please consider how you too can help people around you. Turns out that the gifts you give become part of a life lived well.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Marne Martin, President for Service Management, EAM & Global Industries at IFS, a leading global software company. She was recently named as one of the top 50 women leaders in SaaS world. The more I hear about her career, her travels, her sports, the more it strikes me that he is modern-day Renaissance Woman. She attributes her success to being versatile and coachable. She has a combination of verbal and math skills, is fairly ambidextrous, is a natural at learning and has a lot of resilience. And to top it off she has a great work ethic. Here she writes about her enduring connection with horses that started as a child growing up on ranches.
“Horses and STEM disciplines have been tightly connected all through my life, both in school years and an adult as I developed my technology career.
I was born on a ranch with horses and cattle. Going back centuries, my family on both sides have been in agriculture and when they moved to the Western United States and settled in what become the states of Montana and Wyoming. Education wise, I primarily focused on STEM classes in high school and then went on to major in international finance and economics.
Developing horses is similar to developing a technology business: it is a game of math, probabilities and instrumented results. You have likely heard about the “rule of 40” in software. Here is a site which focuses on the math associated with horseback riding. As I will discuss later, the scoring of dressage is similarly complex. Likewise, the genetics of breeding have plenty of biology and botany.
Similarly, cattle drives are a bit like technology sales cycles. You have varied decision makers within a complex set of stakeholders. Cattle herds have a mix of experienced/older cows that know pastures and their state in each season. They are like digital transformation veterans who know the way and the steps to organize themselves. The younger, less experienced calves, sometimes follow the group, but can wander off at other times. That’s similar to project team members who are risk takers. Finally, you have the bulls that lead their own path and often get into fights. You have multiple riders in concert driving the herd. if you have ever ridden a cutting or roping horse, you know it is an essential and well-trained team member.
Whether in business, academic studies or horses, I have always been motivated to learn new things and push boundaries to accomplish difficult objectives. On social media in particular, it is suggested that success comes easily. But it never does - there are often twists and turns with many seen and unseen complications.
Let’s start at the very beginning.
My family moved after the Civil War and settled in the West of the US, in what became the states of Montana and Wyoming. They were fairly well-known in ranching circles and show up in various halls of fame.
I was born in Oregon and we moved to our Montana ranch when I was four around the time when I started kindergarten. I spent most summers on my grandfather's ranch in Wyoming and then we moved there when I was eleven.
Both my parents rode and as is common with ranch families, they had photos taken with the baby sitting on a horse. We also had annual cattle sales and people flew in from all over the place. Stick the cute toddler on the big bull and sell your cattle for a higher price! Here’s me with my younger sister who is 15 months younger. It was the first time we went to the huge Denver Stock Show with our prized bull, Elevator. Later I would show off bulls and heifers all around the US. I would miss about a month of school every year, but have a number of shiny big belt buckles to show for it. We also had one to two big annual cattle sales a year. Public speaking skills and an ability to sell were expected from me from a very young age. I was the oldest and learned all the business skills. We also did plenty of entertaining. That exposure and experiences I received in my early years stood me in good stead later in life.
I was drawn to horses from a very young age. Horses are a lot of fun to ride and I had a natural affinity to their sensitive intelligence. My mom tells a true story of when I was two. She must not have been watching me closely as I had escaped from a locked yard and gone down the hill into the horse pasture. They found me trying to climb up Dan, which was my dad's horse (they had sat me earlier for a photo) trying to get on for myself. Fast forward a few years when we had a herd of ponies. I could get a cow halter on and climb on them. So I started to ride our herd of unbroken ponies, both the stallions and the mares. And while I wasn’t organizing the breeding, we would have new little pony foals every year that I loved. Here is a photo with my mom, myself, my sister and one of our colt pony foals we called Diamond.
More complicated activities with horses
When we moved to Montana, there was a lot of stress on my parents as my grandfather was sick and my father’s brothers had moved away. Both my parents were working a lot. When I came home from school, I would entertain myself by catching one of the ponies (typically unsupervised) and ride it around. The rule was that I had to be home either when I was hungry or by dark. And if I wasn't home by dark, they would go around honking. If I could hear them honking, I had to come home.
I also trained the ponies to drive with an old cart using a pony harness I found in the barn. My grandfather had used them when he was a kid. The ponies I trained never got to be as famous as the Budweiser Clydesdales, but I am proud that six little stallions I trained to drive were sold to Domino's Pizza. That money, with the accrued interest became my college fund. The ponies showed up in parades like this one in Austin, MN in 1987 – Getty Images has a video version here.
My sister also liked riding, but for her it wasn't as much of a passion and more for helping to move cattle. She also didn’t like riding the complicated or challenging horses. My grandfather was always really proud that I could ride the horses that would buck off the hired hands. He used to say my first words back when I was a toddler were “me can do it.” My sense of adventure has never waned.
In Montana, I never got further than five miles from home. The ranch in Montana was in the Bitterroot Valley, which is relatively narrow. We would go swim in the river but we weren’t allowed to cross it with the horses. In Wyoming, in contrast, I would take off all day. I could easily go 20 miles from home riding all day bareback into the mountains with the wild animals. Of course, we did not have cell phones back then. The only rule I had was to tell my grandparents which direction I was headed so they knew if they had to come get me which road to drive. And I was instructed to listen for the honking, and that was my sign to come home. I kind of told them, "Hey, I'm headed east”. Or West. My grandfather's ranch was very large and I had my places I stashed things if I wanted to go rest, I created my quasi-Native American experience. My family founded the town of Hyattville, Wyoming where ancient cave drawings and petroglyphs are tourist attractions. I claimed a few caves where nearby I could tie the horse to a tree. Some of the ranch hands were Native American and they would tell me stories of the wilderness. It was very cool to learn different cultures at a young age.
Whatever happened, I somehow had to manage. If the horse fell in a hole or I encountered a dangerous situation, I was on my own. I always say that built an independence, courage and a problem-solving capability at a super young age. People ask me “You moved to DC when you were 17? You had lived in London by the time you were 19? And started working in Venezuela in your early 20s, or did trips to Saudi and China in your late 20s/early 30s” And my reaction is “Well, it actually didn't seem that much different from when I was going in the mountains in Wyoming on my own.”
I have always loved a challenge. In those days, I was often the only woman in the room in the telecommunications or technology business. Plus, I had decided by the time I was 13 that I would not be daunted by what I had heard at some of the ranches that “men wear the pants in the family.” Playing also built confidence as I was very good at sports, even against the boys.
School, college and a busy growing up
As I got older, riding horses remained my relaxation. I was playing varsity by the time I was a freshman at school and I was very competitive at volleyball, soccer and track. In my freshman year, I was one of the best basketball players in all of Wyoming. Even though I'm not that tall – I'm 5'8" – by nature, I had an amazing vertical jump, so I was more like a 6' or 6'1" player. That made me more versatile in a variety of activities. However after my first ACL injury at 15, I lost much of that vertical jump. As the reality set in that I would never be 6 foot tall on the court, my focus switched to academics. I had other knee surgeries from other sports as I continued to compete. However, after the second ACL at 25, it became even more apparent that competing with the help of horses was a better alternative.
Fortunately, I graduated at the top of my class with more than a 4.0 because of all my AP STEM classes. I benefited from being well rounded. I had also played “first flute” in our high school concert band. All this allowed me to get into Georgetown in Washington, DC with an early decision application. (Pragmatically, I am sure it helped being a woman from a lightly populated state where many people don’t leave.)
As many of you know, Georgetown is a basketball school (I was there when the legendary John Thompson was coach and his alums would come back to visit in the offseason), my family knew the politicians in Washington, DC from our state, and lastly it was also a Jesuit school (I was raised Catholic). So off I went to DC and the School of Foreign Service. I loved the classical education alongside STEM classes and the international atmosphere at Georgetown. Of course, it was the heart of both business and government and close to the horse community in Virginia and Maryland. I had considered Stanford my Dad had gone for a bit after Whitman College – but Stanford has no horses. Same with many east coast schools.
Polo
When I went east to Georgetown, I wasn’t able to go home as often, and for the first time in my life I did not do much riding. While I played plenty of pickup ball, I also started playing polo for the Georgetown women’s team. I also did some fox hunting and eventing.
Georgetown allowed me to play, not just watch, polo (Sheridan, Wyoming is one of the only places in the West that has a real polo team, and had made me curious about the sport). We played Harvard, Yale, UVA and other schools with a polo tradition. I loved it because it was, again, a team sport. It is competitive, fast-paced, athletic, and I'm not afraid of physicality. I was a “two-goaler”. At that time, I think there was only two of us on the entire Eastern Seaboard that had that ranking.
With all the international exposure at Georgetown, it was an easy decision to spend my Junior year at the London School of Economics. In London, I was playing basketball and not polo, but I was not far from great polo players and polo matches including events where members of the Royal Family participated.
If you want to see how physical the sport is and the hand-eye coordination it requires watch this video of the US Open Men’s Polo. I do sometimes wonder if I had stayed with polo would I have been one of the few five-goal female players.
Horses and polo also led me to my first job working for a high net worth family (also very successful in international business) that sponsored the Georgetown women’s polo team. We also started one of the first GSM cell phone companies in the world. I joined them right after school at 21, ran my first company by 27, and was running or overseeing their entire 40 or so operating and investment entities by 30. All the international travel led to my meeting my husband, Michael.
I loved polo, but with increased travel for work, even being employed by a family with their own polo team, I needed a change. Through eventing, I picked up on the challenge of dressage. Dressage was a sport I pursued when we moved to Europe. I could compete at a high level - Grand Prix class - while still developing my career and getting my international MBA.
Dressage
Dressage has been described as the highest form of horse training with roots in Ancient Greece (the first recorded writings about it are ‘On Horsemanship’ by Xenophon circa 350 BC) using it as a form of training for horses in the battlefield. It was carried forward as a tradition at the Imperial Spanish Riding School of Vienna, which dates back to the 1570s. It wasn’t till 1912 when dressage became an Olympic sport. In 1921, the International Federation for Equestrian Sports was founded, and today, there are 136 national federations that are affiliated.
