Finally getting around to blogging about the conferences I attended last week.
Last Tuesday, I attended the MIT Systems Engineering conference at the MIT media lab. Billed as essentially a "supply chain" conference, it seemed like it might be a royal yawn. Boy was I wrong! I never , ever saw engineering and supply chain issues brought more alive. The speakers were dynamic, and kept the topics interesting and relevant. Many of the issues were broadened to encompass general business, and even life, issues.
Here are the nuggets I mined from the day's events:
Yossi Sheffi - Author of The Resilient Enterprise.
www.theresiliententerprise.com
- winner of the "best quote of the day" award:
" 'A' people hire 'A' people, but 'B' people hire 'C' people." - Awesome.
and another good one:
"Focus on those few aspects of your products that your customers find most valuable, and [commoditize] the rest." - great advise for all of the engineers out there...
Professor Levenson -
"Safety is an emergent property." - This can be of course extended to almost anything. The key point here is that we need to strive in our systems, product designs, etc. to create "emergent properties" that are more than the sum of the parts. This is where true value lies. A more contemporary example would be "Style is the emergent property of the iPOD." It seems bigger than the simple little music player itself. Very cool.
Professor Nightingale -
Book that invented the term "lean" was:
The Machine that Changed the world
...did not get to confirm this one.
Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld -
Lateral Alignment in Complex Systems - interesting talk about how to relate horizontally systems of vertically integrated organizations.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger -
"Highly Visual interactive interfaces" - discussed how we are now moving past the simple desktop metaphor into more graphical, interactive interfaces. "Second Life" was his example of something which is on the forefront of this initiative.
And last but certainly not least:
Dr. Michael Hammer -
www.hammerandco.com
- This guy was a riot. Basically talking about organizing the enterprise for the next century. I never thought a talk about organization could be so amusing, entertaining, and educational at the same time. His premise was that all the organizational metaphors we are using are based upon antiquated techniques which were invented a century ago. Instead of simple functional organization, we need end-end process organization. Very interesting stuff.
If you can ever hear this guy speak, go and see him!
That's it. All in all a very interesting day.
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