Young Engineers

LeChâtlier’s Passport: Working Across Cultures

Recently at a dinner in a “small” Chinese town of just under three million people, I sat around a table with colleagues representing seven countries, speaking Mandarin Chinese, English, French, Korean, Flemish, German, Russian, and Dutch. Given that a coworker and I were born and bred well south of the Mason-Dixon Line, arguably the two of us also spoke “Southern.”

This same group was composed of the following academic backgrounds: mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, one doctorate in materials science, one doctorate in physical chemistry.

These diverse gatherings, once strictly the domain of G20 Summits, professional society annual meetings, or academic conferences, are now more and more commonplace: there we were in our cultural Petri dish that combined scientific knowledge diversity with cultural diversity.

So how to handle developing these working relationships when clients, business partners, vendors, and contractors increasingly mingle across such diverse Venn diagrams of backgrounds?

We turn, of course, to philosophy.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the origins, acquisition, and development of knowledge. The interactions between the knowledge of culture and the knowledge of technology have become the new reactants in the laboratory of the modern global marketplace.

Thermodynamics, through the eyes of the French chemist Henry Louis LeChâtlier, taught us that when we have two separate substances dosed at high concentrations into the same system, the substances will naturally flow from being in a state of localized high concentrations to dispersed lower concentrations, both substances eventually mixing or reacting altogether until the system itself is in long-term equilibrium. As such, different sources of knowledge will rarely have the opportunity to react and create new disciplines and methodologies if left isolated. Exposure to cultural practices and behaviors different from one’s own is the ultimate way of paving an exciting, new syncretic future of knowledge growth, fostering innovation in ways that isolated thought could never bring forth.

So what would the Fodor’s travel guide to this cultural expanse look like? Perhaps in the “How to Get There” section we might see the following sub-headings as trails leading us to an epistemological hybridization of cultural growth.

Translation is not Always Interpretation
When one deals in collaborative work between different cultural backgrounds, language is one of the more obvious differences that contribute to knowledge building.

The caveat is that there is a distinctive difference between translation and interpretation. For technical projects that require a higher level of technological collaboration, this difference is manifested in the ability to translate literally word for word versus conveying the meaning behind those words. This can make critical differences in the understanding of all parties involved, that everyone leaves the table with the same understanding. In the context of agreeing to a contract or the terms of a project, striving toward comprehension should always trump the half-way house of mere vocabulary exchange.

Write it Down
English speakers have the privilege of being a bit spoiled when it comes to doing business abroad (although at the rate things are going, I wouldn’t put that Mandarin Chinese edition of Rosetta Stone on eBay quite yet).

Most countries, particularly in Asia, are built with the training infrastructure to conduct business in English. One trend is that regardless of the country, even in places where speaking English may be weaker, reading and writing English is very proficient.

When in doubt, summon up your dry erase board skills and write it down in your international meetings. If that is not possible, follow up your meeting or teleconference with a clear email or memo. Feel comfortable in requesting the same from your partners.

There’s No Such Thing as Being Too Specific
No dead horses to be beaten here. Err on the side of thoroughness, albeit tinged with precision. Never assume, “Oh surely, they get it.” It’s not a function of any individual’s capability but the challenges that the very act of translation inherently brings. When in doubt, be overly specific and request the same of your counterparts.

Cultural Convergence
What can we learn from our past that can inform our present? What can we learn from the past of one culture and how can it influence the present of another culture? Cultural convergence is the application of business knowledge across different cultural backdrops, taking advantage of differences in technology, customs, and practices, and redeploying such differences in non-traditional contexts. Like LeChâtlier, allowing this equilibrium to occur is to sow the fertile landscape of creativity, innovation, and progress.

The benefit here is to remember that the modern developing countries are at different stages of each other’s economic continuum. Seeing where Japan began after World War II and where it is now, China knows which roads to avoid and which roads to pursue. South Korea might be standing just right of the midpoint. Look further back along the timeline and the countries of Southeast Asia are waiting in the queue. It’s like being able to look into the future and edit other countries’ mistakes in order to tailor them to your country’s own economic benefit. Much of what the United States learned in the industrialization of the country during the 1940s is being reapplied in a more streamlined form in other countries where industrialization is just beginning to gain firmer footing. In this way, guided knowledge becomes the sharpest chisel for global growth and development.

Japan and a Metaphysical Sense of Seismic Engineering

Hello from a shinkansen bullet train, tearing through the Japanese countryside at 300 kilometers per hour. The thorough network of public transportation in Japan continues to embody the aphorism that time waits for no one and that these rockets-on-land will not hesitate to leave you and your laptop bag quivering in the supersonic dust.

With regards to the global economy, Japan, like the rest of the world, is facing its share of large-scale changes. Unemployment, while still half of that in the U.S., has reached historical highs for the country; there has been a change of regime with the election of Kan Naoto as the new prime minister; and the country’s engineering and manufacturing base is still reeling from the recent international PR fallout with the quality issues at Toyota. But despite this adversity, the Japanese industry has still seemed to maintain its technological edge, keeping its infrastructure resilient while confronting even the worst of tectonic shifts. That and the Japanese national soccer team is defying all the contrarians by advancing toward the final stages of the World Cup.

