Leadership

My Company has recently added "Leadership" into a lot of their corporate rhetoric. I've heard phrases like "creating leaders", "Bob Smith has stepped into a leadership position", or "i can't go to lunch today because I have leadership training"...

To be perfectly honest I don't know what my feelings are about this rhetoric. Although some guesses can be made by my use of the word "rhetoric". I'm hoping to simply collect some thoughts about this topic here.

One of my first gut feel was that this was a good way to keep a certain positive attitude in the minds of the employees. In this case the employees are engineers. The certain positive attitude is that we are part of a bigger picture than the specific engineering problem. The bigger picture is of course the business goals of The Company. I'm OK with this approach because it does achieve a good goal.

When talking about future plans a co-worker said to me:

"I plan on being in some leadership position in this company in the near future"

This strikes me because he was regurgitating the same rhetoric. It almost felt like Manager-Speak. I think what he really meant was that he planned on being in a manager position. Does "Leader" equal "Manager"?

I don't think the architects of the current round of business rhetoric meant this equality to be true. However if the natural progression of employees who become leaders end up stepping into management positions, so be it.

What is a leader? What does it mean to be a leader? If i'm not a leader, can I be trained to be a leader? Is it similar to running faster or jumping higher that I will become better at it with training and practice? How can I be a leader if I am not currently in a leadership role? Do I have to be placed in a leadership role to have the opportunity to become a leader? Or can I simply find leadership opportunities within my normal duties?

These are not easy questions to answer and digging into it more deeply raises more questions.

Nelson Mandela talked about leadership and being a leader. I was happy to see this reflected in the recent movie Invictus. Mandela asked what makes a person a leader? One answer was to lead by example. That is a weak answer really. Its equivalent to saying: "I've been named a leader, so watch me, and you'll know what to do". Sounds ridiculous? Its because it is. Mandela's answer to what makes a person a leader was more inspiring:

"how do we get them to be better then they think they CAN be? That is very difficult, I find. Inspiration, perhaps. How do we inspire ourselves to greatness when nothing less will do? How do we inspire everyone around us? I sometimes think it is by using the work of others."

I find myself reflecting on this quote often as I listen to the leadership rhetoric. As I think about it I start to realize the people I respect and look to as leaders. Some of them have been inspiring me since I was very young while others that share the same quality have only been inspiring me for a short while. In either case I had a hard time quantifying the what it was that inspired me. Its still hard to quantify but I know for sure each person I look up to has inspired me to do something that I didn't think I could do. They inspired me to become better at something or become a better person.

My challenge with interacting with others has now become doing what I can to inspire them to be better than they think they can be. In doing this I hope to do more than I think I can do and become a better person.

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Quotes from Invictus

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1057500/quotes

Other Mandela Wisdom

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1821467,00.html

Batteries

I had the opportunity to see a medical battery manufacturing facility this past week. We are doing a project for the battery manufacturing company to verify manufactured batteries meet the necessary requirement. I was was brought in as a specialist to address a specific application problem they were seeing in their lab but we were unable to reproduce. While we were on site, they gave us an impromptu tour of one of their battery manufacturing facilities. Now, it is important to note that these are not exactly the AA batteries that you put in your remote control. These are batteries that are used in pace makers and defibrillator. The reliability and precision should be evident with this intention in mind.

It was another humbling experience to see the precision and accuracy that is necessary for something that we basically use everyday. The facility asked me not to take any photos so unfortunately I can't share you what it looked like.

As an engineer it is frustrating to here someone say a technically ignorant thing such as "why can't they just make better batteries? The battery in my iPod should be much better!". John Miano said this on the radio not too long ago. John isn't unfamiliar with saying technically inaccurate things. John isn't even unfamiliar with saying things that are just plain wrong. I was reminded of his battery statement as I was dressed in static gown, safety glasses, surgical mask, and gloves viewing the automated chamber where a thin layer of lithium (the battery anode) is stamped out, inspected and added to the stack of anodes and cathodes that make up the battery. The engineer pointed to the huge fire suppression systems near the lithium chambers and said "you really don't want to see a fire in one of these..."

The temperature and humidity are controlled on the manufacturing floor. A large display said it was exactly 69 F, controlled to +- 1 F, and the humidity was held at 0.33%. The engineer on the tour next to me leaned over and said, "this can't be good for my dry skin problem."

The entire line is automated. The anoted and cathode are stamped and layered by robotic arms. Belts queue up and move the pieces from one automated assembly station to the next. The enclosures are also assembled automatically and laser welded. Are you kidding me? I just assumed laser welding was something they liked to do in science fiction movies but was never really practically used.

The chemist who was in charge of putting their custom electrolyte into the battery in the final steps was not too friendly about the tour. However, like all technical people he was all to happy to explain his creation and why it was better than others... I take this with a grain of salt.

So why can't they make better batteries? Mino, I suggest you get yourself to a site that makes these. Talk to the chemical engineers, take the tour of the manufacturing floor. I share the sentiment that I wish my laptop's battery would last much longer. However I'm now amazed that our batteries are as good as they are.

Source Control

I have been using source control in one aspect or another since my second year at college. The source control picked by my professor at the time was CVS hosted on an aging unix box.

Similar to most people's first experience with source control... I didn't get it. After all, passing folder locations back and forth between group members seemed to work just fine. The cumbersome CVS command line tools didn't ease the introduction at all. It took two more years before I truly utilized the tool effectively.

Since then I have used several different flavors of source control professionally: CVS, Microsoft's Source Safe, and have landed on Subversion. I'm so accustomed to developing with Subversion that I can no longer imagine developing without it. I have a personal linux box with subversion installed. Every single project I work on has a repository on my linux box; especially if the project is for someone else. There is a sick satisfaction after checking in changes to some hobby project and knowing all the code is safe and sound, intrinsically backed up along with all its history.

Recently, however, i've been challenged to explain the benefits of source control to people I would have expected to know better. For instance I helped out with a website recently and was challenged when I told another developer I needed to check-in changes and create a tag before moving the updated html files to the live server. "Why would you go throw the trouble of setting up a repo for site containing a few pages?"

I think the only response is: If you are asking that question, you don't understand version control. Or software... or projects... or possibly life.

Here is a list of some of my Source Control Irritations:

• Checking in commented out code
• Not adding a check in comment
• Using useless check in comments like "fixed bug" or my favorite "checking in code"
• Checking in a lot of code one file at a time (this really bloats the history log in svn)