EMS SCV Meetings: SEP 2003 – JUN 2004
Jun 30, 2004:
Management Forum: Manu Pillai, Product Acceleration Inc.
After-dinner Talk: Making It: How To Go Into Business For Yourself – Orin Laney
May 26, 2004:
Management Forum: Resolving Conflict on Geographically Dispersed Teams – Jenny Brandemuehl
After-dinner Talk: Sustainable Systems for Off-the-Grid Communities – Daniel A. Pitt
Apr 28, 2004:
Management Forum: Fostering Trust on Virtual Teams – Kathie Sinor (see the slides)
After-dinner Talk: Going Global: a Business and Individual Perspective – Kevin Walsh
Mar 31, 2004:
Management Forum: Remote Management Strategies – Barbara Miller (see the slides)
After-dinner Talk: Pipeline Management – David E. Kirjassoff (see the slides)
Feb 24, 2004:
Management Forum: Employee Stock Options – Optimizing Your Strategy – Rich Chambers
After-dinner Talk: Working With Our Former Enemy – Bob Dodd
Jan 28, 2004:
Management Forum: Virtual Engineering Project Teams: Hyper-productive or Just Hype? – Randi Brenowitz
After-dinner Talk: Nanotech: The Next Generation – Warren Packard
Dec 10, 2003:
Management Forum: Keys to Successful Global Outsourcing – Narendra Dev
After-dinner Talk: Management Across Company and Country Borders: The Sea Launch Approach – John Steinmeyer
Oct 29, 2003:
Management Forum: Creating Successful Mentoring Relationships to Accelerate Learning – Kathie Sinor (see the slides)
After-dinner Talk: Planning and Executing Fast-Track Projects – Dr. Raymond Levitt (see the slides)
Sep 24, 2003:
Management Forum: Fostering Innovation (Innovating for Results: How to Move from Idea to Strategy) – Dr. Louis Patler (see the slides)
After-dinner Talk: Hope for High Tech? – Complexity, Systems, and Semiconductors – Dr. Chris Hamlin, Sr. (see the slides)
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MEETING SUMMARIES & BIOS
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Jun 30, 2004
Management Forum
Presented by Manu Pillai, Product Acceleration Inc.
After the tech bust, outsourcing and agonizing, it’s time to use lessons learned and innovate ourselves out of this economy. The presentation will cover a year 2000 startup, its survival and its growth strategies. Topics will range from developing and refining go-to market ideas in product and services, to leveraging the engineering discipline, to initiating and managing sales, to building solid teams outsourced/offshore and in-house/local) and focusing. We will discuss cash flow and fundraising options – with their risk-reward tradeoffs, including VC fundraising, government SBIR/ATP funds, and using your personal funding sources (and support systems needed for that). Marketing and advertising budget, in the areas of market intelligence, strategy development, channel selection and partner development will be discussed in the context of developing strategic partnerships. This will be a “gloves off” format, and attendees are encouraged to actively participate. At the end of this presentation, attendees should be able to start the process of assessing their risk tolerance, survival chances, and the fundamental value proposition — and perhaps go to the next level of building their own businesses.
Manu Pillai is CEO/Founder of Product Acceleration Inc. (PAI), started in 2000 with personal funds. PAI is based on his experiences in speeding up product design and delivery across hardware and software design, manufacturing and test. PAI has now grown into a focused Engineering Software and Services company, with its own EDA products for the FPGA implementation space, and services that include design process re-engineering as well as custom software development. PAI includes Fortune 250 clients as well as emerging startups, and continues to be funded primarily by internal growth, with assistance from specific individual investors (angel investors) as well as strategic corporate investors. Manu has a BE (EE) from University College, Dublin, Ireland, and an MBA from Santa Clara University. Prior to founding PAI, he worked with Mitsubishi Electric in India, UAE and Japan, followed and then with Solectron Corp., Fujitsu PC and Maxtor in Silicon Valley. PAI was recently featured by the San Jose Mercury News as an example of a small but growing company, and is hiring at a steady pace.