Speaking of movers and shakers, the importance of building codes had particular resonance (literally) when just two weeks ago, I was at a café in the Tokyo Narita Airport when a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck northeastern Japan. My coffee literally started pouring itself. Due to the thankless work of structural engineers, everyone just looked up as if in an afterthought, waited for the aftershock to pass, then went safely back about their business (or in my case, turning my attention to wiping the latte shrapnel off my shirt-sleeve). Particularly in severe cases like the Hanshin earthquake that decimated Japan in the 1990s, nature oftentimes overtakes engineering’s best attempts to deflect its disasters. But like the Japanese mindset of self-improvement and self-renewal, we learn anew and we seek out innovative ways to minimize risk; we roll up our sleeves and we try again.

The Toyota Production System (TPS) and kaizen are concepts that by now in the 21st century are well worn in many Western business environments and unfortunately, some to the point of banality. Just don’t let that TPS name be tainted by recent automotive press—this is just an example of where the idea has grown beyond the company that originated it. TPS is less about Toyota than it is about a system of comprehensive organizational discipline, the observations of which have been interwoven with my business travels here. Certainly, spending an occasional two-week stint a few times a year in Japan does not qualify me as an expert in Japanese culture, but as a third-party tourist of the industrial stage, I have been witness to practices that have made me exclaim, “Check that out!” (or…so desu! as the locals would say).

None of these concepts are foolproof (although the Japanese, of course, have a term for that, too: poka-yoke, in describing the inclusion of mistake-proofing directly into the design of a product or process). Ultimately, when compared to organizations outside of Japan, these practices are less about “being Japanese” than they are about how any company or individual in the modern era uses aspirations for efficiency as part of their striving towards competitive excellence.


Cleanliness is Next to Godliness (or at least Industry Dominance)
Those familiar lean production activities are quite familiar with the concept of clean and organized environments contributing to workplace efficiency. There are many Western companies that already do this very well. The culture of such practices, however, is still more consistently observable across Japan relative to what’s been observed elsewhere. These practices result in quick identification of problems and potential risks. Tools and process plans are “point of use” and within arm’s reach. These practices apply to office and design environments and are not isolated to manufacturing settings. Here, “clean” is not just “not messy” but also “precisely organized,” all characteristics that streamline the path to effectively meeting client needs.

Pride in Expertise
While many managers or shift leaders find the need to “explain” their employees’ capabilities to senior leaders and auditors, the majority of the Japanese engineers and technologists observed were self-validating masters of their craft. Taking true ownership in your subject matter area and being allowed to speak to it (and more importantly, having managerial leadership that supports such a mentality) extends beyond just being an academic veteran or licensed expert. True ownership is demonstrated when a firm’s individuals can readily demonstrate their knowledge both to clients and internal customers. This aspect separates those merely following printed job descriptions from those who possess a depth of passion and fluency in the responsibilities for which they are held accountable.

Everything with a Purpose
It is becoming more important than ever to be purpose driven in a time when resources are becoming more and more scarce. Engineers the world around are familiar with the difficult balancing of aesthetics with functional needs. But even then, anything that does not demonstrate a direct contribution toward attaining customer requirements is eliminated. Every design document, LED bulb, rack and pinion, binder full of documents, scrawls on a blueprint, rolling cart of tools, has a reason for existing. If a process is redesigned, the skeletons of the past are cast upon the pyre of progress. Superfluous nice-to-haves are tossed. John Paul Sartre would have had a successful career as a device engineer in Japan.

So in the context of these observations, it’s still perfectly okay to let out that overachieving perfectionist in you every now and then. Whether in an office environment or in the bowels of a factory, Japan reminds us to just keep shaking things up.

Letter to a (Graduating) Young Engineer

Dear Recently Minted Engineering Graduate,

I use the term “minted” not lightly, but as an indication of value and of stability. Just as the strength of a currency defines the economic stability of a country, the strength of your skills, having successfully completed an engineering program of study, defines the stability of our important profession.

Congratulations.

Graduating with a degree in engineering is no easy feat. According to recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, you have joined the only 1.6 million total working Americans who hold engineering degrees. In a country whose population is just over 300 million people, in the face of a national unemployment rate of almost 10%, you fall into a significant, sought-after minority.

In the past four or more years, you have lost ridiculous amounts of sleep. You have learned how to live off of overpriced food from the university snack bar. You are one of the few who actually do (have to) use all of the buttons on their scientific calculator. You’ve made midnight runs for Red Bull and cheese pizza. You and your classmates have worked in shifts in order to complete team projects on time. You have added words to your vocabulary that will become the lingua franca of your discipline: words like “tensor analysis,” or “thermodynamics,” or “programmable logic controller.”

You are faced with new life choices. You may be in the midst of searching for a job in which to engage your newly earned skills. You may already be hired and are wondering what your working relationship with your new manager will be like. You may be pursuing graduate studies to further enhance your skills and contribute to the knowledge of the engineering field. You may be looking to add specific kinds of skills to your work experience so that you can one day add professional engineering licensure to your list of credentials. Or, you may be exploring a field not directly linked to your academic background at all.

This is a fairly intimidating roadmap to be sure, but not one you cannot conquer. You’ve just recently survived senior design capstone classes so you’ve already been through much, much worse.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, and this time you are the train.

Academically, you are better if not more prepared than most to take on the economic challenges of today. You have come to see that engineering is not exclusively just knowledge of how to solve certain problems or how to be technologically creative. Engineering is a way of thinking. A way of analyzing. A way of doing. These capabilities will not only help you become a citizen of the sciences, but a citizen of the world.

So as you take your first steps, keep a few more thoughts in mind—some of which have not explicitly appeared in textbooks or internships. I charge you with four tasks:

1) Do the Right Thing: Think and act ethically always. Engineers work to serve the public well-being, and when it comes to the common good, you must always make the right choices, even when such decisions become the most difficult ones to make.