The year 2003 was auspicious - I got married and Michael, my husband took a job in the Netherlands. I was able to work from there part-time. I bought my first dressage horse after my jumper/eventing horse sadly died in quarantine while getting ready to fly to Europe. I had a lot to learn about training and competing to go from being a really good rider to being a really good dressage rider. It took almost eleven years for me to go from my first dressage horse to training and competing at Grand Prix. Below is my Escobar, my first Grand Prix horse and a former licensed stallion when we were competing in Germany. Escobar had moved with me from the Netherlands to the US, back to England and then to Germany alongside my work. He was quite a world traveler and competed with me across three countries.
Dressage also appealed to my competitiveness since there is never a perfect score of 100%. Acing a dressage test is much harder than at regular school. But it keeps you striving for perfection. Here are the scoring guidelines from the US Dressage Federation.
Two decades later, I have continued to compete at dressage. Here I am with my second dressage horse, and from whom by embryo transfer, I bred my third Grand Prix horse and first licensed stallion. In this video, we are doing a freestyle dressage where a rider can choreograph music and the pattern. The score I received for this test is one of the highest I have ever achieved. I ranked third in the country that year across all freestyles at that level. It was especially satisfying because I was also running a publicly traded software company at the same time
Breeding
My interest in breeding comes mainly from my family legacy. But it also comes from a desire to manage the economics of dressage. Top horses can cost in the hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions. Breeding isn’t cheap by any means but you have a lower cost basis for the quality of horseflesh I want to train and develop. I have bred my own horses that have gone up to Grand Prix, but I've also bred International Grand Prix horses, stallions, test winners and top performing mares. Over time, we also started breeding Giant Schnauzers who are wonderful farm and home companions.
Cattle breeding has evolved what are called EPDs (Expected progeny differences), which are numerical scores with tolerance and confidence intervals that match to certain types of genetic or lineage-type traits.
European warmblood breeding, especially in Germany, has similar types of analytics available going back decades and, in some cases, centuries Most of my mares have very old and long Hanoverian mare lines, which are called stamms. I use those as data points in addition to my own experience riding and training my mares. Most breeders don’t ride the mares they breed with. That gives me a “leg up” with my own assembled data points to complement the information on the given stamms.
When I started breeding, I started scoring what I felt as a rider, what the horse was good at, what they weren't so good at. I do similarly with teams at work. Whether breeding, training, or growing companies, I like to take a nuanced view that relies on math, sensory skills, partnership and inspiration.
As you can see my love of horses has allowed me to apply principles in business, improve on a wide range of STEM skills, become better at time management and keep myself physically active.
In technology you are always striving for dream teams - training, collaborating, managing, leading. It’s the same in a partnership with a horse that will take at least a decade if one wants to get to Grand Prix. With horses, it starts when you are thinking of a foal, effectively in “stealth mode”. Once born, you start evaluating how closely it meets expectations. It’s quite similar to what happens with a startup or a new invention. You monitor the foal’s growth and development. You make sure it has appropriate food and nutrition, similar to working capital and talent in a company. You start to ride the horse as a three year old. Then the real work begins. if you are fortunate, when it gets to be 10-12, the horse gets a shot at its first Grand Prix. If it is good enough, it may even qualify for the Olympics or other international horse sport. It’s like creating a software unicorn where every step has complications, successes and challenges. Whether developing great software companies or Grand Prix horses, you need a commitment to excellence, enough money, enough time, and of course talent, resiliency and hard work.
The little cowgirl in me would love, of course, to go spend long days riding in Wyoming. Now I spend fewer, but very high-quality, hours with my horses in Florida. It is wonderful that I can do so much more while nurturing my enduring relationship with man’s faithful friend, the Equus ferus caballus
Follow Marne and her horses at the Facebook page for her farm and on Instagram
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Dennis Howlett, a serial contributor to this series. In the past he has written about his home-brewed beer and his model tanks. Now retired, he has taken up cooking with gusto and posts photos of different meals he has cooked multiple times a week. Here he covers a wide range of cuisines:
“I read somewhere that if you can read then you can cook. That’s only partially true.
As a post WW2 child, brought up in a climate of austerity, I understood from an early age that putting out a good plate of food from humble ingredients is an important skill. Mum made sure of that by entrusting me with the weekly local market meat, fish and veg shopping list on a tight budget and a list from which I was not allowed to deviate. 60 years later, I still shop for food the same way, albeit with some wiggle room.
More importantly, mum taught me how to cook basic foods but equally important, introduced me to Chinese and Italian dishes at a time when these were novelties. I fondly remember the highlight of my summer holidays as a weekly trip to the Chinese restaurant close to her office where we feasted on chicken curry or sweet and sour pork. At the time, it felt like the height of sophisticated indulgence.
Then life got in the way. From my late teenage years, until about 10 years ago, I rarely cooked.. While I never lost my passion for good food, my excuse for not cooking on any regular basis was that I was too busy building a career. Even so, there were occasions when I’d take over the kitchen and attempt to serve up a good plate of food. My long suffering partner, Jude says my main skill was using every pot and making a mess.
All that changed when we returned to the UK about six years ago and restored a Georgian house. After more than 20 years relying on Jude to feed me (when I was home), I pledged to be the cook of the house. That gave me the excuse to build the kind of kitchen I wanted, along with all the toys I’d like to have to hand.
As an aside, while we lived abroad there were several important influences I picked up. First is that French and Spanish cooking is all about living according to the seasons and regions. You don’t get strawberries in December as you will in the UK. On the other hand, living according to the seasons means the produce is always at its best in the seasons when it’s available. Each region has its own season and if you travel in those countries then you get to sample amazing flavors. Raw oysters in Brittany accompanied by a glass of Muscadet sur Lie is to die for. The same goes for bouillabaisse in Marseilles. In Spain, cherries are in May, no other time of the year.
Second, country cooking in France and Spain is all about simplicity designed to bring out the best flavors possible. In Spain then forget paella, think grilled hake with a plain butter sauce. In France, think about a wood fired brassiere searing a cote de boeuf, topped with a pat of herby butter. In the US, think slow smoked Boston butt. In short, those countries showed me how to appreciate simplicity as the base for developing great dishes.
Finally, we come to measurements. Most cookery books muddle ‘cup’ or ‘teaspoon’ measures along with imperial/metric. I found this frustrating as a person used to dealing with financial and technical precision. Why? Because regardless of what I cooked, I couldn’t get consistent results. It wasn’t until I was gifted Heston Blumenthal’s ‘Historic Heston’ at a tech event (where I got to taste Blumenthal’s food) that I realized cooking IS a science with art overlaid. In short, measuring according to a single system is vital to both achieving what the recipe author had in mind but also the key to consistently serving up something that works. If I have one tip to readers, choose your one measurement method and stick with it.
Like most folk I know in the tech field, I love my ‘toys’ and the kitchen is no exception. But if I had to choose one it would be my cook’s knives. I acquired several of these while living in San Diego. They’re Kramer design made from Damascus steel, at Zwilling’s Japanese factory. Insanely expensive but with care will last several lifetimes. I’ve promised to gift them to my son who is a talented cook in his own right.
But it’s never that simple. Each oven is different, each hob has different controls and all ingredients are at slightly different levels of freshness. These are variables that need managing as much as the variables in any sales forecast. Just as sales leaders check in with their sales agents, a cook has to check in with his/her food as it cooks and therein lies a great joy. Sales leaders will say ‘test, test, test.’ Professional chefs will say ‘taste, taste, taste.’ It’s a part of the process I enjoy because it helps me to understand how flavor develops during the cooking process.
Over the last few years I’ve become conscious of the need to do my bit to preserve the production of great ingredients rather than relying on factory farmed supermarket produce. That translates into my investments in sustainable potato farming in the Ukraine and UK meat along with carbon zero herb production and a vegan restaurant group. Whether those investments pay off is secondary to knowing that I tried to help.
I regularly support local food production because it helps me get the best ingredients at their best. I also support a local butcher who uses farms within 12 miles of its shop location. My one concern is fish. Brexit nuked the UK fishing industry from an already weakened position. Many species we saw when I was a child like gurnard and pollack have all but disappeared from markets. Online sources try to fill the gap but it is turning out to be a tough challenge when the price to consumers has increased by up to 30% over the last year.
All this means I pay more than the average person for the foods we consume. Here’s the upside. The flavors we enjoy are an order of magnitude better than I could achieve using supermarket ingredients. That, in turn, means we use fewer ingredients than we would otherwise consume. All good for the waistline while satisfying the need to put good food on the home plate.
A bugbear of mine was getting hold of good bacon yet that’s so easy to make at home. Most shop bought bacon has too much water coming out of it during cooking and is so salty as to mask or overpower the taste of the meat. A 50/50 salt and sugar mix is the basis for a great home cured bacon using cheap belly pork that can be ready to cook inside five days (at a pinch.) I don’t save money when measured against the supermarkets but I get the flavor everyone loves. If you’ve never tried it then you’re missing something special. Try it, you’ll be amazed.
Recently, I’ve tried my hand at making sausages with ‘variable’ results. In 2020 I attended a course for boning out a leg of pork to create a ham with the trimmings used for sausages. In the UK, the tradition is to add cereals to sausages yet I find that a tad off putting. Instead, I prefer traditional recipes that avoid adding ‘bulk.’ In that context, my ‘old fashioned’ Cumberland sausages have worked well. The real difficulty comes in skinning up the meat. I’ve yet to master that technique to achieve a consistently good looking round of sausage but then presentation is my weakest skill.
Despite my best efforts, my food often looks like it’s been thrown on the plate rather than presented with any sense of artistic expression. My buddy Sameer Patel reminds me that ‘we eat with our eyes.’ In my case I hope my guests are at best short sighted.
