Failed

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

Honk

What do Karl Marx, honking, dead motorcyclists and car drivers have in common ?

From Karl Marx’s thinking, we see something called class struggle. Yes, conflict arises out two groups of people, namely labor vs capitalist. One claiming to be doing the greater good for another, but both ended up in conflict.

A few weeks ago, while I was cycling near rice paddy field and enjoying the soft breeze, a motorcycle came from behind and gave me soft honk, I was startled a bit and realized I was riding to the wrong side of otherwise winding road. I was too carried away with the view and I nearly ended up riding into the mud. After about 5 mins, I rode up to a small stall and saw the Malay chap that honked me earlier, I said “Thank you” to him. He was rather surprised with my friendly gesture, in some way, disbelief.

Why is that ?

If you have been to Penang (driving a car) with many motorcyclists buzzing around the traffic, you will understand why. The motorcyclist just hate car drivers honking them from behind. In some way, many view this as “class struggle” of rich 4 wheeler vs the poor on the two wheeler . I usually honked motorcyclists that rode out of line or wiggling in and out of traffic. No malicious intention without exception and discrimination, just want to remind them I am coming and if they hit me, it will be painful or even fatal. So, did any of the motorcyclists ever appreciated my gesture of warning them of imminent danger ? Zilch. Well, that is why, due to that motorcyclist behavior of ignorant of honking and seeing danger, many of them ended up dead, no, I did not run over them.

Now, why did the Malay chap even surprised to hear me saying “Thank you”, well, in his mind, I had to be very angry with the honking but instead I was not, it looked like the same form of exploitation he suffered while on the road.

For motorcyclist to have that kind of mindset, is more like class struggle kind of thing. Just because they (probably) cannot afford a car, does not mean that they should be subjected to exploitation on the road. They perceived car drivers as bully(capitalist), they see themselves as being under privilege , therefore car drivers need to forgive their reckless behavior, any form of gesture is to deny them their rights to be on the road.

Just as today, I was crossing Penang bridge, it started to drizzle and suddenly all motorcyclist just slow down and stopped at the side of the narrow bridge regardless of any car coming from the back, a few cars actually honked and I could see some motorcyclist were showing some fingers. To me, I honked because I care, for those drivers that hardly care, they will just run them over.

Some article about motorcyclist death.

There you have it, the connection. Ignorant of friendly warning, one party see it to be friendly warning, another see it as class exploitation.

-woody

Thinking

I have been thinking about migrating to own server. The beauty is, I can stream audio clip, own slide show, house my own video. Now video comes from youtube, slide show cannot do, audio slip need to be hosted elsewhere and use 1-pixel to run.

I have run it before when ISP connection was poor last time.

Another thing, the upload speed is very fast because the server sits in next room.

-woody

Warning

I wrote here about flexi hour, and how it can be abused by unscruplus employees and why management should track down such people and have them properly removed.

Today we got a email from HR, informing us of disturbing trend of many employees coming in late and going home early. Anyway, I felt that what the HR did was messy, because they just sent out the blanket message and and assumed all those coming late as problematic employee. Worst still, most folks in my department felt pissed of with the message (Mostly on time folks), some had to stay up late for meeting with Europe employees. Anyway, I am interested to see one “chronic late comers”, how they will behave after the news. Most of the time, such message hardly had any effect on the chronic cheaters , but ended up upsetting those that behaved well.

As I said, the chronic cheater need to be tracked down at all cost and promptly remove. As usual, I am one of those that pissed off too. The company working hour is 7.30am – 5pm, I usually works around 6.40am to 4.30pm to avoid traffic congestion.

-woody

Blood

I read a blog entry by this flight attendant, she quoted (link)

in training they told us that cabin crew secure themselves first then help/ assist others, because we are still inside the cabin..

Yes, in order to help others, we need to ensure we have the capability and we know the consequences of our action. It is not about trying to be hero or whatever or anything like it..if we cannot swim, better do not try to rescue a drowning person by jumping into water seeing others do that..

I met two persons during my working life, they had an interesting condition know as blood phobia.

One of them R, he was a sporty person, did long distance endurance run, climb a few mountains around Malaysia before. One day, he was trying to rework a plastic part and he accidentally cut himself, I saw him, he was shivering and nearly fainted. It was no joke at all.

Another person Q, he was my ex-boss. You see, due to the size of my company and its 24 hours operation with many manufacturing lines, managers used to take turn to do night shift. Once, there was this incident, an operator had her finger caught by stamping machine, due to seriousness of the injury, he was paged (on duty that night), the nurse actually need the manager to standby in case need to make some critical decision. So he rushed to the nurse room in no time, upon arriving inside the room and saw the blood stained bandage, he fainted on the spot ! By the way, the operator was ok and just about to have the bleeding stopped. The nurse became panic now, having two patients instead of just one !

Anyway, it was like a big joke for a few months after the incident.

Now I learned that, and always tell people before they rushed off to help some injured victims, can they withstand seeing blood in large quantity , if not, better do not get near or risk become part of the problem, preventing the real injured people from getting the much needed medical attention.

-woody