Thursday, December 28, 2006

TEE review at Electrical Apparatus

The Entrepreneurial Engineer has been reviewed by Richard Nailen at Electrical Apparatus:
Despite its title, this book is not a treatise on how to launch your own Fortune 500 startup. Rather, it's a guide for succeeding at any level of engineering practice, from the newest "cub" to manager of complex projects. He stresses the value of engineering education not as a narrow technical specialty, but as a valuable asset for any career. And Goldberg's advice has value for non-engineers as well-for anyone at work in today's commercial/industrial environment.

He has distilled the non-technical skill needs of the engineer into three principles: seek engagement; create first, criticize later; analyze through the eyes of others. Emphasis throughout the book is on that first principle, "engagement"-finding work that becomes an absorbing labor of love. (Chapter I is titled "The Joy of Engineering.") Yet in the section "Get a Life," the author cites the need for balance.


See the full review here.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

A pessimistic love of selling

Jack Krupansky has a blog post here entitled You Have Got to Love Selling, but the post betrays a deep distrust of the role:

I have no problem with providing information or showing a consumer how they can benefit from a product or service, but to my mind, there is a line between providing information that a consumer voluntarily wants and trying to manipulate the consumer in an involuntary manner.

There are lots of gray areas here, and many people are all too eager and willing to exploit those gray areas, but my inclination is to avoid the gray areas unless it is crystal clear that any "selling" is strictly informative and voluntary in nature, and not manipulative or involuntary in any way.

I think there are far too many people who enjoy the manipulation aspect of selling. My strong suspicion is that real selling can be done without the manipulation, but the evidence strongly suggests that my view is the minority view, or that a lot of sales people are unwilling to label many of their practices as "manipulative."


I can agree with the sentiments expressed here, but many salesmen misunderstand that salesmanship is first and foremost an act of empathizing with the customers needs and seeing the situation through the customer's eyes. This is the approach taken in the section We Are All Salespeople on This Bus, in chapter 7 (The Human Side of Engineering) of The Entrepreneurial Engineer.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Jack Krupansky is back

at his "terminated" blog Entrepreneurial Engineering with a post (here) on the importance of youth in understanding the web these days. I made a similar point--among others--in my post Boom vs. Boom (here)

Friday, December 15, 2006

Inventive leadership

Ephraim Suhir has a short article on inventive leadership in an online issue of Mechanical Engineering (here). CEO and President of ERS/Siloptix Co in Los Altos, CA, Suhir calls for the combination of technical and interpersonal skills advocated in The Entrepreneurial Engineer.

Skills of the American workforce

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has issued a 170-page report calling for educational reform to confront the growing challenge from globalization (see Business Week article here). It doesn't appear to include the recommendations of Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind, which emphasizes right-brain (creative) skills as a way to leapfrog Asian progress in technical/analytical skills. It also doesn't appear to call for the teaching of entrepreneurial skills and explicit material about economics. These are mistakes. The report does call for competition and choice as ways to improve American education, ideas that are as commonsensical as they are political intractable.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Inventium: TRIZ with cards

Read or listen to Dan Keldsen's interview here with TRIZ expert, Andre de Zanger, of the Creativity Institute about doing the Russian creativity heuristic TRIZ in card game form.

A book that will go down in infamy?

Chris Donnan mentions my book (favorably) on his blog here. I'm introduced as the "infamous David E. Goldberg" of "genetic algorithm infamy." Any PR is good PR, and he spelled my name right, and included my middle initial to overcome the fact that "David Goldberg" is the Jewish equivalent of "John Smith."

Saturday, December 09, 2006

The exceptionally entrepreneurial society

Arnold King of the Cato Institute has an interesting thought piece here on The Exceptionally Entrepreneurial Society.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Better coverage at Stanford

My entrepreneurial activities get better coverage at Stanford than they do at Illinois (see here). Tom Byers and the gang at STVP run a heckuva program.

The entrepreneurial pendulum

Rebelutionary has an interesting post (here) about the entrepreneurial pendulum or that swing in moods felt by the entrepreneur as he/she approaches the market, alternately believing him/herself to be an idiot or G-d's gift to commerce.

And speaking about ideas

And speaking about ideas Landing the Deal has a post (here) about a site called springwise.com whose slogan is your daily fix of entrepreneurial ideas. Check out today's ideas here.

Will Rob Smith get Roundtuit?

I forgot about Rob Smith's clever blog Roundtuit for ideas that others might get roundtuit if you don't. He was commenting about the Rotter-Covey square and mentioned a time management system idea he had blogged about earlier (see here for comment and here for link). I've also linked roundtuit to the permanent links of this blog (and here). Not a bad source of freebie ideas for the entrepreneurial engineer.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Rotter, Covey, and the urgency-importance square

In The Entrepreneurial Engineer I talk about Julian Rotter's work on the distinction between those with internal versus external motivation. In Stephen Covey's famous book, he talks about the distinction between matters that are urgent versus those that are important.

The connection between these two authors is this. Matters that are urgent are important to someone other than you (externally motivated) and matters that are important get their importance because they are consistent with your internal motivation and goals. Saying this out loud helps highlight the point Covey was making and helps us name the quadrants of his famous urgency-importance square. Here in deference to Rotter's earlier work, we call the diagram the Rotter-Covey Square and name the four quadrants something other than I, II, II, and IV.

The upper right quadrant, called the do-it quadrant, concerns matters that important to you and others. There can be little question that these are matters of the highest priority.

The lower right quadrant, called the strategic maximization quadrant, conerns matters that are important to you, but not urgent for others. This, as Covey points out, is an oft-neglected quadrant, but one that should not be neglected. Thus, it is strategically important to rearrangea life to try to maximize time in this quadrant through long-term rearrangment of affairs so that more time can be spent on matters important to you.