During the last year, I’ve turned my hand to bread baking. In principle, bread is easy. In practice, it takes a lot of skill, especially if, like me, you’re trying to make sourdough based recipes. Sourdough is supposed to be easy but it isn’t. Making the sourdough starter takes some practice and my results to date have been ‘on and off.’ In part I think this is because I haven’t mastered the science involved (and there’s a LOT of science to bread baking) but that’s OK. I have time and I’m not quitting.
As I said early on, cooking is a combination of art and science. The science comes in the combination of ingredients and cooking times. The art comes in the creative combination of ingredients and presentation. I’ve not got that balance solved. But I will get there - one day.
I'm blessed to have spent time in countries whose cooking traditions are different to my own and from which I have learned and from which I continue to learn. I have even tried my hand at cuisines from places I have not been to – here is an Indian curry - keema (minced meat) with peas and potatoes) and nankhatai cookies.
While my cooking tends to the simple, I appreciate the complexities involved in fine dining. Some people save for a great annual holiday. As retirees, we prefer to indulge in a couple of fine dining experiences during the year. For the end of 2022 that meant an unhurried 8 course themed Sunday ‘disco’ lunch with wine pairings at HOME in Leeds. While HOME isn’t Michelin starred, it has two well deserved Michelin Rosettes.
We have been dining at HOME around the Christmas or New Year holidays for some years and they rarely disappoint. The staff have figured out what a great dining experience means. It is one part food, one part setting, one part passion and one part exquisite presentation, all accompanied by a large dollop of dramatic theatre. The idea is to leave diners with fond memories. We believe they’ve nailed it without the pretension associated with some fine dining tables. It helps that the head waiter has accompanied us on our dining journey the last five or so years, apart from 2020 due to COVID restrictions. In that context, we’ve become ‘regulars.’
This year was no exception with delights like ‘pebble’ a rich foie gras mousse encased in bitter chocolate and ‘coast’, a lobster claw nestling in a delicate seaweed foam with curried popping corn and micro herbs. Both sound crazy but they work.
We know they’re developing new dishes for 2023 and giving the restaurant a makeover. We look forward to seeing what magic they create.
My final thought for anyone who aspires to cook is make time. Cooking great food doesn’t happen quickly. You need time to prepare and cook. Trust me - it’s worth the effort when your family, friends and guests smile. It’s a great antidote to the frenetic lives many of us live.
The series had a great year averaging an episode a week. Lots of vertical coverage across vendors, and a number of startups especially those part of the Workday Ventures portfolio and in cohorts of the SAO.iO Foundries accelerator.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Dr. Patti Fletcher, CMO at Limeade. She has spent her career at the cutting-edge intersection of people, business, and technology. She is driven by one mission: to level the playing field so that all talent can thrive. She is the best-selling author of Disrupters: Success Strategies from Women Who Break the Mold and a renowned expert on gender equity and how to build a culture of inclusion to drive real business results.
She writes about her charitable passion - a scholarship - and much more inspired by her Armenian grandmother.
“Earlier this year, after years of working with and supporting the Armenian International Women’s Association (AIWA) through keynotes, social media campaigns, monetary donations, and strategy and board support, I deepened my collaboration with the organization through their scholarship program.
In June of this year, together with my daughters, we established and launched a scholarship in memory and in honor of my maternal Nana, Arshalous Tashjian Medzorian. The scholarship is awarded to two Armenian women over thirty years of age who are pursuing advanced STEM and/or economic development degrees in order to make a better life for themselves, their families, and the communities where they live and work.
The scholarship is a passion project that I hope lasts beyond my time on earth. It is a deeply personal and has its origins a few generations before my birth. I am the granddaughter of survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Nana was orphaned in the genocide when she was just 6 months old. She has been the catalyst for much of how I live today: from the work I do to the mother I have become. She even shows up on stage with me. Whenever I deliver a keynote about equity in the workplace, I like to open with a story about my Nana and how she inspired me to create a global platform to drive change for gender equity in every aspect of life. Even as a technology executive who has built her career at the intersection of people, business and technology, I have been fueled to level the playing field so that all talent can thrive. Above is a Keynote kick-off at a recent AIWA scholarship fundraiser.
The youngest of 10 children, Arshalous (translated to "Dawn"), whose mother was widowed at the time of her birth, represents her name - one hope, belief, grit, and resilience that is needed to seek the light in the darkness, to believe and create the promise of a new day. Armenians are a strong and proud community of people. They have been and continue to face dark circumstances. And still, we rise.
At just .04% of the world’s population, the plight of Armenians and Armenian women is largely unknown in non-Armenian communities. Yet, the Armenian genocide, which Hitler used to justify the invasion of Poland ("Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”/ “Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?”) killed 1.2 million Armenians. The impact was so extensive that there is not one Armenian living today whose family was not impacted. My family was so drastically impacted that elevating narratives of Armenians, particularly Armenian women, to the rest of the world, has become part of the legacy I want to leave behind.
I’m the youngest of three girls with several years between my sisters (Irish twins) and me. Whereas my contemporaries came from traditional families with dads who went to work and moms who stayed home, my mother was a working mom before working moms where a thing in middle-class suburbia. Every weekday morning, while my sisters went to school, she would drop me off at my Nana’s and Grampa’s apartment on her way to the office.
Despite spending much of my childhood with my Nana, I knew very little about her and even less about her family. In an effort to learn more, I went back for my PhD when I was in my thirties, while working full-time at SAP and supporting my family. That allowed me to research like a scholar; my MBA research skills were not helpful as information about the genocide is hard to find. It was through my doctoral journey where I gained the research acumen that I needed to learn who my Nana was, what her life experience was like. and the origins of our family. These insights were supported by the genealogy work that my brother-in-law conducted. Here's Nana, standing far right, at a refugee camp with some of her extended family,
The insights about my Nana and her family, particularly her mother and sisters, came at a time when I was also conducting my dissertation research – a phenomenological study of women who held board of director positions in technology and life sciences businesses. Unlike the women in my dissertation who held a tremendous amount of self-agency and used it to build platforms for real change via the influence of their board and executive operator roles, my Armenian female ancestors had no say in their own lives. My Nana had it the worst of all. After a very scary and traumatic childhood that included being raised in refugee camps, she was able to move to the United States at nineteen years-old because her brothers had arranged for her to marry my grandfather, a man she never met and who was fifteen years her senior. My grandfather and his family had escaped Turkey and immigrated to the United States in the early days of the genocide. Nana and Grampa married very quickly following her arrival. Here's Nana in Marseilles. pictured with her brother Vahe who was stationed nearby in the US Army. a day before embarking alone on the ship that would bring her to Ellis Island.
My grandfather was a cruel and abusive man who had complete control over my Nana. Despite being the kindest, most generously loving person who I have ever known, she lived a life of oppression.
What keeps me inspired to do this work is my Nana’s belief in the power of education. Education gives women options to harness their power and make a difference in their lives. In addition to education, technology is a key vehicle to level the playing field for all populations, Armenia and Armenian women are no different. STEM is a core avenue of economic development in Armenia. In fact, the country has set its sights on becoming the Silicon Mountain where the world’s leading unicorns are born. The entrepreneurial ecosystem is thriving with new funds and start-ups that are solving real problems around supply chain, clean tech, and farming/agriculture.
If the applicants for the scholarship are any indicator, I would say that the country’s focus on technology is working. The applicants for the scholarship were incredibly impressive entrepreneurs, many of whom have undergraduate degrees in STEM and/or have practical experience in leveraging technology to scale businesses that positively impacted their communities through job creation and net-new innovations. It was not easy to choose. The award recipients chosen hail from Ballouneh, Lebanon and Sandbach, England and are pursuing a MBA in Finance from the London Business School and a MBA at Alliance Manchester Business School with a focus on Strategy & Managing Disruptive Technologies, respectively. It is an honor to be part of their journeys.
The Arshalous Tashjian Medzorian scholarship represents the hope, belief, grit, and resilience that is needed by Armenian women to seek light in the darkness, to believe and create the promise of a new day. My ultimate goal is stand-up The Arshalous Project as a 5013.c to raise the next generation of Armenian women leaders who are on missions to close the gender gap in business, academia, and government.
There are many incredible organizations out there who are invested in the future and protection of Armenian women. Here are a few that I support:
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Pete Howlett. If the name rings a bell, he is the brother of Dennis Howlett who has contributed about many of his interests to this series.
Pete writes about his crafting ukuleles. The ukulele, also called Uke, is a member of the lute family of instruments of Portuguese origin and became particularly popular in Hawaii.
“It was a surprise when Vinnie approached me via my brother to talk about my passions. I’m not a technologist (that’s my brother’s world) although I love the creative potential that comes with modern CNC machines, the abundance of information available on the internet, and the ability to reach people through social media who I might never have discovered in any other way. Technology has opened up a world to me that until a few years ago was largely hidden. In turn that magical combination has allowed me to pursue my passions for making, teaching and music.
In short, I’m living the dream I’ve held since 1969, when, aged 14, I attempted to build my first Les Paul copy guitar in my dad’s garden shed. Suffice to say it was a failure. As were many things along the path I chose. However, as you can see in the photo of a younger me, music has been close to my heart almost my entire life.
Back then, there were no freely available resources for people like me who wanted to learn how to build guitars. But, like my dad, I’m gifted with a natural ability to make things coupled with a determination not to let adversity stand in my way. I’m also curious. I like to discover how things work and why they work the way they do. Net-net, I pursued the life of an autodidact, learning by trial and error, picking anyone’s brains I stumbled across who was willing to lend an ear to my stream of questions. It was a long, winding and sometimes digressing path. But I was fortunate too.
Following a stint teaching (and learning) craft design and technology at high school, a certain Lt.Colonel Bill Verbeek gifted me £500 to start a furniture and craft objects making business. That would be about £2,250 in today’s money. Not a lot you might think but it felt like a small fortune to me and was enough to launch a venture that lasted seven years before I realized that bespoke furniture making is a really hard business in which to be successful. I was still building guitars but again found that (almost) no-one can make a living from one off commissions.
In another serendipitous moment, I came across a person who wanted me to make guitars for the Japanese market. That’s when I discovered that batch building is the way to go because that allowed me to spread the labor cost among many instruments. That required the development of reusable templates and learning batch methods.