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After-dinner Talk: It: How To Go Into Business For Yourself
Presented by Orin Laney, PhD Candidate, Touro University
After graduation, many engineers are surprised to discover that employers value them less for their academic prowess than for certain intangible qualities. The flip side of the coin is that employers are always surprised when the engineers who exemplify those intangible qualities are first to quit their “careers” to found new businesses. This is a talk on how to amaze your friends, surprise your enemies, and disconcert your spouse by starting a successful business of your own. In cooperation with the forum speaker, this talk will build on your new strategic knowledge and concentrate on the personal aspects and challenges required to transition from wage slave to a tough-as-nails captain of industry (and floor sweeper). Personal characteristics make a crucial difference in early stage success. Topics include preparation and risk taking, decision making, and how to test your readiness. For the skeptics among you, certain reasons not to go into business will be discussed and the relative merits of employment will be included for comparison. Several of the most important mistakes of new businesses will be developed at length.
Orin Laney became interested in electronics when he built his first crystal radio at age twelve. He was raised in the Washington DC area and received his BSEE from the University of Maryland under its Co-op Engineering Program. He later obtained his MBA from Brigham Young University and has used it to found numerous small businesses in the electronics field. Mr. Laney is currently pursuing his Ph.D BA at Touro University. A senior member of the IEEE and a member and former chair of the IEEE-USA Intellectual Property Committee, he is busier than ever, designing, researching, and making deals.
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May 26, 2004
Management Forum: Resolving Conflict on Geographically Dispersed Teams
Presented by Jenny Brandemuehl, Virtual Connection
When a team is diverse in work style and culture, the potential for conflict is high. Add virtual work to the mix and some unique team problems can develop. Jenny will describe the common pitfalls that geographically dispersed teams experience when conflict arises by describing each stage of a conflict. She will also discuss how different conflict approaches manifest itself in virtual team behaviors and communication and offer tools and solutions for effectively resolving conflicts.
Jenny Brandemuehl has more than fifteen years of consulting experience with high performance team development, organization design, large-scale change, and leadership coaching. She has extensively consulted to virtual teams and spent many years both leading and working as a member of a global consulting team.
She is also a partner at Corporate Development Partners, a consulting firm that works with exceptional growth companies. Ms. Brandemuehl’s focus is working with executive and project teams on how their leadership, organization and team structures change from one stage of growth to the next.
Her recent clients include Agilent Technologies, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Lam Research, ServGate Technologies, and the California Academy of Sciences.
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After-dinner Talk: Sustainable Systems for Off-the-Grid Communities
Presented by Daniel A. Pitt, Santa Clara University
Imagine a home in the community that can: sense and control the air, water, light and sound quality; achieve energy efficiency through the use of energy-efficient appliances and by maximizing use of natural daylight and solar energy for cooling, heating and power generation; and limit waste impacts through minimization, treatment and reuse. Imagine this home designed to use multifunctional components and materials that are safe for the inhabitants and have minimum impact to the environment. Imagine the home to be aesthetically appealing while integrating technologies that promote sustainability. Imagine the inhabitants of this home to have seamless access to the relevant data needed to inform their decisions and empower their actions as citizens of a sustainable society.
Imagine a community that: can sense the air, water and sound quality and respond immediately to promote sustainable activities while safeguarding the individuals; is designed to be integrated within the immediate eco-system, has minimum net energy consumption through the use of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies for common services and safe waste-to-energy conversion; optimizes the use of land and provides biologic reserves that compensate for the environmental impacts of urban land use. Imagine this community promoting communication among stake holders, a healthy life-style, shared common facilities, and mass transportation systems for short distance mobility. Imagine the transportation systems of this community to be powered by shared renewable energy systems while having zero-emissions.
This is the vision of sustainable homes and communities – a dream within our reach. To enable sustainable communities the individual elements of sustainable development must be integrated. These communities are inhabited by individuals who aspire to improve their quality of life, homes that provide shelter and safety, and communities composed of homes and shared commons as well as the immediate eco-system.
The integration of these elements requires the development of new engineering systems that interconnect the individual elements to promote sustainable development at different levels. We refer to these engineering systems as intelligent sustainable systems. These systems consist of the tools required for monitoring, assessing and predicting environmental variables relevant to sustainability, of mechanisms to rapidly disseminate this information in a form that can be used to inform decision-making at the individual, community, and city levels, and of technologies to enable sustainability through auto-adaptability.
We will be presenting the vision for Santa Clara University for intelligent sustainable systems. A few examples of these systems will be presented for the residential and community levels applied to societies in the first and third worlds.
Daniel A. Pitt is dean of the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University, the Jesuit University of Silicon Valley. The School, founded in 1912, offers over 500 undergraduates an engineering education characterized by small classes, close faculty contact, innovative projects, interaction with Silicon Valley companies, and life-lasting perspectives from coursework in liberal arts, religion, and ethics. To its 800 graduate students, the school offers the opportunity to pursue M.S. and Ph.D. degrees while they hold down jobs by scheduling all classes outside the 9-5 workday.
