Speaker: Dr. Leon Khaimovich
Meeting Date: Thursday, January 5, 2017
Time: 6:00 pm Networking; 6:30 pm Management Forum/Guided Networking;
7:00 pm dinner; 7:30 pm Presentation

Earlybird: $10 TEMS members, $12 IEEE members, $15 non-members; At Door: $20
Location: AMD Commons Building / AMD Campus, Sunnyvale
For directions: click map at right
Reservations: tems1701.eventbrite.com

Summary:
Management Forum / Guided Networking: Bring Your Management Challenge;
Arrive by 6:30 PM to join this exciting Management Forum. Following informal
networking is a guided discussion typically related to the topic of the evening’s
after dinner talk, or of general Technology Management interest.
Light Dinner: This month we’re continuing with our light dinner format
— typically sandwiches, salad, drinks, and cookie or similar light dinner.

Presentation: Sustaining Your Startup’s Success
Your company is a success. It is small but already a market leader and is on the rise. Can this be sustained? Why are all big companies so ineffective, and why do engineers not really like working there anymore? Many think that it is a law of nature, which is as inevitable as the law of gravity.

Yet the solution was already available in 1947, when Herbert Simon published “Administrative Behavior,” where he developed an approach to analyzing organizations as dynamic problem-solving and decision-making networks. This work earned him the Nobel Prize in 1978.

This presentation will:
• Outline Simon’s ideas and the team effectiveness model built upon them
• Show that the current interest in predictive analytics gives hope that Simon’s ideas will finally be utilized
• Conclude with a case study, which applied the proposed approach, illuminating what happens under the hood of a fast growing successful tech company.

 
Link to presentation: www.slideshare.net/LeonKhaimovich/sustainingyourstartupsuccess

Link to VC articles which recommend starting to build problem-solving processes infrastructure as early as after having first 8 employees:
 • Building The Machine – Organizational Design In Startups: tomtunguz.com/organizational-design
 • the-second-job-of-a-startup-ceo blog.ycombinator.com/the-second-job-of-a-startup-ceo
 

Speaker:

After finishing at the University of Vilnius with a degree in theoretical physics, Dr. Leon Khaimovich spent three years applying non-linear system dynamics for modeling aerodynamic and electromagnetic properties of disk-head pair in hard drives. Again and again he was surprised by how little mathematics was used to design and refine such complex modern technology. After coming to the United States he pursued this interest of his by entering a graduate program and working with Dr. Herbert Simon—the founder of the field of cognitive psychology, who introduced the concept of bounded rationality into economics and management science.

Since leaving academia Dr. Khaimovich has accumulated the proverbial 10,000 hours of practice in design and remodeling of knowledge-intensive processes in high-tech industry and education. Most of these hours were spent on the front lines of chasing elusive software quality preparing Dr. Khaimovich to tackle the root causes of recurrent problems and slow organizational deterioration.