1994 saw me stumble (again) across Collier Thelan who asked if I could build 6 and 8 string ukulele for the Hawaiian market. I’d never made this type of instrument but of course I said ‘yes.’ What I didn’t know then was that the craft of ukulele making was barely alive in Hawaii because educators didn’t see the preservation of Hawaiian culture as important to its children. This represented an opportunity because no-one outside of the mass producers were making this type of instrument at any sort of scale. The first two I made broke and I thought I was done but no. Collier put me in touch with the 'granddad' of bespoke luthiers in Hawaii who became my warranty guy. One night while I was crying in my beard to him, he said these cryptic words, "You use a lot of super-glue in this business!" In 1998-99 I was able to curate a musical instrument collection at Ross Music based in Akron, OH using that time to research the early American fretted string instrument manufacturing industry.
Just as the wheel of life turns in your favor, so it also brings challenges. Between 2000-2008, I made three (failed) attempts at developing a ukulele building workshop but the timing wasn’t right. For many in the stringed instrument world, ukulele was a toy rather than a serious instrument in its own right. 2008-2010 saw the wheel turn again and suddenly I found myself with an order book stretching out two years. It has largely remained that way ever since, despite my having workshop help from 2015-2018 in the shape of a young and talented enthusiast from Germany - Tom Ziegenspeck - who has gone on to carve out a making career of his own.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In 2015 I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. PD could have been the equivalent of a death sentence to someone like me who uses his hands to create instruments. And yes, as it progresses, PD takes things away but that’s no reason to give up.
In 2016, I was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to study ukulele making instruction in Hawaii and West Coast USA. It was a wonderful learning experience. As a bonus, the chance meeting of Collier in Arlington Texas came full circle 22 years later when we met again. That’s also when I learned how ukulele making was only being kept alive by grass roots efforts. It was truly eye opening and while the local builders initially viewed me with suspicion, I ended my time knowing that with so few ‘workshop’ ukulele makers around the world I should devote at least a part of my time to helping others learn the craft of making these beautiful instruments. That’s where my early training as a high school teacher (finally) merged with my passion for making.
The 2016-2018 period was when Tom and I embarked on a quest to complete the building of 300 instruments. We didn’t quite make it and after Tom returned to Germany in 2018, I acquired Boris - my first CNC machine. The idea was to use CNC techniques to develop the Revelator, a new type of thin, lightweight, electrified ukulele that could take on the sound characteristics of the wood from which each is made. Yes - each wood has its own personality and ‘moves’ the instrument tone in a variety of directions but it’s only by studying wood that you get a feel for how it works with ukulele design. Why the name Revelator? Two things: first it is a nod to the song John the Revelator by Blind Willie Johnson but also because those who heard the instrument early on said that it was a revelation in tone and sound.
CNC techniques allowed me to take out much of the grunt work associated with making while also allowing me to develop a design that would be extremely difficult to make wholly by hand tool methods and certainly impossible for myself with my Parkinsons. For example, my most recent builds have been blinged to the max with mother of pearl inlay. It’s an extravagance for sure, but do these instruments look beautiful or what?
Where are we today? I’ve just delivered the last of the Revelators I’ll ever build. That makes a total of 1,049 ukuleles I’ve built over the years. As I’m writing this, a courier has taken a crate of parts for an American maker who wants to build my Revelator design. Is this professional suicide? Not at all. I do not believe in hoarding intellectual property. I firmly believe that IP should be open source because that’s how innovation flourishes. I prefer to think of my customer as the next in line to make beautiful instruments that ukulele players want. To that extent, I recently held a pop up factory for enthusiasts to both help me finish some instruments while teaching some of the techniques I use to make ukes. Some of them want to learn for the sake of learning, others want the satisfaction of knowing they’ve built their own instrument. Still others want to learn as a springboard for their own careers. I wish them all the success in the world.
In the next few weeks, I’ll visit my customer in California, spending time to explain how the designs work, help them set up their own production line and pass on as much knowledge as possible. And then it’s on to Hawaii for a few weeks. In a very real sense, it will be a return homage to a part of the world that gave me the encouragement to learn and grow and for which I am eternally grateful..
As I reflect on the many years I’ve spent pursuing my dream, living my passion and learning my craft I’ve come to the conclusion that while some people think of me as a master luthier, in reality I’m an artisan with the emphasis on art, mostly in the form of instruments but also in furniture. One of the joys of the past year was delivering a dining table to my brother made with a book-matched burr elm top. It was a test of both my engineering skills and eye for the aesthetic that I’m told came off as an heirloom piece for his family. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that knowledge.
What of the future? I don’t know except that I’ll spend the immediate future learning and, where possible, passing on the skills I’ve acquired, especially in batch process fine instrument making. I have ideas about how ukulele design might progress. Whichever way the wheel of life turns next, I’ll be living the dream of pursuing a passion that’s provided joy for more than 50 years. Who gets a unique opportunity like that?"
Pete has quite a fan base (as you would expect with the 1,000+ ukuleles he has crafted) and several of them honor him by posting on YouTube videos playing on one of his creations. Here is one playing a blues solo.
Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time, it is Bruce Cleveland. Now retired, his career in technology career in Tech spanned more than 40 years as an operating executive and venture capitalist. Bruce held senior executive roles in engineering, product management and product marketing at Apple, AT&T, C3.ai, Oracle and Siebel Systems. He was also an early-stage investor and author of Traversing the Traction Gap.
Here he writes about his passion for high-performance cars.
“I have been extremely fortunate to have owned multiple foreign sports cars from a variety of well-known brands. They are designed by amazing engineers and always look, sound and drive awesome. However, while they are high-performance driving machines, until last year I had no actual experience operating them at the speeds they were designed to achieve. I simply used them to cruise around on weekends with day trips to the ocean, redwoods, or other great California locations in the nearby San Francisco Bay Area.
In 2019, as I prepared to retire in 2021, I knew I needed a hobby that would keep me intellectually and physically active. I began to put considerable thought into what that would be and decided to try and learn how to drive and then pace a high-performance car on a racetrack. Over the years, I had enjoyed learning to fly and sail, so I thought this might be something new and fun that involves mental and physical skills.
At the time, my daily driver was a BMW M4, so after some investigation I elected to enroll in the BMW High-Performance driving school in Thermal, CA. They offer a series of classes that take you from complete track novice to securing one type of race license (Sports Car Club of America ). I enrolled in my first course and to my surprise I was one of the faster students. I was hooked and wanted to learn more.
After completing the BMW program and with a lot of help from one of my son-in-law's (he has a business called Laptimz and coaches people how to convert their street cars and track them), I began to take my BMW M4 to a variety of open “track days” or High-Performance Driving Events (HPDE). These are days where you can bring your streetcar – any type, any year - to a racetrack (e.g., Laguna Seca, Sonoma Raceway) and drive it as fast as you dare.
On HPDE days, you aren’t allowed to technically “race” against the other participants who are on the track with you. Instead, you try to improve your driving and generate faster lap times, competing against yourself. I had a good time doing this and asked my son-in-law to convert my M4 from a stock daily driver to a dedicated track car. So, he added a partial roll cage, aero, race seats, race harnesses, and race suspension components. And, a cool new livery (the name of the exterior paint job or vinyl wrap on a race car).
Then, a few months before I was set to retire, my wife discovered that Ferrari has a driver education program: Corso Pilota. For the BMW school, you don’t need to own one of their vehicles. but for the Ferrari program you must own at least one Ferrari before you can apply. Then, if you successfully complete the program and are approved by the race directors, you can enter and compete in their one-design race program: the Ferrari Challenge. The program is a race series currently featuring the Ferrari 488 Challenge Evo with 670 HP and top speeds nearing 200 mph.
I went through their training program from March through May of 2022 and once again put down some fast lap times. As a result, I made the bold decision to purchase an Evo and to participate in the Ferrari Challenge series. Although I had zero experience racing, I entered the last event of the 2022 Ferrari Challenge program held at Sonoma Raceway in September 2022.
It’s a track I have driven multiple times in my BMW so I thought it would be a good place to begin with the Challenge car. Unfortunately, to keep me out of the way of drivers competing for championship points in the lesser-experienced race groups, I was placed by the race directors in the highest group. Pros and very experienced drivers race in that group so I came in dead last but I had the opportunity to gain some much-needed race experience. And, my grandkids didn’t care – they loved watching grandpa on the track.
Technology and Racing
Over the past decade, real-time data with retrospective and predictive analytics has emerged to play a significant role at all levels of the sport. Every modern race car has onboard sensors and computers that track and capture the driver’s inputs and the car’s responses at every moment – steering input, brake pressure, throttle position, air/fuel mixture, wheel rate, tire pressures, and many other factors that affect car performance.
In fact, if you look at the design of the livery of my Ferrari, you will notice that it contains a series of mathematical symbols; I designed the livery to tell a story. The color up front is a nod to a great car– iconic Ferrari red. Then, blue where the symbols represent how data and machine learning have impacted the sport. When you combine a great car (and driver), with great data, you can generate the fastest lap time – represented by the violet color used in F1 and other series to denote the driver with the fastest lap time.
At the elite levels of racing such as F1 and the Indy series, onboard data is streamed in real-time to the race team engineers located on track and even remotely to engineers back at the factory. They use this data to dynamically adjust strategy as the race progresses (e.g., when to pit, when to change tires, how much fuel to carry, what adjustments to make to suspension and aero, etc.) For most teams, however, real-time data is captured in the car during an event and stored on an onboard SD card located in a small piece of hardware in my car called a vbox (onboard video streaming). This data is reviewed afterwards on a laptop using an application such as Race Studio from AIM.
My pro coaches get limited real-time streaming data generated by my car as I’m driving. This information is made possible by hardware/software applications such as the vbox and sent to their laptops via a gpx system. They use this information to provide me with real-time feedback about my driving and other racers via the radio in the car.