2) Think Globally: Next to music and mathematics, engineering & science may just be the third universal language. Our discipline is rooted in the application of physical laws to fresh innovative realities. Use these skills to broaden your homeland and then share and interact with the world. Leave borders to politics. Engineering knowledge does not and cannot discriminate. Serve the world’s technological needs and you will become wealthy in character, culture, and in spirit.

3) Help Others: You will make great friends on your journey. They will help you along and you must also help them in return. Improve lives. Inspire purpose in yourself and in others. Your skills make your knowledge valuable to the assistance of others who would otherwise be helpless. You are a technological facilitator and innovator. Build bridges both literal and metaphorical.

4)  Promote the Profession: Become a fisher of engineers. Encourage youth interest in the math and sciences. Teach. Tutor. Mentor. Know that you will be the key in the growth and continuation of the engineering profession. We await the inclusion of your capable hands and visionary minds.

This is just the beginning. And you’re off to a great start: yours.

I leave you with an excerpt of Act III, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Henry V, reinterpreted with some poetic (engineering) license:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…
In peace there's nothing so becomes [an Engineer]
as modest stillness and humility…

Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
to his full height. On, on, you noblest [Engineers]…

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
straining upon the start. The game's afoot…

The Recession-Proof Engineer

In March of 1970, Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) presented the concept of a CORElator: certain scientists with the technical background to expand and apply their skill-sets across multiple disciplines. In 2003, then editor-in-chief of C&EN Madeline Jacobs revived the concept in the wake of the dot-com crash. She reintroduced the CORElator in a contemporary context as an individual who,

“related his or her core knowledge to other specialists and to the broad questions facing society. The challenges that faced humanity in 1970 were profound—and they are no less profound today.”

In the present day, scientists and engineers cut from this same CORElator cloth have once again come to the public forefront amidst the backdrop of a shaky (yet slowly recovering) economy. When work process efficiency and making-do with less has become a priority for all sectors of the engineering discipline and, more broadly, the business landscape altogether, this desired knowledge-diverse assemblage of an individual’s capabilities becomes highly sought-after. Such scientists are uniquely positioned to take their specific areas of expertise and relate them to the core of a business, overlapping commonalities that benefit multiple functions simultaneously. When challenged to do “more with less,” the engineering discipline is now rife with opportunity to produce a similar caliber of passionate, cross-functional individuals who grow to become indispensable to their respective organizations and fields of practice.

Are You Indispensable?
In his recent book Linchpin: Are you Indispensable?, Seth Godin investigates what it takes for an individual to reach a status of becoming indispensable, or a “linchpin”—a person without whom the daily work of a firm or organization cannot afford to do without, oftentimes literally.

As an illustration, Godin shows what a linchpin may look like, using the example of wait-staff in a restaurant. To paraphrase Godin, consider the scenario where there are four wait-staff at a restaurant, all trained equally. Despite all of them being capable in their daily job description duties, one of them in particular also knows how to placate disgruntled customers, has the ability to troubleshoot the credit card system, knows which dishes take more time to prepare, and organizes the orders in a manner that supports the hectic kitchen staff, volunteers to cover colleagues’ scheduling conflicts, and possesses the uncanny memory to address all regular customers by name.

Which one of these four wait-staff has more job stability?

Which one, even in the event of restaurant closure, can take this track record to any other role in the service industry and demonstrate these same skills with the same level of excellence?

That person is Godin’s Linchpin.

When can linchpins, regardless of sectors of employment, really thrive as invaluable resources? Godin argues that that organizations will “reward and embrace someone of extraordinary depth of knowledge,” highlighting that such scenarios are created when knowledge is always needed at a “moment’s notice” or if that specific kind of knowledge is constantly required for the daily business of the firm; additionally, that individual is especially valuable when the alternative cost of bringing in a third-party consultant becomes prohibitively expensive.

This does not necessarily mean that going above and beyond one’s job description is the only key to becoming indispensible. Rather, it’s the consistency and excellence by which seemingly common tasks are performed, ever more strengthened by drawing on a wellspring of knowledge that overlaps other linked functions.

For engineers, this may be pursuing development opportunities beyond one’s traditional area of expertise—not to abandon ones strengths, but rather to supplement one’s role with new sources of strength through the interaction with correlated disciplines. These are individuals who then grow to demonstrate knowledge mastery deeply and broadly, execute thoroughly with detail as needed by the task at hand, work well cross-functionally, and deliver actions in a timely and accountable fashion, regardless if the customer is internal or external.

As Linchpins and CORElators, such performers leverage engineering skills, both technical and managerial ones, unique to their respective disciplines, and look for ways of redeploying them to other fields, customer types, and market segments. As a result, clients become served in a way that cannot be replicated anywhere else.

Such individuals become the most highly demanded instead of the least needed, regardless of economic circumstances.

Irrationality as Strength: Hewitt’s Four Disciplines of Leadership

When former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan coined the phrase “irrational exuberance” in the mid 1990s, he was referring to the seemingly irrational behavior that the markets were exhibiting with regards to general consumption. The S&P Index had been climbing to record levels even as the economic environment suggested that a more conservative consumer response would have been more prudent.

In the 1990s, this exuberance ended in the infamous dot-com bust at the turn of the millennium. However, acting irrationally can sometimes produce beneficial results where self improvement, career growth, and overall public good can be positively impacted. In the 2009 Hewitt Top Companies for Leaders study, irrational behavior for growth is actually what maintains an organization’s robustness, at least in the area of leadership. For engineers, re-applying these behaviors to one’s own working environment can produce results that are resilient even in the most disastrous of times.

