Shipulski On Design

Posts Tagged ‘Piano Teacher’

Customers buy products.  Manufacturing makes the products. Design engineering designs the products.  Engineering leaders guide and grow the engineers.  In a “start with the customer” way, engineering leaders are important to growing revenue and profitability.

Engineering leadership requires both technical leadership and people leadership.  You need to understand the technology, or you can’t use good professional judgement.  And you need to understand people, or you can’t create the conditions for them to do work they thought was impossible. (I call this the almost impossible.)

Is it 90% technical and 10% people? Or is it 90% people and 10% technical? Or is it split down the middle at 50-50? The answer is yes.  Sometimes it’s a 90/10 meeting followed by a 50/50 conversation in the hall.  Sometimes it’s 10/90 for a whole week.  Sometimes it’s 90/10 in the morning and 10/90 in the afternoon.  Once in a while it’s 100/0 for a hot minute or 0/100 on rare occasions.  (Most of the time, though, it feels like 75/75.)  A great engineering leader must know technology and people and must know how to set their balance based on the context.

I think the curriculum for an engineering leadership development program must be context-specific.  And because each company’s context is different, I think an engineering leadership development program should be company-specific.  The new product development process is unique. The products are unique. The analytical tools and how they’re used are unique.  The ins and outs of the design reviews are different.  So, when in doubt, I suggest you make your engineering leadership development process more company-specific and use context-specific artifacts and examples.

More specifically, I think the curriculum to teach new product development is the new product development projects themselves.  Junior engineering leaders work alongside senior engineering leaders during the actual projects in an apprenticeship way.  The senior leader demonstrates an activity, and the junior leader watches.  Next time, the senior leader demonstrates less, and the junior leader does more. This responsibility balance shifts over time until the junior leader demonstrates and the senior leader doesn’t have to watch anymore.  The junior leader is certified activity by activity under the guidance of a senior leader.  And when the junior leader has demonstrated all the necessary activities, they become a senior leader.  And the cycle continues.

Companies win when their customers buy their products.  And I think one of the best ways to do that is a formal (company-specific) program to develop engineering leaders.

Image credit – Willy Verhulst.

If you know your shit, you have an obligation to behave that way:

Do – don’t ask.

Say, “I don’t know.”

Wear the clothes you want.

Tread water with Fear until she drowns.

Walk softly – leave your big stick at home.

Ask people what they think – let them teach you.

Kick Consensus in the balls – he certainly deserves it.

Be kind to those who should know – teach, don’t preach.

Hug the bullies – they cannot hurt you, you know too much.

Work with talented new folks – piss and ginger is a winning combination.

In short, use your powers for good – you have an obligation to yourself, your family, and society.

It was Monday night after dinner.  My thirteen year old son and I got in the car and started on the drive to hockey practice.  I drove and he texted.  I was in the middle a struggle to come up with a topic for this post.  My son finished a text, snapped his phone shut, and blurted out “Mozart wrote a note to his dad.  He told him that he thought silence was the most important part of music.”  I responded, “Really.”  “He was a rule breaker,” he said.  He paused then continued, “The music of the time was smooth with a regular pattern.  But he did things that weren’t pleasing to the ear like using 7^th notes and Bs right next to B flats.  Do you know what else he did?”  “No,” I said.  “He put a fermata right in the middle of one of his pieces.  That’s a rest that’s as long as you want it to be.  When you use a fermata you can stop, go out and get a cup of coffee, and come back later and start playing and that’s okay.”  “Really,” I said.

I dropped him off at the rink and pulled into a parking spot so I could write in the car (don’t knock it until you try it).  I jotted down some scattered thoughts, and it hit me.  Jackie!  It was Jackie.  His piano teacher was behind all this.  That morning she taught him about Mozart.  I now had my topic.

Jackie is a great piano teacher – really great.  Sure, she’s got the pedigree, but more importantly she has the ability to reach my son.  She can help him grow his thinking, help him think differently, help him build new thinking for himself.  And this new thinking isn’t the kind that stops at his head, but makes it all the way into his chest.  He feels this new thinking in his chest.  We can learn a lot from Jackie.  I want to look at her system for teaching new thinking, which she does under the cover of teaching piano, and compare it to how we improve our engineering thinking under cover of developing new products.  Sounds like a stretch, I know, but I’ll take a shot at it.

The framework for Jackie’s system can be described by the three Ts – tools, training, and time.  Let’s start with tools. Read the rest of this entry »