Dr. Pitt became dean of the school in 2002 after a 23-year career in industry. From 1997 to 2002 Pitt served as vice president of Bay Networks and, following its acquisition, Nortel Networks, running the Bay Architecture Lab at Bay and the Technology Center at Nortel. His organization, spread over 9 cities in 5 countries, developed new protocols, architectures, and product concepts for networking and telecommunications technologies, among them DiffServ, core routing chips using patented radix lookups, powered ethernet, a DSP library for IP telephony, open routing software and open routing switches that run third-party Java applets, and the first major commercial-grade LAN/WAN communication server based on industry standard hardware and software. Throughout his tenure at Bay and Nortel Pitt held responsibility for university partnerships as well. From 1992 to 1997 Dr. Pitt managed technology development for residential broadband services at Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, including the architecture for the company’s video server, which led the market in the mid 1990s. From 1979 to 1992 he was with IBM, leading the architecture and worldwide standardization of local area networks, in particular the token ring LAN, source routing, and AAL type 2, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and managing the development of the company’s first ATM architectures and components, including the invention of ATM LAN emulation, at the research lab in Rueschlikon, Switzerland.
Dr. Pitt received a B.S. in mathematics (magna cum laude) from Duke University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois. He taught as an adjunct professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Duke University and the University of North Carolina and has served as a member of the industrial advisory board of the department of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a member of the advisory board of the institute for computer communications and applications at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. He commutes by bicycle, plays steel mandolin (very odd), and carries old-vine zinfandel to his friends around the world.
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Apr 28, 2004
Management Forum: Fostering trust on Virtual Teams (link to slides below)
Presented by Kathie Sinor, Virtual Connection
Many skeptics say it is not possible to build trust on a virtual team and as a result these leaders don’t try creative ways to build and foster this important aspect of team collaboration. Learn how to enhance your team collaboration skills while creating the environment of trust to develop on your virtual team. Building trust is at the heart of all team collaboration and leads to higher team performance. It takes longer to build trust on a virtual team but only a few minutes breach it and destroy what you built.
What is your personal experience with building trust on virtual teams? Is it possible or must you be face to face to build trust? What is the role of the team leader as well as team members in fostering trust? Once you have it, how do you maintain it? These questions and potential solutions are explored in this presentation. In addition to the facilitators experience, we will tap the “group mind” present here to share some best practices and tips on this topic.
KATHIE SINOR, MA, specializes in mentoring, virtual leadership and team collaboration. She has personally experienced the challenges of remote management while responsible for the leadership and team curriculum at Sun Microsystems. Her 20 years of experience comes from practical knowledge as the founder of an 8 store retail chain and training manager at several corporate universities. She is an affiliate with Virtual Connection and recently presented at their web conference on the topic of Fostering Trust on Virtual Teams.
As Sun moved toward a virtual workforce, Kathie became passionate about facilitating teams to share best practices for working from home, dispersed team management and running effective virtual meetings. Her group developed on line training and communities of practices for knowledge sharing about effective virtual team collaboration.
Like all management and team skills a leader must continually refine and upgrade their competencies. Virtual Connection has a virtual leadership assessment tool to help you determine your skill gaps and find the best learning solutions. Kathie uses these and other team assessment tools to coach remote leaders and their team members to gain the skills that put them at the leading edge of managers.
IMAGE RE: VISUAL CONNECTION
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After-dinner Talk: Going Global: a Business and Individual Perspective
Presented by Kevin Walsh, Santa Clara University
The presentation will cover the following material:
• What is outsourcing and offshoring
• Host and Donor countries viewpoints
• International trade and business theory
• Adam Smith – David Ricardo – Karl Marx – Michael Porter what do they all have in common?
• Globalization; why it makes everyone better off in the long run
• Politics and the fight for the minds of the voter
• A cost and benefit analysis of a typical offshoring project
• What does this mean for your business career and future
• How you can optimize your business success in the new global economy
KEVIN WALSH, Deans Executive Professor of Management, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University
Kevin is also a general partner at RIDGE PARTNERS LLC investment & buy-out company, responsible for business and financial evaluations of potential investments.
