Is hiring obsolete?

An old post at 106miles asks this question here. An abstract by Paul Graham states the following:

Most CS undergrads hope to get a good job when they graduate. But as the age of startup founders creeps downward, I foresee an alternative path for the most ambitious: instead of going to work for Microsoft, start a startup and make Microsoft buy it to get you.

Regardless whether graduating engineers do a startup right out of school, they would be well advised to treat their employment history as a process of building a portfolio (to use Charles Handy's term) that highlights exemplary work product and marketable skills. In today's changeful workplace, a strong portfolio can lead to traditional, startup, and freelance opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable.

Man's search for meaning

A recent discussion with the elder penguin (see here) about the meaning of life led me to reread Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. In it, Frankl, psychotherapist and founder of the 3rd Viennese school of psychoanalysis or logotherapy (meaning therapy) discusses his personal experience surviving the horror of the Nazi concentration camps and how search for meaning is a guiding principle of human mental health. In this reading, I was struck by how logotherapy may be viewed as a forerunner of the more recent positive psychology movement of Seligman and others (see here). Chapter 3 of The Entrepreneurial Engineer touches on these issues by focusing on personal mission, values, goals, and vocation (see here).

Peter principle plus one-to-three

The other day coming home from Nagoya, I was reflecting on several university administrators and wondering why a number of them seem to be one to three levels above their Peter level. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, The Peter Principle is

The theory that employees within an organization will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent.

In Peter's time the rule made sense and was almost self-evident, but at present it seems as though many individuals punch through their level of incompetence (their Peter level) and are able to rise one to three levels higher.

If this is so, we must ask why, and the most obvious answer is that promotion, at least in academic circles, is no longer strongly tied to the value "competence." Indeed the academy is a postmodern ideological muddle, a point made by Victor Davis Hanson here. Regardless, keep an eye on your leaders and see whether they are competent (a transient state), incompetent (the modern de facto equilibrium), or plus one-three of the Peter level (the postmodern norm).

TEE Chapter 5 TOC

Chapter 5, Write for Your Life, will appear in the Wiley book, The Entrepreneurial Engineer, next year:

5 Write for Your Life
5.1 Engineers, Root Canal, and Writing
5.2 Why Many Engineers Don't Like to Write
5.3 The Prime Directive of Writing: Just Write
5.3.1 Freewriting
5.3.2 Directed Writing for the Real World
5.4 Getting the Content and Organization Right
5.4.1 The Primary Structure of Business Writing: B-P-R
5.4.2 Lists and Amplification: A Technical Writer's Best Friend
5.4.3 Sectioning, Titles, and Headings
5.4.4 Summaries, Conclusions, and Distinguishing the Difference
5.5 Edifying Editing
5.6 Improving Your Writing
Summary
Exercises

Stay tuned here for publication information.

Father and son entrepreneurial engineering tag team

Advice to young engineers from a father-son tag team here.

VC Funding: Israel vs. Europe

Interesting post at the Venture Captial Cafe about VC funding in Israel vs. Europe here. He also has a nice post about profiting from blogs here.

TEE Chapter 4 TOC

Chapter 4 of The Entrepreneurial Engineer is about time management:

4 Getting Organized and Finding Time
4.1 Time and Its Lack
4.2 Effective Ways to Waste Time
4.3 Seven Keys to Time Management
4.3.1 A Place for Everything
4.3.2 Work for Mr. To Do
4.3.3 Sam Knows: Just Do It
4.3.4 A Trash Can Is a Person’s Best Friend
4.3.5 Tuning Your Reading
4.3.6 Managing Interruptions
4.3.7 Getting Help
Summary
Exercises

I get lazy from time to time and have to reread the chapter to get myself back on track.

All marketers are liars

is the title of Seth Godin's new book (see here), and I am struck by the truth of his thesis that stories can be more powerful than facts in the course of my work with a new startup. In the early days of a startup there is little in the way of concrete accomplishment and the story of the founding, the story of the vision, and the story of the people associated with the form are the basis for any and all investment and decision making. Those founding myths probably could be subjected to Campbellian style analysis, but they are powerful and are the life force of a new venture as much as the technology, product development, and business development activities in the early days.

TEE chapter 3 TOC

Here is the full table of contents for chapter 3 of The Entrepreneurial Engineer, Money, Work, and You:

3 Money, Work, and You
3.1 Money, Moola, the Big Bucks
3.2 The Roads to Wealth: 4 Dinner Table Platitudes
3.3 Hidden Lesson #1: Engagement
3.3.1 Why Engagement Matters
3.3.2 Matching Your Vocational Impedance
3.4 Hidden Lesson #2: Courage
3.4.1 Locus of Control: Internal versus External
3.4.2 Exploring Courage
3.5 Tactical Lessons of Handling Money
3.5.1 Spending and Earning Styles
3.5.2 Spending-Earning Impedance
3.5.3 Investing, Saving, and Thrift
3.6 Get a Life
3.7 Plotting Your Course: Values, Mission, and Goals
3.7.1 Creating a Personal Values Statement
3.7.2 Writing a Personal Mission Statement
3.7.3 Setting Goals

I think this chapter was especially popular in Harrisburg.