The upper right quadrant, called the strategic minimization quadrant, concerns matters that are urgent for others, but not that important to you. Covey points out that for most of us this quadrant can be the dominant quad in our lives. We call it the quad of strategic minimization because it is important to a happy life to try to minimize time spent here through choosing work that gives us a steady dosage of activities that are important to us and others as well as time to do things that are simply important to us alone.

The lower right quadrant, called the tactical elimination quadrant, is the quad of busy work, work that isn't important to us or others. The best approach here is to just say "no" and tactically eliminate the time spent on items that no one cares about.

Rotter's distinction between internal and external motivations is an important one, and doing as Covey suggests by relating those to activities and how time is spent can lead to more time, better spent, on more meaningful activities.

Friday, November 24, 2006

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Business hatcheries

Jeff Cornwall has a nice post over at The Entrepreneurial Mind about student business hatcheries at Belmont University.
For those students who have their own businesses we offer our student business hatcheries. The three hatcheries on our campus offer student entrepreneurs access to basic business infrastructure (desks, computers, phones, faxes, copier, etc.) on a co-op basis and to a variety of educational opportunities tied directly to their personal entrepreneurial experiences. Faculty, entrepreneur mentors, our accounting faculty, and local attorneys provide support and advice for students participating in this program.
See the full post here with pictures.

Why engineers do what they do

Hot soup has a heartfelt blogpost about why engineers do what they do here.

Pride and passion for the joyful engineer

PE Magazine picked my short article The Joy of Engineering: Pride and Passion for the Professional. Download a pdf file here.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Square of Epictetus


I've blogged about Epictetus before (here), and I really like the opening words of the Enchiridion:
Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

If we think of the things in our control and not in our control and consider them juxtaposed with our internal state of mind (concerned or not concerned), we can get a nice visualization of what I've chosen to call the Square of Epictetus.

The two positive quadrants are when we are concerned with those things we can control and unconcerned with the things we do not. I've called these, the quadrants of accomplishment and peace of mind, respectively. On the other hand, when we spend concern on things we do not control or when we do not mind things we can and should, I've labeled these quadrants, the quadrants of needless worry and foregone opportunity.

In which quadrant do you spend most of your time? There can be honest difference of opinion between one of the two positive quadrants, and there can be genuine difficulty in not knowing whether something is controllable, even partially, or not, but looking at it this way, I wonder why I've spent as much of my life as I have in the quadrant of needless worry.

How do your rate in the Square of Epictetus? Where do you spend your time, and do you think you are spending your time wisely?

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Boom vs. Boom

The MySpace and YouTube sales together with the rumors of a FaceBook sale got me thinking about the dot.com bust and the current round of big acquisitions. Is there a difference? Or is this yet another tulip craze? I actually think it is real, and I think there are a number of factors to take into account:

Technoecomomic forces. The technoeconomic forces of the first boom and the current one, if it is one, are the same. The internet (a) reduces transaction costs (see Ronald Coase), and (b) increases network returns (see Brian Arthur), but the difference is that the first boom was anticipatory: the infrastructure was not there to realize the benefits fully.

Infrastructure now in place. In the current boom(let), the infrastructure of search and advertising are now in place. Google is a central actor, and in some ways the Google IPO was central milestone in proving that the internet can generate real businesses with real returns. The first boom was about eyeballs (on web sites), but the current boom is about taking eyeballs and turning them into profits.

From widgets to self-expression. The first boom was about infrastructure and web widgets of various flavors. The current boom(let) is about lifestyle, self-expression, and identity; it is more human centered, less technology centered. The remaking of Apple as a music company in ITunes is a landmark in this shift, and the Friendster to MySpace and Facebook evolution is all about going from mere communication to community and projection of persona. This shift causes three other shifts: bigger bangs, younger actors, more communal enterprises

Bigger bangs. With infrastructure in place and the playing field shifted to self-_expression and lifestyle, the successes are faster and bigger. This gives us Big Bang capitalism with a vengeance. There is a positive reinforcement loop at work here. More entrepreneurs have always bred more entrepreneurs, but if this occurs bigger and faster, the new entrepreneurs become angels and VCs more quickly, and the cycle accelerates.

Younger actors and customers. The shift to lifestyle, changes the demographics of the boom(let) as well. Cultural change takes place among those who are not already set in their ways, the young. High schoolers and undergraduates now use AIM + Facebook/MySpace + Mobile phones in place of email. For them email is dead. This occurred quickly. Brin and Page (Google) were grad students. Karim (YouTube) got his BS from Illinois in 2004 and Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard in 2004 as undergrad. Future changes will occur at the HS and undergrad demographic. Current undergrads have noticed (at Illinois for sure), and they want to be like their successful peers.

Creative communal activities. David Brooks coined the term "BoBos" to refer to Bourgeoise-bohemians, those who accepted capitalist processes together with a creative ethic, and Richard Florida has chronicled the rise of the creative class. The new boom(let) reflects these changes well, I think. The new businesses are a pastiche of creative, marketing, financial, and technical effort. Stock and stock options create a kind of creative commune in which everyone benefits if the enterprise is successful. This is a change from capitalism of times gone by, and perhaps Marx's historical materialism was right in the sense that paternal and hierarchical capitalism of the 20th century would be overthrown by something more communal. It wasn't communism that arose, however. It was a more integrated and creative kind of business organization in which success was more evenly shared than in earlier industrial forms of organization.