While modern, high-end street cars will let you make a few macro changes to your suspension, modern race cars enable the driver to make far more fine-grained adjustments to the suspension while they are driving. In the photo below, you can see that the steering wheel in my car has several buttons and two dials. Those dials let me change the “traction control” of the car on demand. I can make the car do more or less of the work to keep the wheels from spinning during turns and under control. I adjust these as I’m driving down straightaways in preparation for different types of turns or if tire or and/or track conditions change – from wet to dry or vice versa, for example. In other race cars, you can also change things such as brake bias – make the front brakes or back brakes grab harder – and other suspension adjustments. The Ferrari Challenge car is so well-engineered it automatically adjusts brake bias as conditions warrant.
Still, even with all the modern technology available, the results of a race are highly dependent upon humans – driver, coach, mechanics, etc. Before an event, I always sit down with my coach and we go over the track configuration on paper. There, he typically points out key things such as the gear I should be in at each turn, braking points, and other tips I can use. Below is an example of the 5-mile configuration of a private race course in Thermal, CA and the mark ups Alex Premat, my pro coach, made.
When you put it all together, you get the opportunity and the thrill of driving a phenomenal car at unbelievable speeds. Then, add 25 other drivers onto the track with you on race day and you have an adrenaline rush like none other. Watch this video with the sound turned up to get an idea of what its sounds and looks like to ride along with me.
While I am still in the early phases of participating in this challenging sport, I’m having a blast learning new things at my age and I hope to be able to continue for as long as I have the physical ability to do so!"
Keep up with Bruce at linkedin.com/in/brucecleveland and on Instagram – bclevela205
“For many companies—and many industries—the COVID-19 pandemic set off a period of head-spinning change. They realized they were capable of moving faster than they ever thought possible. They went digital in a matter of days, not years. They offered new services almost overnight. If companies sustain this newfound speed and agility, it’s conceivable that more innovation will happen in the next ten years than in any previous decade in modern history.”
In a recent Burning Platform episode about tech industry events, I presented a few slides (see starting 24.05 in the first video. Jon Reed and Brian Sommer go ahead of me) on how the world has been turned upside down in 3 other ways beyond the COVID impact
Ukraine war and need for energy independence in addition to a focus on emissions
Climate change urgency and the move to low-carbon in every industry
Big D - building on early Digital transformations at so many enterprises
At Deal Architect, we have seen what McKinsey is talking about the accelerating pace of innovation from three projects:
Our video series
We have recorded hundreds of video episodes in our Analyst Cam, Burning Platform and New Normal series. Even as tech vendor events and travel have been disrupted, we have had a front row seat on how business is evolving industry by industry. In reverse, we have also seen how many companies and tech vendors continue with business as usual, trying to sell what they had in their bags in 2019 and wishing they could roll back time. Others have spray painted a bit of innovation when the opportunity allowed for significantly more.
Support for IFS Moment of Service book
IFS does very well in physical asset and field service intensive industries. That is allowing them to play in a new world where digital and labor services are converging. In the industrial world, products, spare parts, financing, break/fix, monitoring and other services are being bundled in a trend called “servitization” and these companies are increasingly maturing outcome- based contracts.
CEO Darren Roos and his team of executives including Marne Martin, Antony Bourne and Mark Brewer are all impressive story tellers (each has been profiled in our video episodes). IFS has complex customers like Rolls-Royce Aviation, the US Navy, Juton (one of the world’s largest maker of paints and coatings) and others which have been pioneering the use of digital twins, IoT, mixed reality and next-gen contract management and field service.
Our team had a chance to interview many IFS, customer and partner executives and Darren’s team turned that into an engaging 200-page book, Moment of Service.
IFS handed out advance copies of the book at their Unleashed event last month.
SAP’s Business as Unusual project
While IFS’s book is focused on trends around the morphing world of products and services, SAP challenged a team we were part of to catalog trends across 8 themes. One of the deliverables from the project is an upcoming book, available from Amazon next month.
I would say it has been the most intense project my team has ever worked on (the publisher, Rheinwerk has been similarly pushed) and it has exposed us to new energy, new medicine, new mobility, new capital markets, new networks and new business models, and yes, lots of recycled stuff using circular economy thinking.
It gave us a chance to work with some the foremost domain experts across various industries such as Benjamin Beberness, Hagen Heubach, Torsten Welte and many others. I am not exaggerating – as you will see in the book, each of them could easily be a leading industry analyst in their area of focus. They just happen to be part of SAP. It allowed us to spend time with innovative customers who are driving decentralized grids, molecular recycling, pharma cold-chain logistics, next wave of financial instruments and more. It allowed us to learn from SAP’s expanding ecosystem – not just SIs, but strategy firms, Industry 4.0 enablers, micro-fulfillment supply chain players, digital agencies and a wide range of vertical research firms.
Thomas Saueressig and Peter Maier, two senior SAP executives and authors of the book, have built an incredible team and a truly enviable range of vertical products and customers. You can see it in the heat map of industries these 8 themes cut across.
If you can believe, we started with 20 themes and narrowed it down to 8. Which means there is plenty of change we did not catalog. Every one of the 300 pages in the book drips with innovation. There is little evidence of business as usual in the book.
So, yes sure some will keep pining to go back to 2019. As for us, we plan to keep fighting for a front row seat and look forward to a small role in this coming tsunami of innovation.
This is a guest column from Clive Boulton who is a football fan, consultant, prior head of development for popular MRP/ERP products including Micro-MRP, MAX at Kewill and Exact, and successive online products
Willkommen in Deutschland!
As Germans rev up for the FIFA World Cup, they will first get a dose of American Football. My team, the Seattle Seahawks will play Vinnie’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Allianz Stadium, the home ground of FC Bayern Munich on Sunday, November 13. It is the first ever NFL game played in Germany and that stadium will look just a bit different than the Bucs home stadium with its pirate ship and sea of red colors.
Since we are in SAP’s home country, it had me thinking about the complexity of this variety of football. US football’s beauty is actually in its complexity with its wide range of roles, skills and plays. Not to mention lots of technology on the field, in the review booth, in the broadcast networks and in the fan experience.
In many ways,the NFL Head Coach, is like the blend of an enterprise architect and project manager. It is a game with many resources and constraints. Each team is allowed 53 players on active roster. Of these 53, only 46 players can dress up for the actual game. That involves navigating weekly player injuries in a sport with a lot of physical contact. On the field, each team can only have 11 players for any given play. Player substitutions are very common – within the broad categories of offense, defense and special teams. The permutations and combinations are limitless. On offense you can pass (throw) or run the ball – as a result most teams have several receivers and running backs. On defense some teams go with a 3-4 base with more linebackers than linemen. On special teams you may have 2 kickers – one more accurate to kick field goals, another to kick longer on punts.
While this may seem like the coaching team has plenty of flexibility, for each play, the referees watch for “illegal formations”. Each position calls for unique athletic abilities – wide receivers are some of the fastest athletes in the world, the kickers grow up playing more soccer than American Football, linesmen have to be strong enough to push and nullify opposing linesmen who are just as big and strong. So there is a limit to the substitutions you can make. To compensate, coaches scheme up “trick plays” to surprise the opposing team. Some of them work, some actually draw penalties and cause you to lose yardage.
The NFL has long strived to bring parity across teams and there are (more) rules for drafting new players (mostly from college teams) and trading players or coaches across teams. Similarly for each play, the refs follow a very long rule book, and throw what seems like a frustratingly large number of penalty yellow flags. Coaches, in turn, are given a quota of red flags to ask for reviews. No wonder it is a constant stop-and-go sport.
Most observers will agree the most valuable player is the quarterback who has a role in the vast majority of offensive plays. The fans in Munich will see Tom Brady, the most winning quarterback ever, with 7 Super Bowl rings and over 100,000 yards passing in his 23 seasons. In the rough and tumble sport, that kind of longevity qualifies for Superman status. Seattle has Geno Smith, in stage 2.0 of his career, who is having a phenomenal year. (Brady, on the other hand, is off to a poor year - by his high standards). It also looks like Geno will be a crowd favorite. The city has already raised several murals like this to welcome him.
Putting my architect hat on, to me the offense is like CRM in the enterprise. The quarterback. running backs and receivers are always aiming to gain yards and score touchdowns. ERP is the offensive line which does the hard work of blocking and tackling for the backs to run through gaps and give the quarterback enough time for receivers to run downfield and catch his throws
Operational systems that run on the shop floor or process insurance claims represent the defensive squad, and in many close games are even more important than the offense.
Special teams are more like MRP, a short and decisive special planning action, to re-balance resources, reposition the offense and defense after a punt return or kick off.
Sunday’s game sold out all 75,000 seats, Alexander Steinforth, head of NFL Germany said 3 million requests were processed when tickets for the game went on sale. You can watch the game at 3:30 CET Sunday November 13, or follow the game here.
As you watch the game, try and map the players and formations to an enterprise architecture graph, Now imagine if those systems were to change every couple of minutes. American Football looks like chaos to the uninitiated. It’s actually a series of meticulously planned plays, interrupted by equally creative defensive plays and referees who are trying to keep the game fair but actually provide constraints to be optimized around. Think Eli Goldratt would have made a good coach?
To conclude, American football is a game of feet and inches, a focus on the details, not dissimilar to orchestrating an SAP ERP business system. A team requires a great head coach calling the game, and the quarterback executing the calls and a number of other team members working in sync.
Just as easy as running an ERP or CRM system. Only at warp speed. And with strange language like "hut hut" and "Hail Mary".
IFS called its event last week Unleashed - very appropriate given the immense energy of the event in the city of Miami Beach which throbs with Latin energy.
I have another name for the event - “Serendipity”- for the unplanned opportunity to meet people from countless countries and industries.
They had so many sub-themes converge. The main event ran from Tuesday to Thursday, but they had a partner day, a customer advisory board meeting and a Board of Directors Meeting around it. They had so many opportunities to mingle – in the Expo Hall, in various evening activities, and at breaks. The compact Miami Beach convention center made it so much easier to network. I must have detected at least 25 accents from my meetings (ten from around the UK!)
