I am going to write about my failure.
If you are in management, this is probably a nice Harvard Business material to write about. I am going to blog about in the most politically incorrect manner.
About a few days ago, I was chatting online with a friend (ex-colleague). He told me some story about the old motherboard design group I was attached to, how the group was on the wind down mode.
The meaning of wind down mode is, normally, when a company feels certain sector of the business is not longer strategic/not making enough profit to its bottom, they are taking measure to exit that business by either closing down the group, or divest it to another company.
How the group came to existence was , the company was/and is a semiconductor company, it was at mercy of board & PC producing companies to design in their silicon solutions, if they (board & PC folks ) decided not to design in “our” solution, all the product we then made was as good as just sand , and no more . So the company decided to have its own board design group that will design in and sell their own board with its own silicon solution socket attached to. So anyone that bought our motherboard, will have to buy our silicon solution. In a way, we also sell a readily drop in solution for PC, that is why, we have so many white box these days and PCs are dirt cheap.
As of recent years, the company is in dilemma, as the market acceptance of its product is coming to a very mature state, potentially having a board design/producing group is in direct competition with our friendly customer (that designed in our solution) & those faithfully selling our silicon solution. In addition, due to stiff competition, the in house design/manufacturing group also under severe price pressure from its “friendly” competitor.
So a few years ago, the headquarters decided that, instead of selling supplement to silicon solutions only, why not go into segmented application market. In a way, they wanted those involved in board solution design, to actually think of ways to help/enable our customer to come up with new killer products,new application model, like a completely new usage model of our products. But that is in conflict with our present working system of the old group that I was attached to, because it believed in the model of, one architecture served all kind of product proliferation, which is much cheaper to run & execute.
By the way, I am trying my best to write this in anonymous manner as not to sound alike to some real life case, this company X that I was attached to has a good army of lawyers , need to be real careful.
Let’s rewind back the time. I am going to described my failure to tell the management about the message on the wall, because I was trying to politically correct. If you are a manager, sometimes, such vague message served as sign of larger things to come. I am no messiah.
It was 3 years ago, I thought of this problem and believed that, we needed some “skunk job” (Like those run by Kelly Johnson in Lockheed Martin Corp ) , because , all the while, management attention was on how best one can execute and save time and cost and quickly push the product to market. I felt that we need to have some area of capability developed to help ourselves and customer , to better integrate our product, using specific advantage available in our product design.
The message from corp was actually a wake up call, it ring in my ear but message was vague, seeing the need to re-engineer how we define architecture of working product for specific platform, I put together a simple presentation and went to the staff meeting to present my case, one was simple video streaming terminal, that you can remote control using UDP protocol, on what you intend to broadcast, another guy did a presentation of multimedia player with a PC capability inside it. Cool huh ? Actually, the multimedia player is available now in some market, sold as a very niche product.
Humbly speaking, I failed. The message did not get across, and managers present thought that presentation was good, a pet on the back. The idea gain no support and of course , whole effort never take off. Anyway, I also moved on to another division, that was divested much earlier.
While that was happening, there were other groups in the company actively engaging customers to talk about different usage model of the silicons we were producing,doing them at board level, researched about it and pushing the design influence to integrate the product with our dear customer, most of them today, has a credit tag to their respective departments as owner for driving that effort. As for the old group that I was trying to convince, my message did not get across and they are in dying mood .
Come to think of it, if I were so politically incorrect to tell them,
You better listen and do it, or else you are gonna FUCKING die a few years from now !!!! FUCKING die, all of you !
And the managers would have gotten a rude shock with the message deeply embedded inside their head and quickly do something about it. Today, the outcome would have been much different.
-woody
Posted by woodyooi 
Posted by woodyooi 
Posted by woodyooi 
