What are you reading?

my morning favorite.

LOL, Chevis for the win!

I just finished The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. Very strange premise. It read something between an alien encounter and an arctic travel log.

Finished Critical Chain. Now I understand how to apply the principles to multiple projects. I wish I worked in an environment where critical chain was robustly utilized to see how well it stands up in reality. It sure fit my common sense of project management though.

One of the most satisfying parts was when a character advises someone to give a price cap and lead time cap in a request for quote. I’ve done that before with great success, but so many business people have told me not to. They believe if you give a cap, people will just quote slightly below the cap. My experience is that some suppliers will still quote lower if they can, but the noncompetitive ones will appreciate the way out you give them. Also, negotiating lead time is a great idea that I see seldom used. Often people try to make up lost time in shipping that could have been bought in tooling lead time for a fraction the cost.

@Mr-914 - Critical Chain sounds like a good resource for project managers or operations people. Or perhaps even start-ups. Do you see practical applications to the industrial design process itself, or perhaps ID within a product development organization?

When I’m asked to quote on a project the first thing I ask is what is your budget and schedule? To date no one has ever told me their budget and very few have said a schedule. I tell them that I am going to scope it at the maximum and we can go from there, but it would be so much easier if I had a sense of where they wanted to be so I could say “no thanks”, or “I can give you this much for that much”…

What I find weird is that everyone tells me that one of their business advantages is “speed to market”. That’s great, but then you have no idea when the product needs to hit the floor and it inevitably stalls out until your competitor launches their version and it becomes you number one priority. Very strange.

I see a practical application everywhere and anywhere! It has more effect if the organization can recognize the advantages and adopt it too, but you can make just your department more productive by using the methodology.

For example, I used to give deadlines for everything, even projects that were on the back burner or uncertain to advance outside of design. Moreover, I would limit the department work-in-progress so that the designers could focus on actually finishing projects. Those two small things that seem so common sense boost productivity at least 100% in my experience.

The difficult part after that is getting management to understand what one is doing. Because at the same time, I had to ignore daily emergencies to continue the focus. That requires political skill to pull off over an extended period of time.

The Guggenheim just released their digitized book collection for download, here is a great one on motorcycles:

I’ve bought this because it sounds really good in reviews etc. but do not have the time to read it any time soon.

Halfway through ‘DUNE’, the masterpiece from Frank Herbert. Having seen the film at least a dozen times I initially had the unpleasant experience of comparing scenes with chapters, but that effect has diminished over the pages, and now I can absorb the writing and story for its own merits. It is astounding in scope, detail, and the creation of a consistent universe. I love how the prevailing thought or backstory is the law of the Butlerian Jihad - that machines should not replace humans. Computers and AI are outlawed, and as the story shows, are inferior to human intellect, instinct, and ingenuity.

I went ahead and got the hardcover with the foreword by Neil Gaiman; the cover design and embossing is very nice.

Revolution from Above, the Demise of the Soviet System by David Kotz and Fred Weir. An academic book on the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s weird that I have lived through the event and know almost nothing about it.

The Global Brain, by Howard Bloom.
If you read it carefully, and without ego, it will change your view on life completely.

It changed my religion also.

I now believe that humans are like radio receivers - and consciousness is like WiFi. Reincarnation is not yourself entering a new body - it’s a new body connecting with the old data cloud.

a good article on the history of dystopian fiction (one of my favorite genres) The Rise of Dystopian Fiction: From Soviet Dissidents to 70's Paranoia to Murakami - Electric Literature

Currently, I am reading Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale.
The book is an amazing read. I look forward to my 2nd and 3rd reviews.
I really like the fact that he shares a lot of his own stories that you can even relate to situations outside of selling.
If your looking to increase your knowledge about how " A Real Sales Call " in any industry should go, here you can find more business information.
Anyway, no one better than Zig.

I am reading ‘The Swarm’ by Frank Schatzing.
Still a very good sci-fi novel and very well informed. It is about the potential release and extraction of methane from the ocean, an interesting topic since there is twice as much methane in the earth as natural gas and it’s a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2 with a natural oxidation span of a decade. Moreover there are some tipping points in earth’s climate such as the melting of permafrost which can lead to either drastic heating of the planet or a new ice age. Things to think about.
On the list are also Hacking Growth and the Tesla Revolution, both from this year.

I’ll have to check that out.

Just finished book one of The Silence series.

Nice. Ikigai is an immensely popular book in Europe at the moment - it applies to design as well. And I like how it does not put the company, you as a designer or society in the center, but rather the purpose of life itself. I feel like this diagram is like a top-view of an Eiffel tower like 3D structure that you can climb by combining the different areas.

I like this. Kurt Vonnegut would like it as well, I think. His take was a bit more pithy:
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
I think that hits all four quadrants.

I just finished up “Stealing Speed” by Mat Oxley. It’s about the development of 2 stroke racing motorcycles in the '50s and '60s. It’s a story that I knew little about before reading the book. It ends up that a brilliant East German engineer figured out how to get incredible power from a 2 stroke (200+hp / liter, naturally aspirated!). The communists wanted to use technology to show their superiority. After some wins in international racing, the top communist rider defected to the West along with a briefcase of parts and drawings. The communists cancelled their racing program. The rider was hired by Suzuki.

There is so much to love about this book though: the human story of both the rider and engineer, the history of the Cold War, the story of innovation. It’s also really well written, although a tad short.

It’s currently out of print and insanely priced used, but one can get it for a reasonable $10 or so on Kindle.

Currently about 800 pages into Seven Eves by Neil Stephenson… it isa bit challenging. Sometimes there will be 5-6 pages devoted to orbital mechanics. He also seems to obsessively go over the more technical aspects of getting a thousand humans into space and the psychological and health issues it creates… but i stuck with it. And then you get about 2/3rds in and a page says “5 thousand years later…” jumps from present day to that far forward… a bit of a cognitive shift.

Recommended by both Bill Gates and President Obama (that was nice to type).

That’s a Stephenson literary device common to his novels. In ‘Cryptonomicon’ there’s an extended explanation for the inner workings of a WW2 British-made machine gun and how it is similar to an even older sawmill. You get a couple pages of this geekery and then its back to the story. Seveneves was great. You can tell he is really tied in to the space industry start-ups around the Seattle area by his detailed descriptions of orbital mechanics and lasso-ing asteroids. The jump-cut to the future is like Kubrick’s 2001!

I chickened out of meeting Neil at a local book signing when it first came out.