I ran into and had lunch with Craig Conway. I have not seen him since PoepleSoft days. Great to reminisce about past and talk about the present. He sits on several boards including that of IFS.
Nick Ward of Rolls-Royce was brilliant on stage. He covered outcome-based business models like their pioneering “Power by the Hour”. Even more fascinating was his description of material science and how it is pushing aviation boundaries and making it more sustainable. I have interviewed him over Zoom, but it was nice to spend a couple of minutes in person.
I have long admired the Norwegian company, Juton. Known as a paint company, they are actually a technology company with all kinds of unique skills and tools for maritime, oil and gas, skyscraper construction sectors. It was nice to spend a few minutes with the CEO, Morten Fon. I asked him what he thought of the Miami heat. He said he quite liked it – he had enjoyed a stint in tropical Malaysia.
I missed meeting him in person – have done so on Zoom but it was awe-inspiring to hear Mark Adams of Lockheed-Martin on stage. He described one of the most complex asset management and maintenance projects ever - modernization of US Navy. Aircraft carriers on down. Need to work anywhere in globe. Paper manuals to digital twins.
We heard inspirational talks from Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian ever with 23 Gold medals; from Tia Clair-Toomey, the fittest lady in the world having won 6 CrossFit tournaments, and from our friend, Ray Wang who in his own energetic way described what staying fit means for corporations in today’s digital world.
I met journalists who cover energy and aerospace and defense. Nice to not just hang around IT types. There were plenty of sustainability and partner awards. CEO Darren Roos handed out advance copies of his book “Moment of Service”. I got a personal tour of the Expo Hall from Bas de Vos who heads IFS Labs.
There was music everywhere – a sax soloist in the analyst track, bands at every outing, a DJ continually playing music outside the expo hall. There was time to explore South Beach and Miami’s museum/aquarium district.
In keeping with the Miami theme, I must have tried salmon, mahi-mahi, lobster and plenty of other seafood over the 3 days. I delivered my gift of Tampa cigars to Oliver Pilgerstorfer and he generously shared the box with others.
I am just scratching the surface on all the venues where other attendees had serendipitous meetings of their own.
I have requested to record a video episode with the IFS team which planned and executed such an amazingly diverse event – once they have had a chance to catch their breath. One regret - I missed spending more time with I have come to know over the last couple of years like Marne Martin, Mark Brewer and Alex Ivkovic. Hope to at next year's Unleashed, er. Serendipity event
In the meantime, enjoy this 3-minute recap of the event and some of the music.
When Artemis I lifts off (scheduled for 8.33 am on August 29) an artificial thunder will roll across Florida’s Merritt Island as four RS-25 rocket engines and two solid-fuel boosters—the largest ever built—create up to 8.8 million pounds of thrust,”
At ZohoDay in Austin last month, they had a souvenir for every attendee, a cube shown in the video above. So, I asked to interview Raffic Aslam, Creative Director at Zoho for the backstory. He shared details of the design and the speed of production to make sure it made it through customs from India to Austin.
Here are some excerpts
“At the ZohoDay in 2019, we had hand drawn portraits of all the analysts (see video below). We wanted to do something handmade again for the attendees, but in 3D which also reflected the spirit of Austin and Texas. We thought about mural art with flavors of Austin on a cowboy hat. We tried it using Plaster of Paris and wood. Neither worked out.
Then one of my team members, Deepika suggested we do something in metallic fiber with a stone/rock feel. That involved creating a clay model, then creating a cast, then making a mold of that in the fiber.
I was simultaneously working on a recruitment campaign involving 4 roles - developers, designers, sales executives and customer support reps. Each of those had a cube and other icons and that inspired the shift of the form to physical cube.
The 4 visible sides (the top has a Zoho logo) of the cube represent the following
Austin’s music scene
Austin’s foodie reputation
Austin's icons – horses, cactus, boots
Zoho icons – the shield for our commitment to privacy. Our code, our cloud, our customer support
Each weighs about 200 grams (7 ounces), and we added a wooden stand. The whole thing took about 3 weeks – including the shipping to Austin, so we delivered it in a tight timeline. At the end of the video are the three main contributors to the project – Arun Kumar, the sketch artist; Deepika, the clay modeler and Vignesh, the sculptor.
We are replicating this idea for all other events with customized themes. So the one for Europe will have its architecture, its food etc.”
Then I asked Raffic to share more of his team’s creative work. Here are some of them:
The wrench souvenir created for a Zoho Creator event in 2014
The wall painting when they opened their Dubai office in 2020. It blends Arab and Indian cultures.
The print in their Cape Town, S. Africa office. Due to COVID travel restrictions, they could not travel and paint the wall so they improvised with a print and shipped it over.
Covers they have designed for their notebooks. Every has the artist name on the back cover. The digital versions are available on the page here.
Here are the analyst "hedcuts" they had created for the 2019 Zoho Day.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, and they will align in order before sunrise near the end of June.
The rare alignment will appear just before sunrise on June 24 across the eastern sky. The crescent moon will also be in line with the planets, shining between Venus and Mars.
Given all the supply chain breakdowns of the last couple of years, I have often thought about Howard Tibbals who passed away earlier this year. I had reached out to him a couple of years ago and hoped to meet him, but I suspected it would be impossible during the lockdowns. Even more than a craftsman, Howard was a logistician and I hoped to learn from him about the amazing supply chain of the circus a century ago
Howard spent most of his adult life recreating a miniature model of the US circus during its Golden Age in the 1920s and 30s. The Ringling Museum, an hour’s drive from us, has a center which houses his collection, the largest in the world. Requiring over 3,800 square feet. it is a model of the circus under tent. With over 42,000 objects, it includes not only the big top, menagerie, and side show tents, but also 59 railroad cars, 54 wagons, and over 900 animals. Each tent and wagon is equipped exactly like the real circus from steam kettles in the cookhouse tent to the 7,000 folding chairs for the audience.
Here are some highlights from my research about the complexity of circus logistics back then
During the 1920s and 1930s, the combined Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus required more than 100 rail cars to ferry 1300 workers and performers, 800 animals and their cages and equipment.
The circus would travel up to 15,000 miles over the 7-8 month season and visit 150 towns.
They would stay at some of the larger cities like Chicago and New York for a week or two, but most other towns they would only visit for a day. It was a cash-only business in those times – so they would start in the bigger cities and build up a cash cushion. Many circuses would go broke in the middle of the season. No digital payment or cash flow technology back then.
The loading, unpacking, re-packing, travel etc required unbelievable precision. The evening performance ended at 10:30 p.m. but they had to be in the next town by 4 am so that the circus could start its town parade by 11 am. Required lots of parallel activities – tearing down and moving stuff to the train yard while the performance was still on-going. Cooking for everyone while the Big Tent was being set up. There was no HR or project management software.
The local supply chains were just as precise. An order for a day for the humans was something on these lines of 90 gallons of fresh milk, 1,000 pounds of bread, 300 pounds of beef and pork, 250 dozen eggs and 300 pies of 4 varieties. For the animals, the order was along the lines of 5 tons of hay, 20 tons of straw, 50 bushels of oats, and 600 pounds of bran. Local vendors also delivered ice, water, coal, gas, kerosene etc. No supplier networks to manage all this. The most sophisticated communication tech was a telegraph.
Flat cars and ingenious use of elephants and horses helped to load and unload the cages with animals, the tents, cooking equipment. The animals were all-weather – they could work though rain, snow and muddy grounds. They were also part of the entertainment. There were no robots or industrial equipment to do all that
At the industry’s peak, the day the circus came ro town ranked with Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Fourth of July: banks and businesses closed, schools got a day pass, and an entire town came out to watch the parade and see exotic animals and acrobats. The shows used large newspaper ads, heralds, courier booklets and small picture cards, but the bulk of the marketing was spent on colorful posters of all sizes and the cost of putting them up. There were no TV ads or social media.
The planning process began months in advance of the actual show date, with early visitations to the town by contracting agents and the promotional staff who negotiated with local printers and glued thousands of posters in each town. Weather routinely played havoc with the plans. No spreadsheets or planning tools back then.
According to an 1895 article in McClure's magazine, the U.S. Army sent a number of officers to study Barnum and Bailey's Circus for a week while it was in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The report the officers sent back praised the complex logistical operation. I think today’s supply chain wizards should similarly study how the circus did what it did with so little tech.
I have seen Howard's collection a few times and can spend hours admiring his craft and also thinking of the amazing logistics of the circus with the primitive technology they had a century ago.
I started writing trip reports when the kids were young and would embed photos and all kinds of trivia from the visits, print them and store them in giant file folders. Even now, they will occasionally flip through the write-ups. As the pandemic started couple of years ago, I started jotting bullets about every day and started taking even more photos. With a new iPhone 12 Pro, the photo collection accelerated. We have had mild lockdowns in FL so my wife and I did lots of day trips and I shared them in an Instagram series called “West Coast on the East Coast”. Someday, I will contribute the hundreds of pages of bullets and thousands of photos to a time capsule about the pandemic. Hopefully, people will see a positive side to the plague.
Google Photos, Facebook and other places where the photos are shared have allowed me to develop collages. I have become pretty good at my own pattern recognition. Here are some from the Sapphire event last week.
An evergreen SAP
I have heard from a couple of customer execs how nice it is to deal with a Millennial CEO like Christian Klein. I saw him up close in a couple of sessions and was impressed how confident he sounds. Jan Gilg had to replace a COVID-affected Thomas Saueressig at short notice and he handled that admirably. This was Julia White’s first in-person Sapphire and I was impressed by her energy and positivity. Dr Hasso Plattner told me a couple of years ago, he was impressed with how young SAP felt. I did not understand what he meant. After last week, I do.
But not just youth, when Scott Russell shared a photo with the ageless football GOAT Tom Brady it hit me age is a state of mind. Scott brings an incredible career from around the world. Peter Maier does the same with his vertical knowledge.