The Hewitt Top Companies for Leaders
Conducted in collaboration with Fortune Magazine and the RBL Group, the Hewitt study assessed over 500 of the world’s top companies for leadership development. Despite the surrounding economic decline, the top companies for leaders were found to invest equal if not more energy into leadership growth rather than dissipating that energy to focus on other areas of the business. The top companies in the 2009 study included:

1. IBM
2. Procter & Gamble
3. General Mills
4. McKinsey & Co.
5. ICICI Bank
6. McDonald's
7. General Electric
8. Titan Cement Co.
9. China Mobile
10. Hindustan Unilever

This internal focus on development may appear to be an irrational act in the face of external challenges. In times of financial and market stress, wouldn’t companies be instead searching for cost reductions? Re-evaluating existing products and services? Re-allocating budgets? Such business factors are without a doubt included on the agendas of many an executive board; however, rather than exclusively focusing on the external factors, the most robust companies have also learned to look inward at the mechanism of how business is steered by its leadership.

The Hewitt study summarized these observations into Four Disciplines of Leadership:

1. Leaders Lead the Way: Top leaders, given their visibility and influence within their companies, lead by example and allow themselves be held transparently accountable. Part of leading is creating an environment of expectation so that new leaders being forged are aligned with company purpose, mission, and values.

2. Practical and Aligned Programs & Practices: Best practices and policies are engrained into the company’s internal culture, including succession plans and ground-up leadership development. A culture of serving the consumer and, in the case of engineering, the public well-being, when seeded into employees at all levels during the present, emerge as strong, customer-focused leaders in the future.

3. Unrelenting Focus on Talent: Talent is never underrated and neglected. Possession of talent is not enough—when talents become honed through practice, then leadership becomes embedded into one’s daily behavior. Talent, when executed as common practice, leads to adeptness and flexibility in the face of change. It is up to leaders to back talent not as a “nice to have” skill but as a true financial asset. In engineering, this could range from the highly technical to bigger picture service to the public good.

4. When Leadership Becomes a Way of Life: When role models, procedures, and talent development intersect and become commonplace for doing business, leaders become trained to respond consistently, regardless of circumstance. Crises are handled in a disciplined manner rather than as a reactive scrambling for solutions. Leadership development initiatives of the top companies also include regimented mentoring programs that focus on coaching and the controlled, but accelerated, growth for high potential performers. Mentoring becomes an expectation rather than a surprise benefit. Within NSPE, groups such as the Mentoring Task Force are out to accomplish exactly that—expanding the availability of mentors to foster such leadership skills.

Strength in the Irrational
Regardless of an engineer’s environment, whether one is in industry or in private practice, in higher education or in government, these Four Disciplines can be used to buttress career stability and long-term growth even in challenging circumstances. The machinery for leadership growth may be of larger scale for a Fortune 50 company, but even for small engineering firms, the engine to fuel that growth is proportional to the individuals driving it.

This is Greenspan’s irrational exuberance re-deployed with a positive outcome. Ultimately, it is not great companies that build successful leaders, but great leaders that build successful companies. By focusing on leadership, this outcome can be designed to remain consistent, regardless of economic climate.

Surviving Professional Decline: How Tough is Your Parachute?

In the present economic straits, even some of the most robust corporations have just now begun to start climbing up out of the embers. Of the many books on the subject that have appeared, Jim Collins’s How the Mighty Fall, captures the act of collapse from a systems point of view. Written actually before our present recession, Collins and his team discretized corporate collapse into distinct phases, some survivable, some irrecoverable.

Many of these underlying principles have analogous examples to our careers as engineering professionals. In comparison, Collins’s five stages overlap very well with how one rises in one’s career, how one grows one’s reputation based on results and excellence, and also, how it can all be lost in a millisecond. Think of this re-application of Collins’s corporate failure prevention strategy as a durability-based addendum to Richard Nelson Bolles’s famously popular What Color is Your Parachute? career development guide; that is, now that you know what career path you’re destined for, what preventative measures or indicators can you apply in order to ensure your that your parachute is a robust one—one that can slow or altogether prevent a personal professional collapse? How can we re-frame the fall of companies to that of individuals, to understand how no one is immune, no one is “too big to fail,” no one is too smart to fall into professional ruin?

Stage I: Hubris Born of Success
You’re a successful early- or mid-stage engineer and you’re getting positive reviews and broad-based support. Your client list is strong and your first several contracts are a tidy collection of home runs. In these situations, complacent success can often evolve into expectation of success, sometimes unjustified. Personal complacency can allow the ego to start making excuses for the lack of results; overconfidence replaces hard data.

Stage II: Undisciplined Pursuit of More
In the engineering world, there is certainly such thing as too much, too fast. Even our NSPE Code of Ethics, in Section II.2 indicates that the promise of success or opportunity should not blind individuals from accepting work that is beyond their abilities, particularly from the perspective of time or professional expertise. Taking on too many clients in private practice or raising your hand for every single project that comes along in industry allows for more chances of failure rather than more chances of success. This is not to say individuals should not be aggressive and tireless in pursuing and stretching personal abilities, but understanding one’s personal capacity and its limits for good work is just as important a factor.

