Today, I have just found a new incentive for blogging - getting the opportunity to review films. An independent film director, whose name and film I am going to withhold, emailed me yesterday about getting me to review his film. He said that he has been reading my blog and would like my critical inputs on his film before its release in the fall. Also, I have just discovered that my blog is now featured on Milkplus - a blog dedicated to the review and discussion of films. Wow, both discoveries are big surprises for me as I never consider myself a film buff let alone a film critic. All I did in the past 6 months was writing a few short commentaries on the films that saw. Nonetheless, this is exciting news as it represents an opportunity for me to critique films and practice critical writing.

7/27/2005 12:42:42 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Movies

Just to follow up on Yoav's comment on System Engineering (the class) for being too focused on process and repeatable results. So far, the lessons that we learned from SysEng are about quality and productivity. While Six Sigma, Robust Design, and TQM are yesterday's ideas, they are by no means obsolete. I think that both SysEng (the practice) and innovation can coexist together. With a growing number of companies striving to build more innovation in their organization. However, I think that SysEng should include more materials on innovation and creativity thinking. In other words, we need to develop leaders for growth and if innovation is one area where the economy is going. So from an SDM perspective, I think it is a great idea to include an extended or more advanced version of Prof. Eric von Hippel's excellent class in Innovations in the Marketplace to the SDM core curriculum.

Going back to the special report titled "Get Creative! How to Build Innovative Companies" that appears on the latest issue of Business Week, there's a section in the special report that talks about how some business schools are already redesigning their curriculum to meet the growing demand for creative, innovative managers. Traditionally, business schools have introduced electives in product design into their curriculum, with mixed results. And now, a few schools are starting to experiment with integrative programs that foster design thinking that can be applied to product and business design. For example, the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto will soon offer such program that will lead to a Master of Business Design (or MBD).

7/26/2005 1:26:28 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Business

I have just finished reading special report titled "Get Creative! How to Build Innovative Companies" that appears on the latest issue of Business Week (or BW). This report is well articulated and provokes thoughts that supplemented well to System Engineering, a class I am currently taking at MIT. I only wish that our readings for that class would have included something like the highlight Business Week article.

There are several key points to take from this special report. Basically, BW argues that as technology and information become commoditized and globalized, a new corporate model that focuses on creativity and innovation is beginning to emerge from the industry and could provide new growth avenues. It is the creativity economy, stupid. The knowledge economy has now been replaced the creativity economy. As manufacturing outsourcing to China, India, and Eastern Europe becomes more prevalent, the key management principle is no longer Six Sigma or even Total Quality Management but Design Strategy. Companies with rich culture of innovation and creativity stands to win.

As I look in the featured poll: The Top 20 Innovative Companies in the World, it is no surprise why Apple and Microsoft are in the top 3 positions. But if you think that innovation is only about creating insanely products, you are wrong. Innovation and creativity can be applied to wide spectrum of corporate competences, from supply-chain to brand marketing to manufacturing. So is creativity and innovation the next big thinking in management science? I'll continue to think critically about this.

7/25/2005 1:21:55 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Business

After reading an old article from Harvard Business Review and a special report on Creativity from Business Week the past weekend, I maybe wrong about HP cutting down on R&D in my last blog entry where I alluded to R&D as the main source of a company's innovations. In the grand scheme of things, innovative ideas can be created or sought from other sources both inside and outside the company. Drawing from what I have learned from school, academic business papers, and my own observations and reflections innovations transcend R&D, its no longer just designing products based on new technologies and sell them to customers. There's a new emphasis on creativity and how it can create competitive advantage for companies. I am going to elaborate more on this on my subsequent blog entry...

7/25/2005 1:18:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Business

Partly inspired by Lance's Tour de France win and partly motivated by the awesome weather, I went for a run with Camille in the afternoon. We ran the same route that I did yesterday. Running in the company of another runner sure made the run easier. After today's run, I am going to start running regularly like I did before summer school. So here's an idea, perhaps I should start looking for a running companion - preferably female .

7/24/2005 10:22:01 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Sports

Lance Armstrong did again. Today, Lance rode into retirement with a 7th consecutive win in the Tour de France. His run of success will go down in the sports annals as arguably one of the greatest sport achievement. Diagnosed with a terminal cancer and given less than a 50-50 chance of survival, he miraculously recovered and came back to win his first Tour de France title in 1999 and he was been winning the Tour every year since then. Very few athletes have attained the dominance and consistency as those of Lance Armstrong.

As I recall from a recent ESPN feature on Lance, he was genetically gifted with a 10% bigger than average heart and through training he enlarged his heart to 30%. According to a conversation with Yoav last Friday, Lance has a 35 heartbeats per minute (bpm) resting and 200 bpm at his peak. Wow!!! He is a freak of nature. Nonetheless, congratulations to Lance on your win today and may your achievements inspire people, including me, in years to come.

