Business Trip Week

We had our first "Business week trip" from 10th MAR - 14th MAR. The idea of these weekly business trips which happen three times a year is to get face to face time with distance students , listen to special guest lectures , seminars and have fun..:-)
We had two speakers in this trip:
Dr. Andy Grace of the MathWorks to talk about Model Base Design-Concepts
and
We had session with Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Former Chairman of IBM which was great. Its interesting to see the simplicity needed to do task at a CEO level. He talked about management and leadership. Some of the point I wrote during the session are:

1. What do managers do:
Managers create great processes, use information to team's benefit, create compensation/reward channels. He added time-management to the equation and talked about how "meetings" are such a killer of time. Managers should become colleagues during problem solving process (be with their team during weekend when fighting fire) and should become Boss when its about accountability.

So management is finding what are different processes in an organization and how to make them better.

2. On Leadership:
> They create culture, climate, possibility and opportunity to win.
> Leadership is to make others do what they otherwise don't do (inspire, motivate).
> Leaders do not preside they are along side with their people.
> They don't take credit for other's work, there is always enough credit to go around for all.

He also talked about values, behavior when dealing with people, being open and aware and seeking and giving good advice.

One hour session had experience from his life before during and after his IBM days.

I could meet my Product Design and Development team and talk face to face and discuss on our future product ideas and concepts for the course assignment. We had couple of evening get together parties, some sleep and lot of fun.

Jaldi Vapis..:-)

1/6th of the year is gone

Feb was interesting, not as hectic as Jan but studying with distractions from office and little distractions from home has been a learning experience. I'm taking classes this semester from distance using "live video conferencing". It has exceeded my expectations , the class coverage is amazing, distance students (15 others like me) are well involved in the class discussions. The VTC technology itself has improved a lot from cost point of view but still there are lot of areas of improvement. My only complain is the audio delay, its worth it though given the fact that I can attend classes without leaving my job which not only is economical but also the learnings from class can be compared/applied in real life within the company. Its interesting how you change your view of looking, talking and observing things back in your company after you learn stuff in class.
In class discussions has its sides - There are folks who talk only when they have something valid and something which actually is in flow with the topic and adds to the learning value but then there are instances of pure air time and talks about "I did this" and " I did that". That being said you cannot live without them they are what makes the whole learning experience worth while.
Reading before calls is vital something I'm not able to do as well I want, it really makes discussions more knowledgeable if you go in class with atleast some sense of the broad topic to be discussed.
My courses this semester revolve around Innovation in Product Development and Design, organization factors, marketing and one course on a actual product design which is suppose to take us from the need finding process all the way to realizing the actual product. We have $800 budget for each team so they are not expecting us to make next Space Shuttle but a small product with less than 10 parts. The idea is to go through the whole product development life cycle. There have been cases where folks have been able to create something simple in the past which went to patent office.
We have another business trip in a weeks time and so I will back at MIT campus for a week. I'm looking forward to it. There are some guest lectures lined up for us, I'll come back and post about them later mid March. With submissions in mid March I'm assuming I'll be busy but hope to come back here time and again to reflect on what my experiences with SDM program and to answer any queries folks out there might have.

Be safe, be healthy,
AshU.

I leave you with pictures I took in last couple of weeks at Valley Forge Park in PA:



























More here : http://picasaweb.google.com/ashuarchitect/Winter0708?authkey=VGumRSbdrXQ