Stage III: Denial of Risk and Peril
We live in an unpredictable world, but one aspect of the exhaustive analytical nature of engineering work is that at the end of the day, we are trained as engineers to ask, what does the data really tell us? Denying gaps, loopholes, or inconsistencies in data, taking chances because of deadlines, downplaying the risk involved to the public we serve, can all be very dangerous, yet self-imposed blinders. This comes from allowing all aspects of a project to be a means to an end—completing the contract, closing out an exhausting program, meeting a deadline. This denial of process risk then leads to a risk in damaging one’s career and for some, even ending it.

Stage IV: Grasping for Salvation
When one’s career is in a tailspin, every solution seems like a good solution for reversing the situation. Data gets interpreted in ways it otherwise never would have been while under sane conditions. Rules that can be bent will be torqued to the point of figurative mechanical fatigue. Project leaders begin blaming technicians, auditors, other functions, everyone but themselves as a last attempt to recover what little fragments of their credibility that remain. In Collins’s study, many leaders resorted to pointing fingers at everyone except themselves.

According to Collins, this stage is the last point that one can halt the fall and still save oneself, albeit accompanied by a long, hard road of recovery. Accept personal accountability and return to the principles that brought one into Stage I to begin with: that success for clients and for the business first originated in solid, grounded results and level headed decision making guided by good data.

In the professional poker world, grasping for salvation is referred to as “going on tilt.” This means making decisions blindly, absolving oneself of all aspects of strategy, patience, or responsibility, and watching futilely as one’s chip stack diminishes.

Don’t go on tilt.

Stage V: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death
A macabre as Collins’s title for this stage may sound, it is, in essence, the absolute end of one’s career. One’s credibility is completely destroyed because personal risks, personal gain, or unsupported analyses took the place of the best interests of the client or consumer. This is perhaps the career equivalent of what thermodynamicists call “heat death”: the lowest point of energy a body or system is capable of reaching without any other energetic input, the end of a cycle of success and growth. The best way to prevent Stage V is to start by treading carefully while in Stage I.

In the professional world, strategies for success are the engines of our innovation. But understanding the possibilities of our failures are equally important. Pull hard on the rip-cord, let the parachute open, and plan the landing, knowing it will be some time before one might return to the summit, but that such a possibility is inspiration enough to re-think, re-motivate, re-invent.

Design a better parachute.

We’re engineers, after all.

The Thinking Engineer’s Holiday Guide to Taking Time Off

The end of the year is upon us, but before you devote all your free time to catching up on episodes of Lost or making round-trip sojourns to the eggnog punch bowl, consider a few other ways to make the most of your holiday gift of Outlook-calendar free time. Don’t underestimate what some quality time off can do for engineering your career and the challenges of the year ahead. Make these fleeting moments yours while on your path to excellence in self-renewal and self-innovation.

In Samuel Florman’s The Civilized Engineer, a seminal treatise on enhancing engineers’ and the public’s perceptions of what it means to be a modern engineer, he highlights the need to think broadly, to know that science and the humanities are not as distantly siloed as generally accepted, and that true engineering applies to self development as much as it does to chemical plant optimization and truss dynamics. Maintaining a sharp professional focus is an important element as it provides the foundations on which we can self-broaden. Part of the machinations that drive cross-functional development are the firm groundings of self. Stephen Covey calls this “sharpening the saw,” but from our perspective, we’ll take it a step further and call it “engineering the saw”: designing the shape of the saw’s serrations, optimizing the alloy in the construction of the saw body, making its handle more ergonomically accessible, reapplying the saw to be creatively effective in more applications than just two-by-fours and kitchen refurbishments.

There is something to be said for these holiday moments when your Blackberry doesn’t taunt you as often with that vicious blinking red new message indicator light. Though less frequent, it’s still there, serving as a beating reminder of your forthcoming professional life in the New Year (of course you could just turn off the Blackberry or let the battery die, but that’s just cruel). Just as Jay Gatsby had Daisy’s green light pulsing from across the waters, think of your handheld LED as a metaphysical Rudolph’s nose, guiding you toward a time of self-development, self-reflection, and career enhancement.

Submitted for your approval, below are six ideas to consider when looking for ways to fulfill some quality time off in the name of professional development.

Happy Holidays (and save me some eggnog).

1. Don’t Update Your Resume. Evolve It.
“Updating” implies once-in-a-while fact-checking or the cutting-and-pasting of new job descriptions. Don’t just “update” your resume. Resumes should be continuously evolving documents that serve not only as self-marketing tools, but as live, mercurial records of your own accomplishments. Who better to be a proud, constant steward of your professional successes than yourself? Keep a master document with as much detail as you wish (particularly any minutia you may not necessarily remember a year from now). Don’t worry about being too verbose or superfluous at this point. If it comes time to submit a resume on a job opening, to a head-hunter, or for your own work development, you can always custom-tailor the master document to the opportunity at hand. But always tend to your master version with watchful diligence: visit it often, keep it nourished. Bring it cookies and coffee.

2. Skill-Set Espionage
There are no rules that say you can only visit job hunting websites when you’re looking for a job. Job search sites are snapshots, zeitgeists of the careers and skill-sets immediately being sought after in the present day. The landscape may shift and change as the economy itself changes, but spending a few minutes to see where your skills measure up to your peer’s fields, perusing disciplines which you may one day yourself pursue, or even finding out what the latest needs are in your own area of practice, are all important pieces of knowledge in these ever-changing times. Take this time to understand what you, your field, and your competition need in terms of skills and see where your own educational aspirations fit into the overall context of the marketplace.