Kevin was VP of Corporate and Strategic Planning and VP of Finance and Planning for Worldwide Operations, SUN MICROSYSTEMS INC.
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Mar 31, 2004
Management Forum: Management Strategies (link to slides below)
Presented by Barbara Miller, Virtual Connection
Many organizations today are distributed across a range of locations and time zones. Managers, employees and business partners in these dispersed environments face many challenges. Barbara Miller will provide you with concrete strategies and technique to be successful as a virtual manager, team lead, or project manager.
• How do I lead my team whose members are located around the globe?
• How do I work with business partners or key stakeholders who I never see face to face?
• What are the best practices others are using to achieve results in a virtual world?
Barbara will answer these questions and more in an interactive presentation that will provide you with specific techniques you can immediately implement to make a difference for yourself and your team.
Barbara Miller has helped organizations manage change, build teams, redesign work processes, and improve manager capabilities for thirty years. She has a Master’s Degree in Management Science and Women Studies from George Washington University and has taught Organizational Theory and Practice and Group Dynamics at the University of San Francisco’s graduate program in HR/OD. Barbara spearheaded action research on work-life issues sponsored by the Ford Foundation.
SPEAKER PHOTOGRAPH
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After-dinner Talk: Pipeline Management (link to slides below)
Presented by David E. Kirjassoff
In the subject of reducing time-to-market, many companies focus on application of Project Management; improving the ability of development teams to plan, schedule, and stay on track. While this is an effective approach, it does not address the many sources of delay that are beyond the direct control of the development team. Shifting priorities, reallocation of resources, and queuing at common bottlenecks are frequently cited as sources of delay; and yet are not readily addressed by focusing at the team level.
In pipeline management we look at the development engineering organization from the perspective of operating a development pipeline. Concepts feed into the entrance to the pipe, and exit as products ready for market. The capacity or flow rate of the pipeline is function of both the quantity of resources applied, and how well the pipeline is managed to ensure a streamlined flow. In this presentation we’ll explore the pipeline management tactics that help to increase the flow of new products.
David E. Kirjassoff has 18 years of experience in total quality management, large-scale organization change, and business process improvement in both the semiconductor and specialty chemicals industries, building on his 8 years of line experience in process/project engineering and manufacturing management. He currently operates an independent consulting practice, specializing in assisting technology companies with strategy deployment, product development effectiveness, team leadership, and virtual teaming. In his previous role at National Semiconductor, he was Director of Organization Performance, responsible for implementation and support of National’s ongoing transformation process. This included chairmanship of the senior executive change council, design and facilitation of quarterly executive retreats, revision of business metrics and assessment processes, division-level organization redesign, and coordination of companywide process improvement and employee involvement efforts.
Mr. Kirjassoff has a BS in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University, and is a graduate of the Greater Boston Executive Program in Business Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
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Feb 24, 2004
Management Forum: Employee Stock Options – Optimizing Your Strategy
Presented by Rich Chambers, Certified Financial Planner
Stock Options can be a great source of wealth or ruin. We’ll briefly discuss how Incentive Stock Options (ISO) and Non-qualified Stock Options (NQSO) work. Then we’ll review the common mistakes made and how you can avoid them. We’ll discuss a number of possible strategies you could use to maximize the profit potential of your stock options. A demonstration of a sample analysis will be shown using StockOpter, the best software available for stock option analysis.
Benefits of attending: participants can learn how to evaluate their stock option plans and develop multiple strategies that can optimize the tradeoff between profits, taxes, and risk management, given various market scenarios.
Rich Chambers presents the program. Rich is a Fee-Only, Certified Financial Planner who provides “Financial Planning and Investment Advice for Everyday Life”. Rich has presented the stock options program numerous times in workshop environments and at local high-tech companies. Rich is a member of the IEEE was a practicing Electrical Engineer until 1999.
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After-dinner Talk: Working with Our Former Enemy
Presented by Bob Dodd, Space Systems Loral
The age of Globalization creates unique relationships. Previous competitors are now partnering on programs. Manufacturing takes place with components from different parts of the world. Design and service teams are spread around the globe. One of the unique situations is dealing with our former enemies. When nations change their mutual relationships, their people do not automatically and immediately change to reflect the new national condition. Cultural perspectives, traditions, attitudes and behaviors retain their unique character for a long time. So it is between the United States and the former Soviet republics and it’s made even more interesting by the latter’s change in economic systems.