Where does this lead?
It seems to me that these features will become hypertrophied as time goes on. Young becomes younger. Creative becomes more creative. Communal becomes even more communal. Lifestyle/identity becomes more like Hollywood and fashion than technology driven. My own work in Nextumi is at the edge of these trends, and my research in genetic algorithms has been redirected at helping enterprises and groups become more innovative and creative through the use of collaborative technology and machine learning together in a new synthesis (http://www-discus.ge.uiuc.edu/).

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

WMU features TEE

Ed Eckel, librarian of the Parkview Campus of Western Michigan University, has recommended TEE to his engineering students here.

TEE hits ME mag

Bill Rule, an old colleague at the University of Alabama (now at SUNY Oswego), points out that TEE, the book, has a bit of writeup in Mechanical Engineering, the magazine of ASME on page 49.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

TEE book of the week at TSU

Texas Southern University (TSU) librarian has declared The Entrepreneurial Engineer the book of the week here:
This handy guide includes exercises at the end of each chapter to as the author puts it: “engage the material and put it into practice”. For current and future engineers who want to remain at the forefront of the field, this text has the information you need to succeed.

Take a look at the full blog entry.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

YouTube UIUC connection

By now most of you have heard about the Google-YouTube deal (here), but lost in the shuffle is the strong University of Illinois connection. Three principles to YouTube, Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, and Max Levchin are UIUC CS alumni. See some coverage of the UIUC angle here.

Fable of the bees

While exercising this morning listened to a lovely lecture by Darren Staloff on Mandeville's Fable of the Bees on my Teaching Company course on The Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition. This has to rank as one of the great turning-conventional-wisdom-on-its-head stories of all time in which Mandeville argues against conventional wisdom and over two thousand years of philosophical thought that public virtue (the common good) emerges through the interaction of private vice (self interest).

I've blogged frequently about the Teaching Company. Currently I'm doing The Great Minds on video DVD in the mornings when I exercise, and I'm doing Introduction to Greek Philosophy (Roochnik) in my car on audio while I drive around town. I've got to do the Greek Philosophy course, because my older son Max is taking a Greek philosophy class at Northwestern and he was asking me questions about Platonic dialogs I hadn't read.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

The art of worldly wisdom

I've been dipping into Art of Worldly Wisdom, a collection of aphorisms published in 1647 by Jesuit scholar and philosopher Baltasar Gracian. Here's number 83 (Fischer translation):

Allow yourself some pardonable defect, for a certain weakness at times may be the greatest evidence of strength. Envy carries its ostracisms, just as civil, as they are criminal: it accuse the most holy of sin, because without sin, and because totally perfect condemns totally. Envy makes of itself an Argus to discover the flaws of the flawless, for its own comfort. Detraction like lightning, only strikes the greatest heights. At such times, therefore, let Homer sleep, and let him affect some lack of spirit, or of virtue, but not of prudence, in order to appease envy, that it burst not of its own poison: wave a cloak before the bull of jealousy, to rescue immortality.

Get the Barnes and Noble version here or there are online versions available as well (see here)

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Embracing mistakes

In reading a post at Texas Startup Blog on embracing mistakes (here), I was reminded of an experience on campus last week. I've been on a campus committee looking at doing something fairly entrepreneurial and one of the committee members keeps fussing about "doing it right" and "not making mistakes." My reaction each time is that this person is the wrong person on the wrong committee at the wrong time.

To be an entrepreneur IS to make mistakes because you're off doing something others aren't doing. Moreover, the easiest way not to make mistakes is to never do anything. This is a theme in Chapter 3 of The Entrepreneurial Engineer, which cites sources as different as Stanley's studies of millionaires, Seligman's studies of learned optimism and helplessness, and Rotter's work on locus of control, internals, and externals. Assuming that people are vigilant against making mistakes (thereby striving to hold constant or reduce the number of mistakes they make), the number of mistakes one makes is an indicator of productivity or an indicator of daring (one makes more mistakes doing something new). Either way, making mistakes is usually a positive indicator for the entrepreneurial engineer.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

One night in Cincinnati

I didn't know that one of the benefits of being Chief Scientist for a VC-backed company was that I got my name up in the left field lights of Cincinnati Reds stadium. See the video here.

Entrepreneurial academics

Swamp Fox Insights has a post about a Kauffman foundation award given to Professor Toby Stuart at Harvard for research that examines the circumstances that support faculty members become entrepreneurial. The original papers are available here.

Urgency versus importance

Stephen Covey makes the distinction between activities that are urgent versus those that are important and goes on to draw a quad chart along the dimensions of whether something is or isn't urgent or important. The distinction is an interesting one in that it connects to those things that you value internally or that are valued by others externally.

A life driven by important-urgent matters signals a vocational impedance match between your career and your values. A life driven by the urgency of matters that you find relatively unimportant signals a life lived in reaction to the things that others think are important. A life driven by unimportant matters that lack urgency is a life of frivolity and caprice. A life without spending time on matters that are important and not urgent is a life with limited personal growth.

Each of the quadrants signals important information to the entrepreneurial engineer regarding the crucicial match between the internal self and external life he or she is living.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

TEE & online public relations

Over the past few weeks, I've used the online press release service www.prweb.com to promote The Entrepreneurial Engineer. The results have been astounding. Since the initial posting 3 September, I have received 59,020 reads of the press release, 514 pickups by journalists/media outlets, 4 prints, and 53 pdf downloads.

The service www.prweb.com is free; however, I used the $120 upgrade that gave the press release good visibility in major news search engines such as Google News and Yahoo News.

To use the service, simply go to PRWeb's site, sign up for an account, and start a press release. It's easy to use, with minimal extraneous data entry required. After submission, the press release goes and gets an editorial score. Certain kinds of services require a score of at least 4 out of a maximum of 5. The press release here, received a 4.