3. The Great Library of Alexandria Would Still Be Around If It Had a Starbucks Inside of It
You may have noticed that the super bookstore chains are now beginning to offer free wi-fi in their in-store cafes. The reasoning just may be because they notice that the more internet surfers they can attract free of charge, the more lingering happens,  the more lattes get sold, the more book-browsing gets done. More browsing then contributes to a higher chance that actual physical books will end up leaving the store, their fresh receipts dangling from their corners like little permission slips bound for the Land of Net Outside Sales.  Just as Louis Pasteur proclaimed that fortune favors the prepared mind, oftentimes browsing the shelves in person allows us to connect our own existing knowledge fields to potential new areas of their application.

So get some coffee (unless you’re a tea drinker, but they have that, too) and peruse the shelves of your local bookstore. Actively peruse—that is, look for areas related to your work or profession, and when you’re feeling adventurous, step into an aisle you typically don’t explore. Look for trends in the business world via the dust jackets of the newest bestsellers. Read a few Introductions that pique your curiosities. Perhaps, like Alice, you’ll find a rabbit hole that conjures further interest and you can leap deeper into the binding. You may score a few hundred new pages for your nightstand, or you may walk out empty handed, spending nothing but time (and the cost of coffee), but don’t underestimate the power of planting ideas in your thoughts, one glossy jacket at a time.

4. Give Your Hard Drive the Augean Stables Treatment
As part of Hercules’s mandated Twelve Labors, he was tasked with cleaning out the massively voluminous stables of King Augeas, which contained nearly all the cattle in the kingdom. One catch was that the stables had never been cleaned at all in their existence and the other catch was that it all had to be done in one day (and, in his own uniquely Herculean way, he simply diverted a few rivers through the place and purged everything squeaky clean).

No matter your industry, you have junk on your hard drive. Devote a significantly solid block of time to doing some electronic file maintenance and general hard drive cleanup (and accomplish it all within one day if you expect to win your own herd of cattle from King Augeas). Clean out that horded in-box of yours in this rare time when the mass balance of messages-in versus messages-out will be drastically in your favor. Defrag. Back up needed files and archive away old projects. You may be officially doing “work” but imagine what you’ll recoup psychologically come the New Year when you have a fresh hard drive waiting for you.

5. Commercial Break Pedagogy
Studying for the EIT/FE or PE? Ready to take the dive into that master’s degree you’ve always pondered about? Finally following up on that Post-It note about an interesting webinar on new environmental codes for your market region?

When you’re working full-time and considering school part-time, the planning process is almost as important as the studying process. 

Time off during the holidays is a time you can use to sacrifice an hour here and there to look up courses you might be interested in. You can research schools, programs, degree requirements, your company’s tuition policies. You now have the luxury of time to weigh decisions between online education and on-campus education.

And studying. Those FE and PE review texts are just dying to become reacquainted with you. Do you have fresh batteries in that NCEES-approved calculator of yours? Now you don’t have the excuse of meetings or teleconferences distracting you from studying. If you’re in test-prep mode, find some private time to yourself—early morning before your family is awake, an hour in the evening just before you leave for movie night, the moments during commercial breaks on ESPN. Take it one problem at a time; every one counts.

6. The Lounge Chair of Learning
Raise your hand if you have a stack of newspapers or magazines you are technically subscribed to but are otherwise just collecting dust on the living room table?

As Florman’s “civilized engineers,” we should stay sincerely knowledgeable of current events, modern economies, and emerging sciences, especially beyond the domain of our own professional disciplines.  The world is simply too small these days to think that our own lives will be forever inoculated from the events, developments, technologies, and regulations in countries on other sides of the globe.

Now that you actually have the time to sit and flip through your growing periodical collection, take the time to really explore the latent content within. Some of my favorites include Financial Times, MIT’s Technology Review, and Seed. It’s okay to take a nap if you get tired while reading—but that’s why we invented couches.

Simplicity in Innovation: A Millionaire Scientist Shaves with Occam’s Razor

In Superfreakonomics, Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s best-selling sequel to their 2005 hit Freakonomics, they write of an individual “so polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame.” That individual is Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft who is a scientist, award-winning photographer, rare-book aficionado, and dinosaur bone collector, among other things. Myhrvold went to college at age fourteen and then continued on with multiple bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in physics and mathematics, doing a little research in cosmology with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge along the way. After retiring from Microsoft with a nine figure salary, he branched out with fellow Microsoft colleague Edward Jung to create Intellectual Ventures (IV), a firm whose company tagline is “investing in invention.”

One of the many secrets of Myhrvold’s and IV’s success: simplicity. Declaring that all solutions should be cheap and simple, Myhrvold and IV have taken on stripping down the world’s problems to bare-bones solutions, whether it’s the “garden hose to the sky” idea to mitigate atmospheric warming or controlling the ocean’s temperatures using giant floating contraptions built from car tires. Where the concept of Occam’s razor states that reducibly simpler solutions are likely to exist preferentially relative to complex ones, IV has its own razor sharpened and at the ready.

As engineers, it can often be disheartening, feeling like U.S. Patent Commissioner Charles Duell when he declared in the late 1800s, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” But modern engineers have a reason to hold hope high. In the glow of our crackling torches of ideation and insight, engineers of the modern era still invent with the advantage that simplicity is alive and well.