Launching a US satellite from Kazakhstan and the experience of living with Russians at Baikonur offer international launch teams a unique perspective on these cultural patterns and how the Russians deal with their new realities. All this in a place which itself is a symbol of the past: Baikonur officially did not exist during the cold war, although all of the Russian manned space missions started there as well as most unmanned ones. The Russians denied even the very existence of this base during the cold war. Baikonur is still not on most maps. This is the location where all of the Russian manned missions were launched in Kazakhstan. Our speaker has had the unique experience of living among the Russians at their launch base. There were many surprises, highs and lows in the experience testing our management skills to the max.
Bob Dodd is a staff engineer at Space Systems/Loral. He has been an Advanced Payload Manager and Subsystem Manager. Prior to Loral he was the Director of Engineering at Dalmo-Victor. He has been the Manager, Electronic Systems Division at SAIC and a Division Manager at Watkins-Johnson. He was also the Director of Engineer at STI. He has 2 patents and has written numerous technical articles. He is active in many professional societies. Most notably, he was the previous Chair of the Engineering Management Society.
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Jan 28, 2004
Management Forum: Virtual Engineering Project Teams: Hyper-productive or Just Hype?
Presented by Randi Brenowitz
The realities of today’s marketplace and engineer labor pool have created the need for virtual and geographically dispersed engineering project teams. Come and discover how to turn this “necessary evil” into a true competitive advantage.
The convergence of globalization, increased product complexity, the proliferation of technology, and the resulting requirements for increased interdependence and collaboration have given rise to virtual teams as the form of work design in Engineering organizations. It is increasingly common for project teams to be located at facilities remote from those with whom they must collaborate or for the team members to be in various locations.
Despite their ubiquity, you know that engineering teams give rise to their own unique problems. When the challenges of virtual and remote teaming are added to the inherent struggles over interdependence and collaboration, new and creative approaches for supporting the work and interaction of teams become necessary.
The Team Essentials Model™ is a simple, but robust way of understanding these teams and to help them become high-performing as quickly as possible. At this session you will:
• Gain a better understanding of the implications of the virtual environment on teams and team development
• Become familiar with the Team Essentials Model™ and how to apply it to virtual teams and explore the question
of tools and technology necessary to support virtual teams
• Plan a strategy of how to jumpstart or re-start virtual teams.
Randi S. Brenowitz, CMC is an Organization Development Consultant who is committed to improving corporate productivity through teamwork and collaboration. Randi has worked both as an internal employee in large corporations such as Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation, and as an independent consultant.
Scott Sturzl, CPM, a vice-president at the Institute for Supply Management calls her ” a dynamic speaker who knows her stuff and speaks in real world terms.”
She is the writer and publisher of Tools for Teams, a bi-monthly electronic newsletter focused on the dynamics of high-performance work teams. Subscribe at newsletter@brenowitzconsulting.com.
Randi offers a full range of services in the design, start-up, and continuous development of co-located, cross-functional, and/or virtual teams. She is also expert at team and team-leader coaching.
Randi received her B.S. from Northeastern University and M.B.A. from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, specializing in organization behavior.
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After-dinner Talk: Nanotech: The Next Generation
Presented by Warren Packard, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Nanotechnology is the next great technology wave. It will lead to profound advances in energy, medicine, electronics and other areas: think matter compilers, personalized meds, and inexhaustible power sources. At Draper Fisher Jurvetson, we have been exploring and investing in the nanotech arena for the past four years. While we have been introduced to many fascinating ideas and concepts that won’t be realized for five to ten years, we have been able to identify and back a number of nanotech business opportunities that have real world applicability today.
This talk will tackle a diverse set of topics that will be interwoven in a logical manner. Starting from a broad perspective, we’ll explore the sources of future innovation, diving into the way we think about technology and the way that it is progressing in an exponential fashion. This will lead into our primary discussion on nanotechnology: What is it? How is it advancing? Who is making it happen? When will the nanotech wave really hit? From this point, we’ll transition into a discussion of how we, as investors, think about this trend and the opportunities: How does venture capital work? What are we looking for in an early stage technology company? How do venture capitalists help drive entrepreneurship? Broadening out from this point, we will explore the impact of nanotechnology on our industry as a whole, the challenges of inspiring entrepreneurship within a large organization, and whether a well managed organization has any hope of getting around the innovators dilemma.
This will be a thought-provoking, interactive talk that is guaranteed to make you to think small.
