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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.