7/24/2005 1:17:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Sports

Lately, I have been feeling really stressed from school, moving, selling my condo, and everything else. Worse, my sedentary lifestyle has left me feeling unfit, somewhat lethargic, and easily vexed. That is why I felt really good when I finally went for my first run in a month and a half earlier today. I also discovered that Kristall beverage is amazingly refreshing after a run. Unlike American beverages, which are overloaded with sugar, I prefer the lighter and intriguing taste of the European beverages. Why doesn't Coke or Pepsi realize that their drinks will taste so much better by reducing their sugar level by at least half!!!

7/23/2005 8:09:34 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Sports

I had dinner at Penang with Camille last night and as usual our conversation included a good dose of office politics and high-tech business trends. We speculated that in the light of the massive layoffs at HP, other companies (including the company that we work for) are likely to follow suit in order to save operating cost. There was absolutely no basis in our statements, just pure speculation.

Earlier today, I read from Good Morning Silicon Valley that HP has announced the disbandment of not 1 but 4 of the company's advanced development group in the wake of retrenching 14,500 employees off its workforce. Quoting an excerpt from John Paczkowski's blog:

"In disbanding the last group, HP is bidding adieu to legendary Silicon Valley technologist Alan Kay. A founder of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Kay - who once said, 'The best way to predict the future is to invent it' - was instrumental in the development of the windowing GUI and modern object-oriented programming. He envisioned a laptop computer long before the first ones rolled out and won a Turing Award in 2003 for his work on Smalltalk, the dynamic object-oriented programming language on which Sun Microsystems' Java is modeled. Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose. But it is. According to the company, his research doesn't jibe with HP's new focus.

Let's analyze this announcement from several perspectives. From a public relations point of view, the disbandment of several research facilities and departure of a legendary technologist will likely send a wrong message to its customers and investors that research is no longer an important activity valued at HP. From an accounting perspective, HP maybe in deeper financial trouble than we knew when CEO Hurd took over the company. The shakeup may be inevitably and justified. In strategic terms, how would this move affects HP's competitive advantage? HP has always prided itself as an innovator and inventor of many technologies, the word "Invent" is even written distinctively below the company logo. Visit their website and see for yourself. The knowledge lost from the closure of research facilities and departure of experienced engineers is likely going to impact HP's ability to create and deliver innovative products in the long run. On the other hand, if those R&D facilities aren't aligned well with HP new corporate strategy or producing results that add value to the company, then reduction in R&D activities in HP makes sense. In conclusion, I think that the financial state of HP may require the managers to act quickly to realign its resources and imperatives. But, regardless of HP's new focus, R&D is still and should continue to be HP's core competence for a while. I feel that the magnitude and extent of the recent cut in R&D may actually undermine HP's long-term growth.

7/22/2005 2:06:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Business

Not much happened today. For people who missed today's class, the first half of the class was about the principle that was advocated by Prof. Clausing of always asking "Why" in the design process. The second half of the class belongs to our guest speaker, Madhav Phadke who spoke about the application of orthogonal array in software testing. Overall, System Engineering class was okay but nothing groundbreaking.

Later today, I managed to procure a book on Statistical Process Control. With this book, I hope to complete my System Engineering homework, which has so far been a time-sucker, by this weekend.

7/21/2005 11:22:13 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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School

Eating one of my favorite dish, Chinese Pork Chop, is like flipping coin; there is a 50% chance of getting gastric pain the following day. But to satisfy my craving, I had the dish for dinner last night. Unfortunately, this eventually became my downfall as I suffer from severe stomachache the whole morning and most of the afternoon today. The moral of the story is: gluttony is not worth the gastric punishment.

7/20/2005 5:09:40 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Food

Today, we had Professor Olivier de Weck as guest lecturer speaking our System Engineering class. He is engaging and his lecture on Isoperformance was interesting. In short, Isoperformance is a concept conceived by Prof. de Weck, in which he argues that the goal of any system (or product) development project is not seek for a solution that produces the optimal performance. Because of resource constraints, solution leading to optimal performance will usually end up being over-designed and often costing too much and being too narrowly focused. A better approach is to define a set of desired performance targets and work backwards to discover a set of acceptable solutions.

Two interesting questions were raised in the lecture. First, Uday asked the question: "If safety is a critical requirement of a product, shouldn't engineers strive to optimize safety in their design." This question wasn't adequately answered in today's session but it was argued that Isoperformance still has its place in the design process as long as we can define the desired level of safety performance. I am not too sure if this is true, after all this argument works only if we assume that such desired level is known at design time. So here's my question, how safe is safe? Can there be too much safety available in a product?

In the next question, Joe asked the question that alluded to how Isoperformance may stifle innovation in the design and development process. I respectfully disagree with Joe on this one. I believe that innovation and Isoperformance can co-exist harmoniously in engineering environments. Drawing, once again, from my professional experience, I remember that the lofty goals of a particular project at my company have undermined the company's ability to release the product on time to the market. The designers were simply fixated in delivering the highest performing products and neglected other aspects of the process, such as lead time, manufacturing cost, etc. Innovation isn't about optimal design but rather the introduction of new concepts that have positive impact on the product, and its users and producers. I believe that Isoperformance can help to achieve a balanced system by using a set of pre-defined expected performance while still allowing innovations to flourish under these conditions.