Warren Packard is a Managing Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He currently serves on the Boards of 422 inc., BinOptics, Digital Impact (NASDAQ: DIGI), DigitalWork, FlexICS, Imago Scientific Instruments, Outcome Software, and Ultimate Arena.
Mr. Packard also led the firm’s investments in Hypernex, MEMGen, Chilisoft (acquired by Sun Microsystems), Direct Hit Technologies (acquired by Ask Jeeves), Enviz (acquired by Keynote Systems), Fogdog Sports (acquired by Global Sports), and NetMind (acquired by Puma Technology). Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Packard co-founded Angara Database Systems, a main-memory relational database company, which was acquired by Personify. Prior to Angara, he was an Associate at Institutional Venture Partners, investing in early-stage technology companies. Before IVP, Mr. Packard was a Senior Principal Engineer in the New Business and Advanced Product Development Group at Baxter International. In this position, he led professionals from product development, marketing, and manufacturing in the design and manufacture of next-generation kidney dialysis machines. During his tenure at Baxter, Mr. Packard received a number of domestic and international patents for his engineering work – including designs of silicon-based micro-electromechanical systems. Mr. Packard is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University and holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering: Smart Product Design. He received his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. E-mail: warren@dfj.com.
Draper Fisher Jurvetson is the leader in seed and early stage venture capital, typically serving as a startup’s first outside source of financing. Founded in 1985, Draper Fisher Jurvetson has created a global network of affiliated venture funds with approximately $3 billion in capital commitments and offices in the major technology centers around the world. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, the firm has proven expertise in identifying and helping extraordinary entrepreneurs who want to change the world.
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Dec 10, 2003
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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
Board Elections for Year 2004
Current board will nominate candidates for board elections for year 2004 at the December 10, 2003 meeting. You can also enter your nominations from the floor at the meeting.
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Management Forum: Keys to Successful Global Outsourcing
Presented by Narendra Dev, vCustomer Corporation
This hands-on approach for project managers who are tasked to outsource projects offshore will feature:
• Investigation of the business problem for offshore outsourcing
• Evaluation of the best country for offshore outsourcing
• Vendor RFP process
• Vendor selection process
• Implementation
Issues addressed in this presentation will include:
• Language and accent issues
• Training the offshore partner
• Spreading the risk between partners
• Building the infrastructure for seamless work
• Using appropriate tools and systems for managing the partner
• Writing a contractual agreement to meet performance criteria
Narendra Dev is the VP of Business Development at vCustomer Corporation. He has more than 20 years of senior operations management experience in customer service, IT hosting and network operations in enterprise companies and start-ups. He has setup Offshore contact centers for Hewlett-Packard, Broadband Office, Peoplesoft and other companies.
Narendra is an instructor at several universities on the topics of Offshore Outsourcing, Establishing Call Centers and Customer Support. He has a Masters in Physics
from Delhi University and an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, India.
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After-dinner Talk: Management across Company and Country Borders: The Sea Launch Approach
Presented by John Steinmeyer, Director of Mission Integration, The Sea Launch Company
Many companies are creating partnerships with other companies to optimize the product and production cycles. The challenges are greater when these teams cross country borders. Not only are there different languages and laws, but new sets of standards and customs to deal with, as well. One organization that is successful in this process is the Sea Launch Company, LLC. Sea Launch is an international company comprised of American, Russian, Ukrainian and Norwegian partners that provide an innovative, cost effective, heavy lift launch service for commercial satellite customers.
In his presentation, John Steinmeyer will address how Sea Launch has established the management team and approach that has made it successful. The Sea Launch operation is dynamic and constantly changing. There have been some areas that required minor changes to be optimized. This ability to meet the management challenges afforded by this unique partnership and adapt to the necessary changes in plan have been essential to Sea Launch success.
Sea Launch building on the proven performance flight-tested hardware and the expertise of their International Partners. Sea Launch offers superior value, high performance and fully integrated launch services using development and operations teams from America, Russia, Ukraine and Norway. In addition to reliable, enhanced performance capabilities, Sea Launch is able to offer competitive cost advantages, due to its international composition. The Sea Launch approach utilizes an ideal equatorial launch site at 154 degrees latitude. This provides the most direct route to geostationary orbit and offers maximum lift capacity for increased payload mass or extended spacecraft life.
Our speaker is John Steinmeyer, Director of Mission Integration for the Boeing Sea Launch Program. In this capacity, John leads a team of Boeing Mission Managers and Technical Specialists responsible for the complete integration of Spacecraft requirements with the Sea Launch System. John reports directly to the Sea Launch Chief Systems Engineer.