The response has been very good and it is still coming. As a direct result of this press release, the following articles appeared (see here and here). Last week, I was asked to write a short article on non-technical issues for a major engineering magazine with 50,000 readers, and the article was accepted for publication Monday. In addition, ordinary web searches show that the book has been picked up on dozens of product and book sites that did not carry information about the book prior to the press release.

Given this response, I'm now a believer in this form of public relations. It gives terrific bang for the buck.

TEE on front page of Daily Illini

An article about the book, The Entrepreneurial Engineer, appeared on the front page of the Daily Illini, the student newspaper of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Check it (here).

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

TEE reviewed in Electronic Design

David Maliniak reviews The Entrepreneurial Engineer in Electronic Design:
Goldberg’s writing style is conversational and highly readable; the book carries enough illustrative material to amplify its points. All told, it’s a worthy read for anyone thinking of striking out on their own as an entrepreneurial engineer.

See the whole review here.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

A license to learn

One of the points I make in chapter two of The Entrepreneurial Engineer is that an engineering education is a license to learn.

A common myth is that engineering involves the education of a narrow specialist, but we live in the most technological of centuries to date, and in case some haven’t not noticed, the centroid of human knowledge has shifted. Analysis of the typical engineering degree finds a balance of (a) humanities, (b) social science, (c) science, (d) mathematics, and (e) major coursework in a technical specialty.

The average liberal arts degree by comparison stuffs much into the first two categories, requires only a smattering of courses in science and math, and no coursework in technology at all. Far from being narrow, the average undergraduate engineering major has a balanced curriculum that gives him or her a lifelong license to learn. Where the average liberal-arts undergraduate is closed out of whole swaths of human knowledge, especially those involving math, science, and technology, the engineering graduate can feel comfortable picking up almost any text on any topic, knowing that the fundamental coursework of their high school and college education give them the tools to read, learn, and grow.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Sense of beauty

Started Santayana's The Sense of Beauty this weekend. Clear thought wrapped in lovely prose. Picked it up while browsing philosophy aisle at Barnes & Noble (see here). B&N has low-cost reprints of classic texts that make building a philosophy library somewhat less costly.

Friday, September 01, 2006

The Entrepreneurial Engineer is out

I received my first copy of The Entrepreneurial Engineer in today's mail. See a press release about the book here. Order your copy at Amazon (here) or Wiley (here). The Wiley site appears to have the book in stock.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Engineering identity in the postmodern world

Andrew Fox at Philosophy of Engineering is blogging about the identity crisis of engineering in our brave new world (here). Many of the concerns of that post resonate with the themes of The Entrepreneurial Engineer.

Engineers of our times must be more broadly capable than Cold War engineers. Engineering educators and leaders of our times need to be more reflective on the foundations and underpinnings of engineering, and they must grasp the opportunities to bridge engineering to the social sciences and the humanities. The key distinctive feature of our times is the interconnection of a large segment of the world's population, the cache of data about human preferences and behavior that this network creates, and the possibility of moving from qualitative and statistical modes of reasoning about human affairs to a new kind of engineering knowledge that is quantitative and sufficiently predictive to enable better postmodern systems design.

Engineers of the Cold War concentrated their efforts on designing physical systems that obeyed natural laws. Engineers of the postmodern era will need to learn to concentrate their efforts on designing institutional facts (in Searle's sense) integrated with physical devices that serve the needs of diverse, distributed populations around the globe.

These efforts requires solid engineering metaphysics, epistemology, and a deeper concern for the logic of invention. They will also strain our Cold War notions of engineering ethics as well. For these reasons, and many more, a better concern for the philsophy of engineering is crucial at this juncture in time.
My view is that the crisis is worse than Fox suggests. and I doubt that the remedies suggested will be of much

More Teaching Company hits

I've blogged previously about Teaching Company courses, and my combined mind-body exercise program continues unabated. I just finished James Hall's course Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World Through Experience and Reason. I liked his earlier course Philosophy of Religion, and thought Tools of Thinking would be worth a shot. I was right.

Tools of Thinking is a subtle interweaving of metaphysics, logic, philosophy of science, history of thought and great thinkers in a form that I think entrepreneurial engineers will particularly appreciate. It is practical, erudite, informative and Hall has a dry sense of humor and an avuncular manner. Lovely course.

I'm just underway on the Teaching Company's flagship course 84-lecture Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 3rd Edition. Back when I started running (1994?), I bought the first edition of this course on audiotape, listened to it on my morning runs, and really enjoyed it, but they've added some terrific new lecturers and made a very good course even better. My exercise regimen has changed (weights and elliptical training), and now I watch DVDs instead of listening to tapes, but the Teaching Company has been a twelve-year invariant in my life.

Hello TEE students

The purpose of this post is to say hello to all GE 498 students in The Entrepreneurial Engineer. There is still time to register for those interested in taking the course online. For those interested in taking it on campus, simply sign up using the normal registration procedures.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Take TEE online

The arrival date for The Entrepreneurial Engineer in the warehouse at Wiley is 25 August. In the meanwhile, you can sign up to take my 1-hour online course by the same name at the Office of Continuing Engineering Education website here.

The course can be used toward credit for the Strategic Technology Management graduate certificate (see here). It may also be useful for a variety of online graduate programs at the UIUC and elsewhere (see program requirements).

I will be offering the course on campus on Thursday afternoons (starting this week) as GE 498-DG1 (click here).