The simplicity of potential solutions is paired with the simplicity in exploring new knowledge from which to innovate. Accessible tools like Google are the modern sibyls, and you don’t even need to trek into an ancient, dusty Greek cave to glean from their knowledge (unless the cave has wireless, of course.) Not that the Internet is a repository of absolute truths, but the point is that information is more accessible, or rather, more simply accessible, than it ever has been. Engineering education and experience are the joint tools of discernment, precise rudders by which we navigate new ideas and blaze trails of new progress. When facing our daily engineering challenges, simplicity may just be among the more efficient (albeit easily neglected) tools at our disposal in our aspirations towards technical and quantitative mastery.

An engineer today might just be a modern day incarnation of Sweeney Todd, innovating to serve society and to promote the advancement of technology in a reducibly sharp (and simple) way, inviting Complexity to take a seat in that barber’s chair.

Eloquence and innovation do not always have to coincide with intricacy.

Just keep that shaving gel handy.

Being Mentored by the Indiana Jones of Mechanical Engineering

When I first met Dr. Robert Greer, he was going through a combination of spreadsheets and table-sized CAD drawings with the meticulousness of an archaeologist on a work site, hidden behind a pillar of manila folders and three-inch binders.

I had shown up in his office as a new hire engineer, looking for help to get on the path of becoming an EIT. He and I had worked on similar manufacturing projects together, and I had always found his insights fascinating. When I mentioned my EIT aspirations to him, a wry smile crept through his Santa beard and he proceeded to give me one of many morsels of career and life guidance that would form the staple of our friendship. Getting his support for the EIT was so much more than just a signature. Over the next six years we would regularly meet in his office for casual chats or would go seek out a worn bench at a local luncheonette called Bob’s (no relation) for chicken fingers and sweet tea. Each time we chatted, little scenes from his past would come to life like pages in an adventure novel: pieces of history, anthropology, sociology, and engineering all melded into one.

He had grown up in the Boston suburbs and then gotten his Ph.D. in polymer rheology in the U.K. where over a pint (or two, or three) of ale he had come up with the skeleton structure of what would become one of his company’s most successful device patents. He would go on to lead a rather colorful life during his youthful years in Europe and the Americas, whether it was swimming in the Greek Isles with shipping magnates, having champagne toasts with opera divas aboard black-tie yachts, racing Italian sports cars with fellow engineering doctoral candidates through the streets of Belgium, getting ensnared in manufacturing espionage in Mexican factories, all the way to how operating heavy equipment led him to his beloved wife. And he would do all this in time to make it back to the pub to scribble down another calculation or engineering drawing on a beer-stained napkin. I learned that every living day, we are excavating ourselves and actually living the mantra that the act of treasure-hunting is oftentimes equally if not more rewarding than the treasure itself.

Bob’s first piece of career advice to me:

“When it all comes down to it, we all just want to end up on the beach.”

Part of this may have been literal, but the underlying truths were that every human’s life needs are fundamental ones of family, food, finances, safety, and stability. Regardless of how we as individuals might tailor-define each one of these elements to the context of our own world views, these were fundamentals that did not have to, and in some cases were impossible to, be separated from one another as independent pursuits.

He taught me that engineering as a career is the pathway we traverse in order to further both personal and professional ambitions, and that engineering as a discipline, as it did in his life, opens up unique opportunities by which other life fundamentals can be expressed or re-invented.

Personal life and professional life are intimately intertwined and you don’t have to be a controls engineer to see how leveraging their entangled interactions is one feedback loop you do want to keep propagating while on the path to becoming great. His life had been the ultimate engineering assembly drawing of all those things, tirelessly (and to my amusement, cynically) optimized as part of a more refined, more breathtaking whole.

So find a mentor. A good one. And don’t stop there. Return the favor. Push yourself to make your life as inspiring to someone else just as your mentor has inspired you.

There might even be some buried treasure in it for you (I hope you like snakes).

What Poets Can Teach Engineers About Career Development

Collins’s “zeroes” are less about currency than they are about being current or rather, motivating oneself to avoid getting mired in a stagnant present. As the professional world rounds the bend on the last fiscal quarter of 2009, Microsoft Word documents everywhere are being fired up to summarize the year end’s professional accomplishments. Annual reviews are being formatted, costs (bonus points if they’re cost-savings) are reported, everyone’s ideas for next year’s objectives are being weighed against company strategies as delicately as the light in a Vermeer painting.

Perhaps literal currency really is buried in there somewhere, but the immediate objective is to clarify our thoughts while completing those blanks on development plans. Don’t think for a moment that clicking “Save” and e-mailing your performance results and career plans to your manager is where it all ends. Companies provide the opportunity for career growth, but it’s up to the individual to shun inertia and, in pursuing those opportunities with depth and with discipline, to live a dignified professional life beyond the plane of a .pdf file.

To paraphrase Louis Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, modern jobs are less about long-term employment than they are about long-term employability. We are all painfully aware that, with the exception of only a few companies, duration of employment is no longer the comfortable long-term guarantee afforded to previous generations under different global economic circumstances. As such, diligent career development is what fuels employability. But career development is not a self-sustaining engine. Thermodynamics was right: energy in equals energy out.

Long term employability means becoming an expert without becoming siloed; it means learning cross-functionally and inter-disciplinarily without losing focus; it means protecting business costs without sacrificing organizational capability. Basic engineering prowess isn’t even on the table for discussion anymore: proficiency is an understood requirement. An organization’s leadership has dictated what the non-negotiable business targets are, but to execute, the evolutionary question is: how does one approach this and leverage specific talents and experience to do it more efficiently or more cost-effectively? How can an individual not just deliver new technology, but true holistic innovation to win customers in a fashion superior to one’s competitors?