Prior to his assignment on Sea Launch, John severed as Executive Staff Assistant to the Vice President / General Manager of Boeing Expendable Launch Systems in the 14 months prior to, and just after the inaugural Boeing Delta IV launch. In this he assists in the coordination of enterprise strategic and operational management processes, including budgeting and performance assessment, resource management, affordability, and process improvement initiatives. John was selected for this role while he was serving as a Major Subcontract Program Manager, responsible for the procurement and performance of rocket engine systems for the Delta Launch Vehicle program from Pratt & Whitney, Aerojet and Thiokol. He previously managed foreign procurements, and served two years as the Major Subcontract Program Manager on site at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Nagoya, Japan. He also directed IRAD activities relative to advances in Delta Structures Design. He began his career in 1987 with the former McDonnell Douglas, working in the Space Products Division Mechanical Systems group, as cognizant engineer for separation hardware and later as Test Director for Payload Fairing Separation Tests.
John has a BSME degree from UC San Diego, Revelle College, and an MBA from the University of Southern California. He is the recipient of two Boeing Special Invention Awards for patents held on Satellite Dispensing Systems, and has published several technical papers.
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Oct 29, 2003
Management Forum: Creating Successful Mentoring Relationships to Accelerate Learning (link to slides below)
Presented by Kathie Sinor, Talent Development Consultant & Helen Gracon, Career Development Consultant
Ask a successful person how they got to where they are now, and most will give credit to a mentor who accelerated their learning along the way. Mentoring can be formal or informal, successful, a disaster or somewhere in between. Learn how to set up the mentor relationship for success and the role and responsibility of both parties in the relationship. In the more formal mentor and mentee arrangements, the developmental plan of the mentee plays a significant part in the design of the program. Negotiated agreements frame the relationship to ensure both parties get what they need. From an organizational and personal viewpoint, there is a return on your investment which can be demonstrated. Learn how to set up a program pilot in your organization and the basic elements that will ensure success.
Kathie Sinor has been a mentor and a mentee over most of her 20 year career in Human Resources, and as a business owner. Recently, as a manager at Sun University, Sun Microsystems, she experienced how getting the right mentor at the right time saved her career from derailing. She mirrors the values and best practices learned from training managers, as well as being a manager in her own company of 200 employees, and in the high tech world. She has worked at all levels in an organization from CEO to mid-level manager to professional staff.
At Sun Microsystems, Kathie was responsible for the Management, Teams and New Hire curriculum. The management training received high marks from the CEO for changing the culture and driving accountability. Training was linked to management standards and a feedback system for managers.
Kathie earned her BA from UCLA and Masters from University of San Francisco in Human Resources and Organizational Development. During the time she was completing her masters degree, she was working at National Semiconductor in the Quality and Organizational Effectiveness group, learning and applying theory to practice. She was part of a significant change effort that focused on visioning and goal alignment to get the company moving in a new direction. At National, Kathie was fortunate enough to work with organizational gurus, such as David Sibbet and Peter Senge, to learn, then teach, the importance of visioning and teamwork built on collaboration and commitment. She learned the value of accelerating her learning through both the mentor and the mentee role, and believes it can be more effective than training for certain types of skill building.
In Helen Gracon’s 20 years experience in career counseling, she has worked with both employed and unemployed Silicon Valley professionals in fields ranging from high tech to manufacturing. She has designed and implemented both retention and downsizing programs. Her recent experience has been developing, implementing and advocating global mentoring that accelerates learning in high tech companies.
Helen has been a guest speaker for IEEE, ASQC, Amdahl, Apple, Raychem, Lockheed, UC Berkeley Business Alumni, Women in Aerospace, and others. She co-authored an article called, “Lay-Off Should Come Last” for IEEE Spectrum magazine.
For the past nine years, she has been a consultant for companies such as Raychem, Apple, and Sun Microsystems. Prior to her consulting experience, Helen was a Program Director for ProMatch, a nationally recognized career development center sponsored by the NOVA Private Industry Council and the State of California. Helen is a Nationally Certified Career Counselor and holds a Masters Degree in Counseling.