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Epictetus for entrepreneurial engineers

As part of the course I'm taking on the Greco-Roman moralists, I've been reading some Epictetus's Discourses. He hits the hammer on the head in book 1, discourse 1 Of the things which are under our control and not under our control:
But now, although it is in our power to care for one thing only and devote ourselves to but one, we choose rather to care for many things, and to be tied fast to many, even to our body and our estate and brother and friend and child and slave. Wherefore, being tied fast to many things, we are burdened and dragged down by them. . . We must make the best of what is under our control, and take the rest as its nature is.
Nuggests of wisdom of the ages are found on almost every page.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

ILSPE and TEE

The Entrepreneurial Engineer goes on the road to The Illinois Society of Professional Engineers convention in Bloomington, IL Friday, July 29, 2006 (9:10-11 am).

Session 9-A - The Entrepreneurial Engineer (2 PDHs)
Sponsored by: College of Engineering, University of Illinois
Speaker: Professor David E. Goldberg, PhD - Department of General Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


Today's world is radically networked, fast-paced, and full of opportunity, but to be successful in these times, engineers need to master a broad array of personal, interpersonal, oganizational, and business skills. This talk starts by pointing out key differences between yesterday's Cold War engineer and today's entrepreneurial engineer. It continues by examining the tug of war for the engineer's mind and how to find joy in engineering study and work. This lead to an examination of the role of engagement in matching personal interested to a life of fulfilling work. The talk concludes by explaining a key pattern or template that lead to clearer, more effective business writing and presentation.

See the full program here.

White paper on the Engipreneur

Paragon Innovations President has a whitepaper on being on an entrepreneurial engineer here. The paper explores five characteristics of the Engipreneur:
  1. Initiating communication
  2. Packaging potential
  3. Delivering on promises
  4. Understanding the business
  5. Closing the system loop
See the full white paper for more detail.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Interesting PoE essay

There is an interesting 1998 essay entitled The Importance of Philosophy to Engineering by Carl Mitcham here.

Blogging GECCO

The gang from IlliGAL is blogging the GECCO conference (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference) here.

Descartes for engineers

Philosophy of Engineering invokes Descartes (here) and his Discourse on Method as being of interest to engineers. Similar points are made in Billy Koen's Discussion of the Method and my own Design of Innovation.

Take a SHOT

One of the conferences I have threatened to attend for a number of years is the SHOT conference, the Society for the History of Technology. See the coming conference (SHOT-2006 in Las Vegas) program here.

Philosophy and technology

During some investigations of current efforts in philosophy and engineering, I came across the web site of the Society for Philosophy and Technology (here). The society holds a conference every two years and puts out a journal Techne (here). During my perusal, I found an interesting article connected with my own investigations of Searle's ideas (here) and a review of a book (What Things Do) that takes an artifactual view of the philosophy of technology. I was also directed by this work to take a look at some of Don Ihde's ideas (here).

Friday, July 07, 2006

Theology and engineering: Has engineering lost its mojo?

Philosophy of Engineering is blogging about theology and engineering here. Take a whiff:

I have always seen my engineering career as a journey, a never ending path of learning along which I am driven by a love for the subject. As such the few years spent as university have long-since become only a small part of what makes me an engineer.

This may be likened to some form of religious devotion, something spiritual, something beyond the materialist and utilitarian application of scientific principles to problems. Rather it may be characterised by a desire to understand the nature of engineering knowledge and how that knowledge can be used for the benefit of mankind the universe and everything. To some extent, it seems this zeal is missing from new entrants to the engineering profession; it seems the profession may be losing touch with its soul.

Given the history of the 20th Century and the turn that philosophy took in that century, it may be a bit late in the day to worry about engineering having lost its soul; engineering is merely a small part of a culture that has largely lost its soul, in any seriously religious sense.

If on the other hand, we are wondering where the passion is in a more secular sense (has engineering lost its mojo?), I would agree that engineers need to better follow their bliss and find engagement or passionate involvement with their work. There are many ways to do this, and chapters 2 & 3 of The Entrepreneurial Engineer explore these topics (see here).

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

TEE is really done

The last stop before freeway on publishing a book is the index. I took longer than expected, but the index for The Entrepreneurial Engineer is done, and the book should be out in early August. The table of contents is available here.

Monday, July 03, 2006

Submerged in philosophy

I've been submerged in philosophical reading and viewing during my non-work moments this summer. I've documented the other courses I've finished this year, but I just picked up with Practical Philosophy: The Greco-Roman Moralists. I've got Loeb Classical Library editions of Lucian, Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus on the way as a result, but I'm still trying to catch up with my reading generated by past classes and my other interests.

Moore's Principia Ethica and Ross's The Right and the Good are two classics of modern ethics. They together with Nagels Mortal Questions followed up on Teaching Company course Questions of Value.

Robert Solomon's, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life was very enjoyable. It laid out his thesis (as did his course Passions: Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions) that emotions are judgments that give our lives their meaning. He arrives at this conclusion from careful readings of the existentialists, but is able to cast off the emptiness of the absurd world of the existentialists and find meaning in our passions.

Robert Solomon's edited collections of papers, Existentialism, was a terrific companion to his course (No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life), and also went along with his suggestion to read Camus's, The Fall, The Stranger, and The Myth of Sisyphus.

Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety was a nice summer read with a philosophical/historical edge on it. Botton tracks the causes and possible solutions to widespread anxiety over status elegantly and well. If you like Status Anxiety, try reading Bobos in Paradise and The Paradox of Choice for interesting parallels and connections.

I've got a few other interesting things teed up, but let's talk about those when I get to them.

Monday, June 05, 2006

Philosophy of engineering

Blogging is great. I posted my stray comments about the philosophy of engineering (see here and here), and Andrew Fox of Covington University in the UK posted the following comment:
Some of us were thinking the same thing and started a discussion forum. Results are on our website: http://www.philosophyofengineering.com/. Have a look.