We had a fascinating conversation with Eva Zauke about localization services for all the countries and local governments SAP supports. It is a endless journey – it used to be languages, payroll and tax support (SAP was born global with MNC customers from Day 1), now it is about data domicile, new ESG regulations and so much more.
Last month, I saw Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce present a slide at an analyst event. It nicely captured how they have grown through major crises and supported their customers for the last 17 years since their IPO. It hit me that SAP has helped its customers for 50 years through many more transitions – mainframe to client/server to cloud architectures, relational to columnar databases, now it is helping them move to industry networks, low carbon energy, new vaccines and so much else new. And helped customers through a number of recessions and other challenges.
“A Category of One”
Scott Russell said when they segment the market effectively, they are essentially a category of one, onto themselves. I could not agree more. “Vinnie Vertical” was especially thrilled about several one-on-one conversations about Industry trends and technologies with
Achim Schneider about customer experiences, reverse logistics and other retail trends
Matthew Reymann about computational chemistry and the opportunity for the Chemical sector with new molecules in energy, food and so many other sectors
Falk Rieker and trends in fintech
Benjamin Beberness and energy transition to low carbon in oil and gas and utilities and the dramatically shifting global energy landscape
E.J. Kenney and the Direct to Consumer trend in CPG, health care and other consumer industries
I will be honest I cannot have such conversations with execs at too many other tech vendors. Having said that I wish the show floor would have not emphasized traditional functional silos – HCM, SCM etc.
I partly blame my side of the aisle – analysts - for reinforcing acronyms which encourage such silos. Easier said than done, but hope SAP starts speaking a different language not just reinforcing this 30-year-old taxonomy. When they compete at a higher level of abstraction, SAP has little competition. Us analysts will eventually catch up.
“The future of everything”
Andre Bechtold and Anita Riegel arranged a personalized tour of the Trilogy fashion/apparel demo company on the show floor which showcased next-gen tech for product innovation, sustainability, robotic manufacturing and retail experiences
I have seen videos of other SAP showcases. It would be nice for SAP to similarly show off the bank branch of the future, the clinic of the future etc. at its events. It would be a logistical challenge to move the giant devices around the world but there is a wow factor in bringing together the physical and virtual worlds.
More adjectives for the enterprise
Christian Klein ended his keynote by raising the bar. It is no longer sufficient to think about an intelligent enterprise. It also needs to be resilient and sustainable. I wish he had added "profitable". We risk largely talking about sustainability as a compliance mandate. We have been growing a number of case studies around the circular economy, low carbon transition which are allowing for new revenue streams and cost savings. We need to highlight that a lot more of that,
Relativity theory and ecosystems
During a visit to Joshua Tree NP. Margaret and I got to spend some time with some astronomers in the desert night and they talked about how much more we know about our celestial skies since they were at school and how the universe keeps “expanding”
At Sapphire, for a change it was nice to see a compact set of partner booths, but at breakfast with Frank Ruland we discussed the expanding ecosystem around SAP. Strategy consulting firms, warehouse and other bot vendors, digital agencies, SAP.iO Foundries startups, low-code communities, App Stores – it’s not your grandpa’s ecosystem
With these fresh voices, we will hopefully see much more automation of services, new business models and a lot more change.
Business Model Innovation
In an exchange with Christian Klein, I mentioned that the software industry led customers into new business models like subscriptions starting in the late 90s. Now, many customers are ahead experimenting with outcome-based models, platforms and “everything as service.”
I was pleasantly surprised to hear of the uptake of RISE with SAP, especially with net-new customers. I would love to see SAP and its partners align their economics with those of their customer experiments.
Sapphire was a whirlwind and as you can see I took hundreds of photos and created tons of collages.
I have been asking every vendor what have you done to take advantage of the last two or three years since your last in-person event? More importantly, what have you done to help your customers through all the shocks and chaos?
I got a pretty convincing set of answers and yet came away with several new questions. As Emerson famously said “It’s not the destination, It's the journey.” As we move to new everything, I would say most customers look forward to lots more of SAP-enabled evolution.
As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.
I occasionally invite authors to present on their new books in this series. This time it is my former Gartner colleague and mentor, Erik Keller
In his book, available at Amazon, he shares his personal journey after he retired from his technology analyst career and became a master gardener and from there a horticultural therapist. He has helped over a thousand clients including cancer patients and juvenile delinquents with the restorative power of flora.
We cover a surprising amount of STEM topics – gene sequencing in plants, how drones and mapping tech have influenced gardening, Google Lens and gardening mobile apps. I am driving to SAP’s Sapphire event in Orlando this week, and will probably talk about spargel (white asparagus) season (which goes from April to June) with many of the German executives. Erik reminisces about his trips to their HQ in Walldorf and has a botanical angle on the delicacy.
We also discuss how much more information is available even to the amateur gardener nowadays. And how much publishing has changed since his last book, Technology Paradise Lost, he wrote in 2004.
BlocPower is a Brooklyn-based start-up that has “greened” more than 1,200 buildings in New York City and has similar projects in two dozen other cities. It uses a lease-to-own platform, offering landlords and homeowners green heating and cooling systems, electric appliances and solar panels. It installs the equipment and manages its upkeep. Landlords make monthly payments that cover those costs and offer returns to investors.
The company reports it has reduced building energy costs by 30% to 50% and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 40% to 70% in current projects. It says it can reduce U.S. greenhouse gases up to 25% in 10 years and recapture up to 30% of the millions of dollars in wasted energy spent.
Early in February, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced that they will build the world’s first ship for transporting carbon dioxide solely from carbon-capture facilities. The demonstration ship, which will be able to haul 1,450 cubic meters of liquefied CO2, is scheduled to be operational by late 2023.
The Japanese shipbuilding giant joins a list of ambitious projects that plan to ship CO2 from the power plants and factories where it’s emitted to sites where the gas can be used or permanently stored. By providing a cost-effective option to transport the greenhouse gas, CO2 shipping could provide an impetus for large-scale deployment of carbon-capture utilization and storage (CCUS).
We were at the Sun n Fun Airshow in Lakeland, FL yesterday. The last mile to the parking lot took us 90 minutes, the grounds were soft from days of rain and sure enough we got stuck in the parking lot mud till help arrived 90 minutes later. So, I was arranging for our tickets when the Thunderbirds show had already started. With my back to them, I was left shaking like a leaf by the loudest sound I have ever heard. So was Margaret 30 feet away and everyone else around us.
The Thunderbirds had flown directly over us in their F-16s. They can technically reach speeds of Mach 2 though in airshows they stay below Mach 1. But it sure felt like a sonic boom had hit us. And Major Schlichting, in her first year as a Thunderbird is the right wing pilot in the diamond foursome formation. It's precision flying - she is often only 18-inches from the lead jet. 2 other solos make up the aerobatic team of 6.
Two weeks ago, I had the chance to see the US Navy’s Blue Angels in their F-18 Super Hornets - see my write up here. Each has their fans. Navy v Air Force. Super Hornet v Fighting Falcon. My wife likes the Thunderbirds jet livery more.
This video is a nice compilation of both the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels. Mercifully, they rarely fly together – imagine those roars if they were to try to out-hotdog each other.
Quaise Energy, a geothermal energy company born from MIT, has set its sights on harnessing the unlimited renewable energy that exists beneath the earth’s surface. To do so, Quaise plans on drilling holes at least twice as deep as the deepest holes ever created (i.e. Russia’s Kola Superdeep Borehole and Qatar’s Al Shaheen oil well, each of which sit at about 7.5 miles deep), which, according to CEO Carlos Araque, would generate power “at a scale far greater than wind and solar.”.
Occidental Petroleum Corp., the shale giant backed by Warren Buffett, plans to build 70 carbon capture facilities around the world by 2035 that will each remove as much as 1 million tons per year of the greenhouse gas directly from the atmosphere.
Quidnet's innovative GPS energy storage technology pumps water underground and stores it between impermeable rock layers. The rock performs like a natural spring and holds the water under pressure. When the project is called upon to supply electricity, the pressurized water is released to power a hydroelectric turbine that generates emission-free electricity. The entire process is closed loop to conserve water resources.
The technology is a form of pumped hydro storage, which currently provides over 90 percent of the world's energy storage capacity, but deployable in a wide and diverse swath of geographies previously considered unsuitable for pumped hydro development. This unique approach to energy storage offers a new, cost-effective, highly scalable tool that is key to unlocking the global clean energy future.
The company, formally East Japan Railway, will begin safety testing on the two-car Hybari train in late March. Plans are to start commercial service in 2030.
Hybari runs off hydrogen fuel cells and batteries. Hydrogen is supplied from tanks to a fuel cell system, and a chemical reaction with oxygen in the air generates electricity. The batteries store energy generated when the brakes are applied.
Scientists have produced a map showing where the world's major food crops should be grown to maximize yield and minimize environmental impact. This would capture large amounts of carbon, increase biodiversity, and cut agricultural use of freshwater to zero.
The reimagined world map of agriculture includes large new farming areas for many major crops around the cornbelt in the mid-western US, and below the Sahara desert. Huge areas of farmland in Europe and India would be restored to natural habitat.
The redesign—assuming high-input, mechanized farming—would cut the carbon impact of global croplands by 71%, by allowing land to revert to its natural, forested state. This is the equivalent of capturing twenty years' worth of our current net CO2 emissions. Trees capture carbon as they grow, and also enable more carbon to be captured by the soil than when crops are grown in it.
I had a chance last weekend to go to the Airfest at the storied MacDill Airforce Base just a few miles from where we live. I walked through the belly of a C-5 Galaxy and a C-17 Globemaster. Looked inside a Blackhawk helicopter. Stood under the 8 engines of a B-52 Stratofortress. Saw a F-22 Raptor stealth fighter and an E-3 Sentry AWACS radar plane fly by. A demo by a C-130J Super Hercules. See my Instagram post for 10 photos from the visit.
But the highlight of the day was the US Navy’s Blue Angels.
