If the Shoe Fits: Running and Innovation
Photo by Jenny Hill on Unsplash Two of my favorite things in one blog — running and innovation. Normally, I run 5K during the week. On the weekends, I find 8K and 10K races. While I would say I run at racing speed, I enjoy the atmosphere and the cold beer at the finish. My shoe of choice forever has been New Balance, 9 ½, EE. These fit like a glove and in all of my years, I’ve never had any problems. But then I read an article in Business Week that had me thinking. “How Nike Started a…
Common Myths About Engineers
Photo by Scott Blake on Unsplash As a regular reader of Chemical Engineering Progress (CEP), I was impressed to see its Editor-in-Chief Cindy Mascone writing her monthly editorial as a poem. She mentioned that when she writes for the magazine "accuracy, clarity, and conciseness take precedence over all else." But that doesn't mean she can't be creative too! Her poem got me thinking about common myths about engineers. We aren't creative We lack social skills We want to fix everything (whether…
Agile Project Teams in Engineering
Photo by Pascal Swier on Unsplash Engineering these days requires agility. We’re reconfiguring processes, and we need to be flexible with time zones, languages, accents, engineering cultures and operating philosophies. We cannot always select the people on our projects and must work with various teams to be successful. How do we do this? McKinsey & Company insights into Agile Project Teams provides some interesting insights. Let’s apply their practical observations from How to Select…
Goodbye 2019, Hello 2020!
Photo by Rakicevic Nenad on Pexels.com A new year is a great time for a shift in direction. This blog tries to be different each time. I cover topics ranging from innovation to technical leadership. I’m always looking for fresh ways of doing things in our industry, in process engineering and business development. And I look for new ways to convey these ideas to the marketplace. In 2019, I talked about clarification technologies, types of engineers, innovation risk, and the creativity of the…
P&IDs and Process Evolution
Photo by ANIRUDH on Unsplash P&IDs are par for the course in process engineering. Recently, I was poring over P&IDs and process planning for several projects. Each project was multinational, multicultural, and extremely complex. For one specialty chemical filtration application, part of a plant expansion in the southern United States, the engineering company is in the Southeast while the existing processes were from the Netherlands and Austria. In another project, with a similar scope,…