I suspected that was the case based on previous comments you’ve made but figured I’d ask. Pretty cool to be involved in that progression of significant engineering accomplishments.
Naturally, or it would have been a short career for the engineering staff
Just kidding around. Sometimes I get asked what was the most difficult engineering problem encountered and overcome. Innovating on a schedule We ain’t cutting cookies here, this stuff has never been done before. There are bound to be discoveries along the way…
Stating the obvious now but the combination of hardware and software was a game changer and will continue to drive evolution in automotive technology.
Very tough to say … Today I shall invent! Innovation doesn’t work that way… Try, fail, try again, fail again… And sometimes you runout of ideas to try… Until one wakes you up in the middle of the night that works.
Over the years, I have seen ideas and solutions come from just about every way possible. So I am a strong advocate for full engagement. Anyone and everyone is welcome and invited to attend meetings where new product opportunities are discussed, including critical review meetings. If you are not leveraging every resource at your disposal, you are doing a disservice to the people and the business.
One example is years ago, there was a guy in purchasing named Bob. We had a large staff of very capable, highly educated R&D engineers and scientists. One of the newer recruits came to me and asked, why is Bob at all these meetings? He works in purchasing… Stick around and you’ll find that Bob is here because he has a unique perspective and is a misplaced engineer at heart. He approaches problems in a way that most trained engineers do not and has made many valuable contributions to our efforts over the years…
I worked on a tiger team at the steel mill in the 1980s. There were five hourly employees and one engineer (me). The hourly guys had many outstanding ideas but didn’t know how to evaluate them. They only aske what’s good about this idea and not what’s bad. Since they didn’t consider the downsides, they couldn’t devise tests of the ideas. That’s where I came in. I’d ask what could be wrong with the ideas and we would then use the good and bad features to devise tests that would show the idea’s value. We made a good team.
For a while I worked in an agency of the federal government.
That agencies policy, it was management’s job to come up with system improvements, not the worker bees.
Agree again! The group I worked in would gather around and start kicking ideas about. Our manager was pretty hands off but sometime he’d toss an idea to the group to see what we could come up with. We’d include our machinist (when we were in the same building) as well.
We filed lots of patents from these sessions with between 2 and 6 inventors since the pieces that formed the whole came from each participant.
When my old Delphi division that created MagneRide was sold to the Chinese, it was the $700M MagneRide business they wanted but kept the passive shock and failing brake business as part of the deal.
We ain’t cutting cookies here, this stuff has never been done before. There are bound to be discoveries along the way…
only kidding…