7/19/2005 11:35:15 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Business

Prof. de Albeniz lectured about Kaizen or the English term: "continuous improvement" and how it has greatly benefited Toyota and other Japanese automakers in today's lecture. While I don't question the merits of Kaizen, I am cynical about the way Kaizen is implemented at my company where I still work on a part-time basis. In my humble opinion, there has been a divergence of perception and expectation on the execution of the Kaizen program between management and the employees. It has become apparent that the goal of the program has become nothing more than posting fancy powerpoint slides on bulletin boards than to really use the concepts of the program to solve problems or improve processes. To most employees, the program has become just another fad and despite enormous amount of resources that have been invested in the program. To management, it serves no more than a public relations tool by window dressing the program as the panacea of solving any of the company woes. Sadly, the program that was designed to reduce Muda (Japanese for waste) has itself become muda.

7/18/2005 2:11:15 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Business

Today, we have Professor de Albeniz from IESE and a former student of Professor Simchi-Levi as guest lecturer in our Supply Chain and Operations Management class. We finally started talking about Operations Management, the second half of the course and something that I am very familiar with. Phrases like Kanban and Conwip were immediately recognizable as I have been involved with several Operations Research (OR) and Optimization projects with several LFM graduates and an Operations Research alumnus at work in the past. Apart from the basics, I never really delved further into topic of Operations Research as I was more involved in implementing the information systems part of the project. I hope to learn a little more on OR while I am at MIT to compliment my past professional experience and make a more solid credential in OR on my resume.

7/18/2005 2:10:32 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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School

Since moving 2 weeks ago, it amazes me how much computer and electronic junk I have accumulated at my old apartment. To reduce inventory at my new place, I gathered all those junk and went to the MIT Swapfest (flea market of computer/electronic goods) to dispose of my excessive junk. I set up shop at 8am and already I have people asking about my acoustic guitar and that ancient Apple Newton 100 that I have on sale.

Business was brisk until I was left with less popular items. Concerned with the inability to liquidate my remaining inventory by the end of the session, I then decided to sell most of items way below my original asking place and even gave many of them away for free. My motivation wasn't to make a profit from this endeavor but rather to get rid of my junk. Thankfully, by 1pm I was left with only a handful of items (about 10% of what I had brought into the flea market). I am happy; I got rid of my inventory and even got decent money from it.

7/17/2005 11:36:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Personal

I am devoted to the pursuit of the enjoyment of good food ranging from gourmet cooking of various types to simple confectionary delights. I am also downright critical when it comes to food. Yes, I have even angered people by my candid yet unflinching remarks on their culinary skills. Since I have been talking about food on my blog, I thought it would be great to actually grade the restaurants that I have eaten at. So I retroactively updated all food related blog entries with new ratings yesterday.

7/17/2005 10:42:01 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Food

Last night, my sister and I went to Sugar & Spice to celebrate Fanny's birthday. There were the usual suspects: Hanri, Denise, Milt, Bruce, and Eimear. There were also additional surprises like Bruce new love interest and Simon and his guest.

The good thing about dinning in a group setting in an Asian restaurant is that everyone gets to sample someone else's dish. While the food at Sugar & Spice is fresh, I was a little disappointed with a few dishes. Stay away from Chili Lime Salmon and Deep Fried Ice-cream. For the best Thai sweet and sour fish, try Three Flavor Fish from Thai Rice. Avocado Chicken Curry, on the other hand, is acceptably delicious. Overall, the food there was so-so but on the upside, the staff are friendly and attentive. I don't want to recommend this Thai restaurant considering that there is a much better Thai restaurant call Tamarind House, down the street from Sugar & Spice. In closing, Sugar & Spice gets a 6.5/10 from me. It is interesting that my ratings for all the restaurants mentioned are inversely proportional to those of Citysearch. Hmmm... In any case, happy birthday again, Fanny.

7/16/2005 12:36:48 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [9]

Food

This blog site just expanded slightly with 3 new categories: Radio, Mac, and Travels.

7/15/2005 6:12:10 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [9]

Blog

I can't believe this... Citing financial shortfall and poor program ratings, WBUR is ending their flagship radio program, the Connection, in 3 weeks. I am still not buying to the officials' argument of poor program ratings. The show airs from 10am to noon and from 9pm to 11pm; while these hours aren't prime-time, they still fall within good listening hours. I am a big fan of this program and it would be sad to see it go.

7/15/2005 5:29:10 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [5]

Radio

These days, computers have an average of 3 years lifespan. Believe it or not, computers and most electronic devices contain harmful toxics (or e-Waste) that shouldn't just be disposed in landfill. As more and more people and corporations are getting rid of their computers and electronics devices, businesses specializing in e-waste recycling/reuse have proliferated. One of the e-waste recycling/reuse companies that was mentioned on an earlier NPR program is RetroBox. If are on a budget or nostalgic for a particular computer, you can get a cheapo computer from them.

7/15/2005 5:28:13 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [8]

Computers