Since 1946, the Blue Angels have performed for nearly 500 million fans. Since 2020, they have flown the F/A-18 Super Hornet E/F. During their demonstration, the Blues fly six aircraft split into the Diamond Formation (Blue Angels 1 through 4) and the Lead and Opposing Solos (Blue Angels 5 and 6). Most of the show alternates between maneuvers performed by the Diamond and those performed by the Solos.
There were 6 Angels in the show including
Captain Brian Kesselring, Flight Leader and Commanding Officer
Lt. Christopher Kapuschansky (right wing)
Lt. Scott Goossens,(left wing)
Major Frank Zastoupil (slot)
Lieutenant Commander Cary Rickoff (lead Solo)
Lieutenant Commander Julius Bratton (Solo)
Check out their bios here and those of Blue Angels 7 and 8 -Lieutenant Griffin Stangel who narrated the show and Lieutenant Katlin Forster, the event coordinator
They did several maneuvers including the Fleur de Lis where the pilots fly over center point, where they separate and do a 360-degree roll with the diamond shape reconnecting through a loop. Others included the Barrel Roll Break, the Diamond Dirty Loop and the Fortus.
My phone battery died just as the Blue Angels show started. Logan Sears who was with his family next to me in the stands came to the rescue. He kindly sent me half an hour of footage. I have edited in down to 6 minutes of thrilling maneuvers below.
Unbelievably, next weekend the US Air Force’s Thunderbirds in their F-16 Fighting Falcons are coming to a show in Lakeland, a short drive from us.
Try and catch one or both of these acrobatic teams in person if they are ever at a show near you. Quite a thrill to watch and hear their thunder up close.
Britain says the Russian Ministry of Defense has confirmed the use in Ukraine of the TOS-1A weapon system, which uses thermobaric rockets.
Thermobaric weapons, sometimes called "vacuum bombs," basically suck in oxygen from the surrounding air to generate a more high-temperature explosion than conventional bombs.
Though not illegal, their usage is controversial because they are much more devastating than conventional explosives of a similar size, and have a devastating impact on anyone caught in their blast radius.
These warheads make Washington state host to the globe’s third-largest arsenal of deployed nuclear weapons — an estimated 1,120 — behind only Russia and the United States as a whole, whose stockpiles still number in the thousands, despite decades of reductions, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
One weapon in particular on those subs is at the apex of relevance in its short life: The W76-2, a reduced-payload nuclear warhead designed to counter Russia. It was rushed into production by the Trump administration and greenlighted by Congress in anticipation of a moment precisely like this one — a Russian invasion of a friendly nation, where President Vladimir Putin’s “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine could inch the world’s nuclear superpowers closer and closer to an exchange.
Among the many weapons being used by the Ukrainian military to inflict losses on the Russian invasion forces, several have risen to prominence in the country and on social media. Alongside ‘St Javelin’ and the ‘Ghost of Kiev’ which have mythologised the eponymous anti-tank missile and the Ukrainian air force’s Mig-29 fighters, the Bayraktar TB-2 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has gained a symbolic place in the Ukrainian defensive arsenal.
Bayraktar’s UAV is a comparatively cheap, rugged and efficient platform that is performing well, but it is certainly not a miracle weapon. The effectiveness so far of the TB-2 speaks more to the skill of its Ukrainian operators and the incompetence and operational failures of Russian forces than any particularly unique capabilities of the drone itself.
China is developing a hypersonic airliner capable of transporting 10 passengers to anywhere in the world in less than an hour.
The 148-foot-long (45-meter) plane is about a third the size of a Boeing 737 and has delta wings identical to that of Concorde, the world’s first supersonic airliner, but with the tips pointed skyward, reported the Daily Mail.
Officials hope to build a fleet of the jets by the end of 2035 and to increase their capacity to 100 people by 2045 – although their exact purpose is yet to be revealed. Owing to its intricate construction, the plane will be able to travel at a speed of Mach 5 or more than five times the speed of sound.
Twin’s Whole Body Digital Twin builds a “digital twin” modeled after a patient’s individual metabolism. This digital replica is continuously updated based on data from wearables, blood tests and self-reported symptoms. AI is then used to analyze the twin and offer personalized guidance that could facilitate improvements.
Users can see how changes to nutrition, sleep, activity and breathing could potentially reverse or prevent chronic metabolic diseases. Because it enlists technology and monitors that are already approved, Twin has said that its system doesn’t need FDA approval.
It takes on average a decade to go from the initial discovery stage of a drug to approval and, with a high failure rate, the pharmaceutical industry estimates it costs $2.7bn to bring each one to market. Clinical trials make up the bulk of this time and cost, but discovery and pre-clinical tests can still take three or four years.
During the pandemic, AI was primarily used as a tool to save scientists’ time, accelerating this notoriously slow discovery process, while often using drugs and vaccines designed for similar viruses such as Mers as a starting point. But advocates of AI believe its wider use during the crisis is just the start of a revolution in drug discovery that will harness growth in biological and chemical data, computing power and smarter algorithms that could reduce soaring healthcare bills and create treatments for conditions where we have none.
They argue AI proved itself in the crisis. AbCellera sorted through 6mn cells in three days to find an antibody that could be mass produced — in this case by Eli Lilly — as a drug called bamlanivimab that has helped more than 1mn Covid patients. A supercomputer helped in Pfizer’s quest for an antiviral that could be taken orally.
As a cancer patient himself, he understood that design could play a huge role in how patients experienced the often uncomfortable treatments. He started asking patients what they wanted in a new facility. “What I heard repeatedly is, ‘We don’t want sterile fluorescent lights. We don’t want to feel like we’re on a stage while we’re sitting on these high exam tables and freezing cold in gowns,'” he says. Patients wanted a softer experience, with more natural light, not the typical sterile white walls of a chilly hospital room.
“As we met with the architects, we went with a full natural material palette for everything, lots of varying textures and colors all relating to nature, what we felt was more soft and inviting,” Flora says. He wanted the project to “echo more the feeling you get when you walk into an Apple Store than the feeling you get when you walk into your gynecologist’s office.”
Messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA for short, is a single-stranded molecule that carries genetic code from DNA to a cell's protein-making machinery. Without mRNA, your genetic code wouldn't be used, proteins wouldn't be made, and your body wouldn't work. If DNA is the bank card, then mRNA is the card reader.
At the University of Rochester, Dragony Fu, associate professor, department of biology, received expedited funding for his laboratory from the National Science Foundation to research RNA proteins. If we are currently witnessing mRNA vaccine 1.0 for Covid-19, then 2.0 will address two further categories of disease, says Fu: "one is pathogens, like Sars, but you can apply this technology to other foreign invaders such as HIV. Already before Covid, companies were in development making mRNA vaccines against HIV." He also cites Zika, herpes and malarial parasites in the pathogens camp.
"The other category is autoimmune diseases," he says. "That is intriguing because it's verging beyond the very strict definition of a vaccine." Fu says the future could involve mRNA "treatments", for example to reduce inflammation. "In theory, that opens up so many possibilities," he says.
"The most innovative period mankind has experienced"
McKinsey recently wrote:
“For many companies—and many industries—the COVID-19 pandemic set off a period of head-spinning change. They realized they were capable of moving faster than they ever thought possible. They went digital in a matter of days, not years. They offered new services almost overnight. If companies sustain this newfound speed and agility, it’s conceivable that more innovation will happen in the next ten years than in any previous decade in modern history.”
In a recent Burning Platform episode about tech industry events, I presented a few slides (see starting 24.05 in the first video. Jon Reed and Brian Sommer go ahead of me) on how the world has been turned upside down in 3 other ways beyond the COVID impact
At Deal Architect, we have seen what McKinsey is talking about the accelerating pace of innovation from three projects:
Our video series
We have recorded hundreds of video episodes in our Analyst Cam, Burning Platform and New Normal series. Even as tech vendor events and travel have been disrupted, we have had a front row seat on how business is evolving industry by industry. In reverse, we have also seen how many companies and tech vendors continue with business as usual, trying to sell what they had in their bags in 2019 and wishing they could roll back time. Others have spray painted a bit of innovation when the opportunity allowed for significantly more.
Support for IFS Moment of Service book
CEO Darren Roos and his team of executives including Marne Martin, Antony Bourne and Mark Brewer are all impressive story tellers (each has been profiled in our video episodes). IFS has complex customers like Rolls-Royce Aviation, the US Navy, Juton (one of the world’s largest maker of paints and coatings) and others which have been pioneering the use of digital twins, IoT, mixed reality and next-gen contract management and field service.
Our team had a chance to interview many IFS, customer and partner executives and Darren’s team turned that into an engaging 200-page book, Moment of Service.
IFS handed out advance copies of the book at their Unleashed event last month.
SAP’s Business as Unusual project
I would say it has been the most intense project my team has ever worked on (the publisher, Rheinwerk has been similarly pushed) and it has exposed us to new energy, new medicine, new mobility, new capital markets, new networks and new business models, and yes, lots of recycled stuff using circular economy thinking.
It gave us a chance to work with some the foremost domain experts across various industries such as Benjamin Beberness, Hagen Heubach, Torsten Welte and many others. I am not exaggerating – as you will see in the book, each of them could easily be a leading industry analyst in their area of focus. They just happen to be part of SAP. It allowed us to spend time with innovative customers who are driving decentralized grids, molecular recycling, pharma cold-chain logistics, next wave of financial instruments and more. It allowed us to learn from SAP’s expanding ecosystem – not just SIs, but strategy firms, Industry 4.0 enablers, micro-fulfillment supply chain players, digital agencies and a wide range of vertical research firms.
Thomas Saueressig and Peter Maier, two senior SAP executives and authors of the book, have built an incredible team and a truly enviable range of vertical products and customers. You can see it in the heat map of industries these 8 themes cut across.
If you can believe, we started with 20 themes and narrowed it down to 8. Which means there is plenty of change we did not catalog. Every one of the 300 pages in the book drips with innovation. There is little evidence of business as usual in the book.
So, yes sure some will keep pining to go back to 2019. As for us, we plan to keep fighting for a front row seat and look forward to a small role in this coming tsunami of innovation.
November 20, 2022 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)