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After-dinner Talk: Planning and Executing Fast- Track Projects (link to slides below)
Presented by Dr. Raymond Levitt, Professor and Academic Director, Stanford Advanced Project Management Program
The competitive need to innovate while decreasing time-to-market requires many firms to schedule multiple product-development projects aggressively and then execute them concurrently. The resulting exponential increases in coordination and rework for interdependent project tasks challenge the organization’s ability to rely on intuition or existing project scheduling approaches and tools to plan and execute fast-track projects.
Professor Levitt reviews a variety of methodologies and tools — including PERT Simulation, Critical Chain, and SimVision — that allow managers to determine the most aggressive project schedules and staffing levels that they can confidently use to execute their fast-track initiatives successfully.
This program will feature a drawing for a free online Stanford Advanced Project Management course. To learn more about the program: http://apm.stanford.edu.
Dr. Raymond Levitt is Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Academic Director of the Advanced Project Management Executive Education Program, and Director of the Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects, at Stanford University.
Since the late 1980s, Dr. Levitt’s Virtual Design Team research group has developed new micro-organization theory and computer simulation tools to design organization structures for fast-track product development. He has consulted to numerous Fortune 100 companies on organization design for project execution.
Dr. Levitt co-founded, and is a Director of, Design Power, Inc., Vit™ Corporation, and Visual Network Design, Inc. http://apm.stanford.edu
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Sep 24, 2003
Management Forum: Fostering Innovation (Innovating for Results: How to Move from Idea to Strategy) (link to slides below)
Presented by Dr. Louis Patler, Chairman, Near Bridge, Inc.
Dr. Louis Patler, author of Tilt, Irrelevant Lessons for Leading Innovation In The New Economy, will be talking about the difference between creativity and innovation. He will discuss the link between innovation and business strategies and models, and highlight the five emerging consumer trends that will shape the next five years. This information is drawn from his forthcoming book, “TrendSmart: The Power of Knowing What’s Coming . . . and . . . What’s Here to Stay!”
Award-winning author, speaker and consultant, Louis Patler is hairman of Near Bridge. Louis’ clients have included many Fortune 500 companies, multinational corporations, and foreign governments. He has brought to these clients pioneering methodologies for identifying emerging business and consumer trends, for solving practical problems, and for providing unparalleled quality service initiatives.
Louis writes frequently for newspapers, magazines, and management newsletters in the U.S. and abroad, covering the most innovative individuals and companies. Recently, J. Walter Thompson Agency named him one of “The 20 Most Creative Minds in America.” He also hosts a monthly live online chat on cutting-edge business topics at www.WorldWithoutBorders.com.
Louis is currently spotlighted as one of the world’s 150 elite business “thought leaders” in the landmark publication Business: The Ultimate Resource. Writing the section on “Changing Strategies,” Louis joins other contributors such as Warren Bennis, Michael Hammer, Margaret Wheatley, and Jim Collins.
His previous book, “Tilt, Irreverent Lessons for Leading Innovation in the New Economy” was named a Top 10 Business Book for 1999. He is also coauthor of the New York Times best seller, If It Ain’t Broke . . . BREAK IT!: Unconventional Wisdom for a Changing Business World, which has been widely acclaimed by business leaders such as Tom Peters, Steven Covey, and Paul Hawken, professional coaches Pat Riley and Tony La Russa, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. It was the second-best-selling business book of 1992. Louis’ training programs and videos are based on his three books.
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After-dinner Talk: Hope for High Tech? – Complexity, Systems, and Semiconductors (link to slides below)
Presented by Dr. Chris Hamlin, Sr. VP, CTO of LSI Logic
Pundits have had a field day recently proclaiming the final days of the high technology boom in the wake of the dot com collapse and the ensuing downturn in semiconductors and other high tech industries. But the picture may be more complex than that: disentangling short term speculative effects, the impact of normal cyclical trends, and long term technological factors is challenging. This talk will place technology industries’ response to spiraling complexity in the context of markets and commerce.
Dr. Chris Hamlin is responsible for defining and coordinating LSI Logic’s strategies and intellectual property development for design, storage, communications and software technologies. Prior to joining LSI Logic in 2000, Hamlin was chief technology officer and vice president of New Technologies for Western Digital Corporation. He has more than 25 years of systems industry experience, having also served as vice president and chief technology officer at Ridge Technologies and distinguished engineer at Apple Computer. Hamlin graduated with honors in 1965 with a BA in History and Mathematics from the College of the City of New York. He received a Ph.D. with distinction in Oriental Studies in 1976 from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Hamlin has been awarded patents for his work in Real Time System Architecture and Home Networking.
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