P&ID Calls for Chemical Process Development
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash Back in April 2021, I wrote about Working from Home. One of the points was about video calls and how to “read eyes” to gauge the attendees’ interest and your communication success. Now, however, we’re experiencing “video fatigue.” We’re combating this by returning to telephone calls to discuss chemical process development. But some people have forgotten how to have an effective phone conversation. Others are afraid to pick up the telephone. Fortunately,…
Writing in Engineering & the Power of Storytelling
Photo by Nong on Unsplash In any engineering career, technical writing skills are an important subset of communication, and highly valuable. If you follow this blog regularly you already how much I enjoy writing and communicating ideas to the marketplace. To me, while we may call ourselves engineers and professionals, we are also technical writers. Yet even our writing in engineering can benefit from storytelling. Engineers regularly craft e-mails, white papers, reports, proposals,…
Take the Gold for Problem Solving — Olympic Style
Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash This blog often shares perspectives on innovation and leadership, traits we see in spades during the Olympics. As this Winter Olympics unfolds in China, though, let’s discuss the awesome problem-solving skills of the Olympians and what we can apply to our own business endeavors. The performances of Olympic athletes can seem unbelievable. Part of the joy of watching the Games is seeing these amateur athletes accomplish seemingly super-human feats. As we all…
Creativity and Innovation and Orangutans
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash So, here we go again…intertwining seemingly unrelated topics — creativity and innovation and orangutans — into an interesting blog. Over the years, as my readers know, I’ve discussed different approaches to innovation and creativity. My recent octopus blog fell into this category; now, we have lessons from orangutans. By the way, I’m not sure where my current animal obsession stems from. I have never had any pets (except for a salamander now and then I found…
Moonshot & Management Lessons
Photo by malith d karunarathne on Unsplash 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the Miracle Mets World Series-winning season, Joe Namath and the New York Jets taking the Super Bowl title, and the New York Knicks’ NBA Championship win with Bill Bradley. 1969 was quite a time for me as I was growing up a sports fan in Brooklyn. But now that I’m older, I find I’m more drawn to the management lessons we can glean from something else that happened in 1969 — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike…