The shift to enhancing employability is realizing how an individual’s unique experience, background, and talent can deliver these goals not just on a single piece of paper, but across an organization. Career development plans are company development plans spread out across the strengths of its employees. As such, companies can afford to be anything but blank.

While leadership has provided the roadmap, it is still up to the individual to select what gear is getting brought along the way, whether the excursion will be by boat or by safari van, whether the journey will be by sunlight or starlight. Don’t be afraid to stop and ask for directions, fill up on fuel (and coffee), keep your iPod charged, and drive onwards.

And ask your manager to come along for the ride.

There are lots of zeroes out there just waiting to be caught.

The Accidental Botanist: Growing Your Knowledge Base

The week here usually begins with a vase of freshly cut flowers.

Each time I check into this hotel in China’s Guangdong Province, there’s always a vase of stargazer lilies waiting by the bath, compliments of the housekeeping staff. They’re not lilies yet, mind you, just buds. These buds are anticipating their forthcoming lives as flowers much in the same way I am anticipating what the markup on my laundry bill will be this week.

Each day as I see the buds a little more opened, I know I am one day closer to finishing out the week’s project work: a floral Gantt chart of sorts.

Engineers are typically well equipped to take on the multifarious challenges that cross-functional project work requires. Marketing, supply planning, manufacturing: the gang’s all here. Through rigorous ABET-approved course after course in our academic lives, the countless times fingers have been numbed on our HP48Gs (which we still use even though we switched to the HP35S for the state EIT and PE exams), no brick has been spared from the banging of our foreheads when at a loss for words (or calculations). But as our academic skills were vetted in the bowels of senior design labs, those beginnings were just preliminaries for the next step in the phase change.

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds shared the benefits of seeking a diversity of knowledge. When subject matter experts mix with on-the-job practitioners and fresh eyes from outside functions, an emergence of innovative solutions sprouts forth organically. Such knowledge diversity is the true force of problem solving across skill-sets, creating enough new dimensions that even the most fledgling of string theorists would be envious of. New perspectives sow those new realms across which engineers can innovate. An insight from a commodities trader may tell you just why battery grade steel is skyrocketing and how that impacts your cost strategy. Workers in a mineral mine two continents away may suddenly go on strike and your masterfully executed product specifications are now legless from paper to platform.

Among engineers’ most versatile skills is the steadfast acquisition and incorporation of external technical expertise. Hear out the line mechanic who may not know what FEA stands for, but can tell you that on days of high humidity, his powder compaction dies fail on every other rotation. Problems become redefined, ideas become gifts, and engineers get to do what we love most: inventing new solutions when old solutions have long since withered into outdated antiquity.

This week I have engaged in discussions with global procurement teams to best position our business, re-assessed why mixing ABS plastic with other kinds of resins is a bad idea, and have wiped away tears of joy when a colleague and I learned how the auto-filter function in Excel would save us countless hours in mining process improvement data. There is no shortage of stress of course, but think of it more as activation energy than groveling for aspirin.

It has been a long week but I have emerged wiser from the harvest. As an added bonus, psychological bruises heal pretty quickly, too.

The lilies have bloomed.

Have Luggage, Will Travel

My suitcase measures 30” x 24” x 12”.

When living out of a duffel bag for six weeks at a time in Asia and Europe, certain basic engineering principles such as void volume begin to have particular resonance when you’re just 0.5 kg away from being rewarded with an overweight luggage charge.

When I was invited to write the Young Engineer blog for the NSPE, I was thrilled at the chance to wax poetic (or at the very least, blog poetic) about the engineering life, locally and globally,  from a Young Engineer’s perspective.

Let’s start with a handshake.

My name is Austin S. Lin and I am a 32 year old chemical engineer in the consumer goods industry where I manage quality and engineering projects for a global manufacturing base. This means mostly that I get to visit lots and lots of factories in different countries and that I spend more days falling asleep in airplanes and hotel rooms than on my own living room couch. On the same “day,” I have had breakfast in San Francisco, lunch in Seoul, dinner in Hong Kong.

It’s an exciting time to be a young engineer.

Walt Disney was right. We do live in a small world (and it’s getting smaller…or at least flatter a la Tom Friedman). Young engineers are more international than we have ever been. Functions such as programming, product design, artwork, and plant engineering that used to be down the hall from each other may now be literally thousands of miles away, strewn across cultures and geographies. These distances come with the costs of differences in language and exchange rates, differences in the application of technical standards, differences in environmental regulations. But despite the differences, there is a unifying element of young engineers and no, it’s not the high tolerance for sleep deprivation.

We are unified by a new promise of opportunity, of being fortunate to see the modern era of invention redefined in a world that is increasingly connected, of feeling like we have an endless supply of aspirations that we hope to tap in order to see science and innovation interact with technology in a way that is most beneficial to society.

Your professor was right—we still have to make sure we’re calculating using the correct units. The only difference is that the people working with you on your project aren’t sitting across from each other in the university library over a pizza anymore. We are living in different time zones. We are communicating internationally via instant messaging and email in the wee hours of the night. We are mastering all those cool new features in Skype. International teleconferencing: when else can you compare product specifications designed in the U.S. against production data generated in Frankfurt while eating a club sandwich in your pajamas in a Shanghai hotel room?

We have luggage, will travel, and have packed our experience and technological knowledge to bring along with us.

30” x 24” x 12”.

As real estate goes, my bag is not the most spacious, but the construction, the weather resistant material, and the hardened rubber wheels make for a good temporary home.

Hoping the property value increases soon.

Maybe I can at least upgrade to a larger suitcase.