Indeed I did, and you should, too. There seems to be a bit of a nascent movement in these directions and it couldn't come at a better time. To this point, the UK effort has held several seminars, and several more are planned this year with details to come out shortly.

Moreover, this blogging rendezvous has resulted in the creation of a new blog by the name of Philosophy of Engineering by Andrew Fox, and I've linked to it permanently for TEE readers.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

More philosophy of engineering

Gave a quick read of Billy Vaughn Koen's Discussion of the Method: Conducting the Engineer's Approach to Problem Solving. Koen takes a philosophical look at engineering's place in the world and does a nice job of making some important distinctions regarding engineering method; however, the text's ulimate conclusion is that everything is heuristic, and this move amounts to the same kind of surrender of realism contained in much 20th and 21st century philsophy. It hardly corresponds to most engineers' understanding of the world and is thus ultimately unsatisfying. Nonetheless, Koen is one of a very few writers to take engineering serious in a philosophical way.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Philosophy of engineering not a contradiction in terms

I've been on a philosophy reading/learning jag for a number of months, and one of the questions I've had is why isn't there a well defined literature on the philosophy of engineering. Science has a longstanding literature on the philosophy of science. Other fields of practice, for example law and medicine seem more philosophically inclined. Engineering (and business for that matter) seem less inclined toward philosophical reflection and speculation.

On the one hand, this dearth of philosophizing can be attributed to the practical nature of the engineering enterprise. Engineers are busy doing, and reflection on that activity detracts from getting the job done, but this argument does not answer why engineering scholars in the academy and elsewhere don't spend more time reflecting on the place of engineering in the world, the ontology and epistomology of engineering artifacts and knowledge, engineering method, ethics, and other philosophical topics.

Although there is a growing community of engineering scholars concerned with ethics, there appears to be a substantial philosophical hole in the engineering literature. Some of the chapters of The Entrepreneurial Engineer were essentially philosophical in nature, and an interesting course of action would be to take those loose threads and tie them together into a more integrated philosophy of engineering. Stay tuned for further posts along these lines.

Monday, May 22, 2006

Solomon and existentialism

I've just started Robert Solomon's Teaching Company course No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life. I've enjoyed his Nietzsche course and his Passions course (see here and here). Looks like another winner.

Examined Life

I'm in the middle of reading Robert Nozick's Examined Life. As you can see from the table of contents (below)
  1. Introduction
  2. Dying
  3. Parents and Children
  4. Creating
  5. The Nature of God, The Nature of Faith
  6. The Holiness of Everyday Life
  7. Sexuality
  8. Love's Bond
  9. Emotions
  10. Happiness
  11. Focus
  12. Being More Real
  13. Selflessness
  14. Stances
  15. Value and Meaning
  16. Importance and Weight
  17. The Matrix of Reality
  18. Darnkness and Light
  19. Theological Explanations
  20. The Holocaust
  21. Enlightenment
  22. Giving Everything Its Due
  23. What is Wisdom and Why to Philosophers Love It So?
  24. The Ideal and the Actual
  25. The Zigzag of Politics
  26. Philosophy's Life
  27. A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Man
Nozick has something to say about everything, and much of what he has to says is interesting if not entirely persuasive. I'm slugging through the middle sections on what is real (Ch. 12-17), and I like the framework, but the whole thing seems a bit more Platonically ideal than real. Nonetheless the categories he sets up seem useful and worth the effort.

Friday, May 05, 2006

Pink's whole new mind

Daniel Pink has a new book called A Whole New Mind in which he explores the logic of employment in what he calls the conceptual age. Given the 3 As (abundance, automation, and Asia), traditional high paying employment in the information age (business, engineering, accounting) that involves left-brain skills (analytical thinking and language) will be supplanted by increased emphasis on right-brain skills (creativity and art).

The argument of a shift to creativity makes sense. The idea that these skills will supplant analytical skills across the employment spectrum does not. My view is that Pink is right that entrepreneurial engineers going forward will need to be more creative. They will need to be category creators, not category enhancers. They will still be valued for their analytical skills, but the best engineers will be distinguished by strong right brain skills.

Read A Whole New Mind and see if you agree.

Advance praise for TEE

A number of people have written some nice things about The Entrepreneurial Engineer. Here's Severn's Chair for Human Behavior, Ray Price:

The Entrepreneurial Engineer is important for engineers at any stage of their careers. Goldberg presents lessons and insights that are critical for engineering students who are forming their professional perspectives and attitudes and useful for practicing engineers who are assessing their lives and careers. Goldberg writes in a style that is informative, provocative, and practical. The skills he describes and challenges us to develop are critical for the demanding and creative engineering profession—will we make the most of the opportunities before us? Developing the skills outlined in The Entrepreneurial Engineer is a necessity for a productive engineering career.

Raymond L. Price
William H. Severns Professor of Human Behavior
Director, Illinois Leadership Center
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

TEE page proofs in

The page proofs for The Entrepreneurial Engineer are into Wiley and the book will come out later this summer.