TEE material well received in Harrisburg

My Joy of Engineering seminar in Harrisburg was well received. One of the participants wrote the following:

I have been attending engineering meetings...in Central PA for about 25 years. This event was by far the most informative and> inspiring I have experienced.

My post about that workshop is here.

Blogging styles

For those interested in blogging itself, I have posted a number of interesting links over at IlliGAL Blogging here.

TEE chapters 1 & 2 TOC

Here is the table of contents from The Entrepreneurial Engineer chapter 1:

1 The Entrepreneurial Engineer: Ready for the 21st Century
1.1 21ST Century Engineers Moving at Internet Time
1.2 Engineering Education, Common Sense & the Real World
1.3 Ten Competencies for the Entrepreneurial Engineer
1.4 Three Principles
1.5 Three Cautions
Exercises

And here is the TOC from chapter 2:

2 The Joy of Engineering
2.1 A Joyous Confession
2.2 Engineering as Liberal Education, Launch Pad & Lifelong Love
2.2.1 Who is Getting a “Liberal Arts” Education Today?
2.2.2 Engineering as Launch Pad
2.2.3 10 ways to Love Engineering
2.3 The Fundamental Tug-of-War
2.4 Science and its Little Secret
2.5 Engineers: First Masters of Modern Enterprise
2.6 Economy of Intellection: Separating Science from Engineering
2.6.1 The Modeling Plane
2.6.2 Spectrum of Models
2.7 Four Tensions Facing the Entrepreneurial Engineer
Summary
Exercises

Chapter 1 is an introduction that weaves together the 10 competencies with three unifying principles and warnings or cautions. Chapter 2 is my favorite chapter. The core of the chapter is the tale of two historical inversions, one between science and engineering, and one between business and engineering.

Earlier posts on TEE

on IlliGAL Blogging are here, here, here, and here. The chapter table of contents of The Entrepreneurial Engineer is reprinted below:

1. The Entrepreneurial Engineer: Ready for the 21st Century
2. The Joy of Engineering
3. Money, Work, and You
4. Getting Organized and Finding Time
5. Write for Your Life
6. Present, Don’t Speak
7. The Human Side of Engineering
8. Ethics in Matters Small, Large, and Engineering
9. Pervasive Teamwork
10. Organizations and Leadership
11. Assessing Technology Opportunities

Over the next few months, I'll discuss many of the topics covered in these chapters on this blog.

Bioteams and genetic algorithms

I wasn't sure whether to post this at IlliGAL Blogging or here, but the perpetual beta has a post about Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near and bioteams here. Rule 9 for a bioteam is as follows:

Learn through experimentation, mutation and team review. Traditional teams believe that analysis is the main way to get things right.Consequently they engage in extensive planning, design and preparation before trying out new things or releasing new products to their customers.

I've always wanted to write a business book that carried the lessons of The Design of Innovation over to enterprise.

Bribery, corruption, and the entrepreneurial engineer

Nosophorus has an interesting comment about The Entrepreneurial Engineer:

Well, will be there in TEE some chapter, section, etc, that deals with corruption, bribery and other kinds of negative atitudes that an Entrepreneurial Engineer would need to face some day ??I am not joking about it, here in Brazil the person who wants to have an entrepreneurial atitude needs to face (daily??) those "challenges".

The chapter that deals most directly with these matters is Chapter 8, Ethics in Matters Small, Large, and Engineering. Here is the table of contents for that chapter:

8 Ethics in Matters Small, Large, and Engineering
8.1 Is Engineering Ethics Necessarily a Dreadful Bore?
8.2 Ethics: The Systematic Study of Right and Wrong
8.2.1 Golden Rules: Positive and Negative
8.2.2 Whence Right and Wrong?
8.2.3 An Engineer’s Synthesis of Ethical Theory
8.3 From Ethical Theory to Practice
8.3.1 Self-Interest
8.3.2 Obedience to Authority
8.3.3 Conformity to the Group
8.3.4 Practice Makes Perfect
8.4 From Personal to Engineering Ethics
8.4.1 What is a Profession?
8.4.2 A Tale of Two Codes
8.4.3 Conflicts of Interest
8.4.4 Whistleblowing is Not a First Resort
Summary
Exercises

I'll confess that the book (and the chapter) are written from an American perspective where bribery and corruption are less frequent than in Brazil. Having said this, the book does not assume that human beings are perfect little angels. Moreover, the term "entrepreneurial engineer" is used in a broader sense than usual. Our times are ones of great change and engineers everywhere, whether they work for a startup firm (startup entrepreneurial engineers) or whether they work for established firms (intrapreneurial engineers or corporate entrepreneurial engineers) , are increasingly involved in helping their companies seek and exploit opportunity. This requires more finely honed personal, interpersonal, and organizational skills than in times past, and The Entrepreneurial Engineer is aimed at building exactly those skills.

The entrepreneurial engineer is here

Over the past few months, I have blogged about matters of professional development mixed in with my genetic algorithm thoughts over at IlliGAL Blogging (here). Starting today, I will blog about professional development matters for engineers and other technologists right here at The Entrepreneurial Engineer. I start TEE the Blog in the Harrisburg International Airport, having just given a professional development seminar for Central PA engineers (see here).