Importance of Having a Clear Mission

Important message about having a clear vision and mission for ourselves and for whatever we do.

"We succeeded because of the mission," says Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of Mozilla. She is called the "conscience" of the company. "Firefox was faster, safer and blocked pop-ups. It also offered some compelling innovations, like tabs, which allowed users to have multiple pages open inside a single browser window."

Each of us needs to have a clear mission for ourselves and for any ventures that we are associated with.
Find some examples of good Mission Statements and share them in comments below.
You might start at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Statement

Chutzpa- We Need it to Innovate!

What does it take in order to create something radically different and innovative? Chutzpa!
Gall, brazen nerve, incredible guts. The New Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten

Chester Carlson had it big time. He built a working model of his new copier and spent years knocking on doors and being rejected by all the leading companies in the office equipment field. He was told that his invention was not needed!...

But he didn't give up.. and finally he met another person with chutzpa, Joseph C. Wilson, the head of Haloid Company, a small company in Rochester, NY, who "took a chance" on this radical new device. The company changed its name to Xerox.

Just to show you how little chutzpa I had in 1959...
I was working in the Product Design Department at Polaroid. One day, I walked past Sid Whittier's drawing board. Sid was a bright eyed 60 something and a look a like for Ernest Hemmingway. He said, "Swersey, you seem like a bright young man. Cheap copies. If you could design a machine to make cheap copies, you would really have something."

My brilliant response-
"Sid, whenever I need copies I can put carbon paper into the typewriter. And in the rare instance when I need to copy something that already exists, I can use the Kodak wet copier on the first floor." Well, I used that wet copier only once, and I still have stains on my hands.

How did Sid have the vision to see what was needed and how did he have the nerve to ask for it?
Who else has chutzpa? And how can we develop it in ourselves and others? Let us know.

"Problem Finding", Vision and Commitment

Times have changed. Global competition is such that engineers no longer have the luxury to wait to be told what to do. Instead we must train our students to find unrecognized problems / needs, understand the needs fully and then state their VISION of what could be.

Here are some suggestions for doing this-
1- Identifying, defining and understanding the problem is critical to success of the design.
That means that the students need to understand the state of the art (SOTA).
* Research is key. What is life like for the user? Why? What has already been done?
* Who are the stakeholders? Explain.
* Compose a clear problem statement of the need/ opportunity for improvements.
* Perform Reverse Engineering analysis of what exists.
* Understand how existing devices / solutions work, how built, what they cost

2- Criticize what Exists-
* What are the assumptions?
* What are the compromises?
* What would be ideal?
Use metrics in the evaluation and criticism.. rather than vague terms like.. large, heavy,.. hard to use,..expensive..
* Criticize what exists in a structured manner, using a template...
Start with functional analysis of the sub-system.
Functions- that must be provided by the sub-system. Functional analysis is really important.. functions are defined as verb-nouns.. Arrange the functions in diagram form.. starting with top functions and branching to show the sub-functions needed to provide the function.

Template for criticizing looks something like:
1- Physical characteristics
2- Performance
3- Cost- Affordability for the user
4- Interface with-
* user
* The environment
5- Safety
6- Innovation
7- ??

3- Create a Vision of What is Needed and what you will do, BEFORE you know how to do it or even if it is possible.
"Two billion people in the developing world do not have .... This means that their lives are.... and.... The lives of everyone in the world are impacted by this because.... Therefore, (our vision) we are comittted to create a ... The result will be .... And the BENEFITS will be....
We don't know how we are going to do this, but we will do it within the next .... months."