Monday, April 17, 2006

And the teach goes on

I'm working on a new Teaching Company course Passions: Philosophy and Intelligence of the Emotions. Robert Solomon of UT Austin is doing a bangup job integrating philosophical, psychological, and neurological evidence. I took Solomon's Nietzche course, and it was also well done.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

More teaching company

My latest Teaching Company course during exercise is Philosophy of Religion by James Hall of the University of Richmond. The lectures are quite good, although I think the 36 lectures could have been compressed into a shorter course. Patrick Grim's Questions of Value was outstanding as was Zarefsky's Argumentation.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Change the World

My colleague Ray Price (see Illinois Leadership Initiative here) recommended that I read Robert Quinn's Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Results, and I did so this past weekend. There is a good bit of fear and talk of change at the university, but top-down strategic planning efforts are quite easily thwarted by a conservative faculty that does not see any urgency in change. Quinn recommends an 8-step Advanced Change Theory that he claims overcomes the inertia of a settled "normal" perspective within an organization. Drawing on such all-star transformational change agents as Jesus, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King, the theory recommends the following:
    1. Envision the productive community
    2. First look within
    3. Transcend fear
    4. Embrace the hypocritical self
    5. Embody a vision of the common good
    6. Disturb the system
    7. Surrender to the emergent process
    8. Entice through moral power
All of the chapters and elements of the theory made sense to me, but I especially appreciated the embrace of the hypocritical self. In trying to institute change in the organizations I am a part of and in myself, I am always confronted by the gap between the ideal I am attempting to achieve and the reality of what I am able to accomplish (with myself and others). Quinn suggests that this is a universal and that even when we are effective change agents, the gap remains, and further efforts are always necessary. I have sometimes been concerned that my inability to achieve long-term near-ideal change labels me as a phony, a hypocrite, but Quinn suggests that this is one of the prices of attempting change. If you don't want to feel hypocritical, don't try to change, but to paraphase an aphorism of love Quinn might suggest that it is bettter to have tried to change and been hypocritical than to never have attempted change at all.

In short, I give Change the World three stars. Read and overthrow the established order today.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Selling

Jack Krupansky's blog Entrepreneurial Engineering has a post on rainmaking that references a post by Guy Kawasaki. My favorite entry is

Make prospects talk. If prospects are open to buying your product or service, they will usually tell you what it will take to close them. All you have to do is (a) ask questions to get them talking about their needs, (b) shut up, (c) listen, and then (d) explain how your product or service fills their needs (if it indeed does). Most salespeople can't do this because (a) they're not prepared to ask good questions; (b) they're too stupid to shut up; and (c) they don't know their product or service well enough to know whether it can in fact fill these needs. When it comes to rainmaking, there's clearly a reason why God gave us two ears but only one mouth.

The Entrepreneurial Engineer spends a good deal of time talking about the importance of questioning in all kinds of interpersonal situations including salesmanship.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Nextumi hires CEO

Since September 2004, I've been chief scientist of a company called Nextumi, Inc. that is developing technology to turn the web inside out (see Champaign News-Gazette article here). In late December 2005, the company hired a CEO, Mike Blackwell, who brings long development and business experience in pioneering web based companies. An article in today's News-Gazette (print only), highlights Blackwell's experience and Nextumi's plans.

Friday, January 27, 2006

IESE versus GE

I used to work in a department called General Engineering. The new name is Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering. Read more here.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Values course

I'm almost done with a terrific course available over at the Teaching Company. In particular, Patrick Grim's Questions of Value has absolutely knocked my sox off. Here are the lecture titles:
  1. Questions of Value
  2. Facts and Values
  3. Lives to Envy, Lives to Admire
  4. Foundations of Ethics—Theories of the Good
  5. Foundations of Ethics—Theories of the Right
  6. Thoughts on Religion and Values
  7. Life's Priorities
  8. The Cash Value of a Life
  9. How Do We Know Right from Wrong?
  10. Cultures and Values—Questions of Relativism
  11. Cultures and Values—Hopi, Navajo, and Ik
  12. Evolution, Ethics, and Game Theory
  13. The Objective Side of Value
  14. Better Off Dead
  15. A Picture of Justice
  16. Life's Horrors
  17. A Genealogy of My Morals
  18. Theories of Punishment
  19. Choice and Chance
  20. Free Will and Determinism
  21. Images of Immortality
  22. Ethical Knowledge, Rationality, and Rules
  23. Moralities in Conflict and in Change
  24. Summing Up

Lecture 10 on relativism was quite nice in separating different flavors of relativism from one another, and lecture 6 on religion was well argued even if I didn't agree with his conclusions.

Elsewhere, I've raved about Teaching Company courses (see here, here, here, and here), but this one is a keeper. If you haven't tried these courses, start with Questions of Value.

Vacuous method + new-age mumbo jumbo = Presence

Over the holidays I read Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society by Senge, Scharmer, Jaworksi, and Flowers. I enjoyed Senge's The Fifth Discipline and have since my first reading believed that systems thinking Senge-style (a derivative of Forrester style) is a useful tool to help bridge qual-quant divide in organizational theory and analysis. I was chagrined, therefore, when I dug into Presence and found it methodologically vacuous, full of new era overstatement, reliant on new-age mumbo jumbo, .

The book is the anecdotal account of a year and a half conversation among the authors about changes taking place in organizations in response to the rapid and global pace we witness today. The meetings take place in a bunch of swell places around the globe and the authors are earnest about finding answers to the pressing problems of organizations today, but in the end the result seems to be, drum roll please, an amalgam of what the authors believed before they started talking to one another.

This is not to say that there is nothing interesting here. The book is a not unenjoyable read with engaging stories about personal and organizational transformation. And there is interesting speculation, extension, and integration of the authors' theories. But the custom of late among organizational theorists has been to build or confirm theories in response to long-term data collection efforts. This is not a data-driven book, except in the loosest anecdotal, quasi-historical sense.

OK, fine. That a bunch of organizational theorists have written a book of speculative theory is a not a news flash, but is the theory interesting, provocative, insightful, or otherwise useful. The authors are largely concerned that the decomposition inherent in the solution of any complex problem prevents sufficient holistic thought to solve the problem well. To counter this the authors propose the U Movement, a series of seven steps to step back and be more integrative and creative about organizational problem solving. The seven steps are as follows:
  1. Suspending
  2. Redirecting
  3. Letting go
  4. Letting come
  5. Crystallizing
  6. Prototyping
  7. Institutionalizing
(Don't seven steps constitute a decidely unholistic decomposition of a process; can't the authors be more integrative about their learning architecture? But I digress.). The steps seem to map fairly nicely to Wallas's earlier (1926) Art of Thought or Osborne's pioneering work on brainstorming going back to 1939, and the work is more concerned about how to institute such thinking in large-scale organizations as opposed to earlier creativity theorists who were more concerned with individuals or small groups. Yet there isn't anything here that seems compellingly interesting or provocative.

Moreover, to read the book one must put up with a fair amount of new-age mumbo jumbo and Western thought and institution bashing. For example, the rationale for being in the moment (to presence) is drawn from Zen and other Eastern traditions. This is fine (and certainly not new), but the authors go on and bash Western governments, institutions, and corporations for not being in the moment and sufficiently holistic. If only they were all more Eastern in their thinking, the world would be closer to the authors' utopian ideals. This is an easy game to play, because all global institutions today (including those in the East) are decidely Western in their decomposition, organization, management, and operation. Of course, this is because Western thought and culture have been decidely successful (have won the evolutionary struggle) in creating new knowledge and using it, going back at least as far as Bacon.

Of course, the jig is up once one understands what the authors want to do with their theories. Not only are they interested in improving large global organizations that are forming everywhere. Their Global Leadership Initiative, seeks to focus on "critical issues like AIDS, water, malnutrition, sustatinable food production, and climate change--over the next five years." How? "By simultaneously engaging leaders from corporations, government, and civil society, GLIS is dedicated to building leadership capacity while producing concrete results."

I see. Leaders from despotic organizations like the UN and corrupt third-world countries will hold hands and sing Kumbaya with Senge and company, do a bunch of presencing, and solve all the remaining intractable problems of our world. That's a nice half-decade's work for an unproven methodology unsupported by data.

The larger problem here is that Forrester's leading disciple learned the wrong lessons of the master's work. The hope in the 60s and 70s that Systems Thinking I would lead to our ability to model organizations universally using computer simulation, but the failure of modeling efforts by the Club of Rome and others largely discredited such efforts. In Presence the tools have changed, but the utopian goals remain operative. A little humility in the face of such failure would certainly be in order but is not in evidence. As a result, it is hard to recommend Presence as a serious contribution to the organizational literature.

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Resolved in 2006: List values, mission, and goals

The new year is an arbitrary but convenient time of the year to reflect on the past and make resolutions and plans for the future. At my recent TEE short course in Harrisburg (see here), I asked for a show of hands among those who regularly made professional goals or resolutions on an annual or more frequent basis. I was surprised to see only 2-3 people raise their hands (10% or so), because I know that short- and long-term personal planning are important elements in a personal success strategy for those who wish to steer their own life course.

For a long time, I merely went through an exercise of making a list of goals (personal, work, and financial) for the next year, but back in the early 90s I also drew up two other lists: a personal values statement and a personal mission statement. Now, in drawing up my goals, I take a look at the mission and values statement and think in terms of what things are most important to me and central to my life. Over the course of a year, I am usually gratified to see measurable accomplishment toward last year's goals, and over the course of a decade, I have seen progress toward living out my life's mission and values.

One of the hardest lessons for me in making these various lists has been trying to be true to my own heart. It is very easy to put things on your values, mission, or goals list that sound good but you don't really believe in. These imposter bullet points usually reveal themselves after a few years, but much wasted effort can be avoided by making lists that are consonant with who you are or who you want to be.

If you don't have a list of long-term goals, a values statement, and a personal mission statement, why not start 2006 out with a dose of reflection and added resolve to steer a course toward the life you would really like to lead. For those who are interested, chapter 3 of The Entrepreneurial Engineer (see here) covers these topics in more detail.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

10 steps to happiness

The Practice of Leadership has a post on ten steps to happiness here.

More HappyFest 2006

I forgot to mention rereading Dennis Prager's Happiness is a Serious Problem as part of HappyFest 2006. Prager has interesting perspectives on many issues. I enjoy his talk show, which I sometimes listen to out of KRLA in Los Angeles (www.krla870.com).

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Happiness fest

I've been reviewing some of my favorite books on happiness over the holidays as part of my usual yearend goal/mission/values exercise (see TEE chapter 3 here).

Here are the books I've been going over:

Learned Optimism (M. E. P. Seligman, see related post here)
Authentic Happiness (M. E. P. Seligman)
Man's Search for Meaning (V. Frankl, see related post here)
How to Do What You Love for a Living (N. Anderson)
Character Strengths and Virtues (C. Peterson & M. E. P. Seligman)
You Can Be Happy No Matter What (R. Carlson)
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle, see Teaching Company course here)

If you were going to read one, read Authentic Happiness. If you wanted to do a short course, do the Teaching Company course on Aritstotle's ethics.

Monday, January 02, 2006

Back from Orlando

Over the holidays I laid off the blog and took some time off with the family in Orlando (Orlando is Las Vegas for families; Las Vegas is Orlando for adults). The amount of commercial development since my last visit in 1999 is stunning, and the crowds after Xmas day were incredible. We enjoyed a fairly tame SeaWorld on Xmas day, and then stayed away from the theme parks. Weather was pleasant and it was just the right getaway from the cloudy cold of Champaign-Urbana.

Have done some business related reading over the holidays I'll be bloggin about. In the meanwhile, have a happy, productive, new year.