Jeremy Yoder 
As an engineering services company, what are the keys to DISTek’s future success? We believe it’s: 1) hiring and developing top notch engineers, 2) a best place to work culture, and 3) great leadership. With “great leadership” in mind, we recently established DISTek U and kicked off our first leadership track (DISTek U 101: Potential Leads).
In Cameron Herald’s book Double Double, he writes about how important a shared vision is to top performing business organizations. At DISTek, we just went through the vision setting process. We leaned out into the future to paint a picture of what DISTek will look, feel, and perform like three years into the future. The resulting vision highlights what DISTek’s employees, culture, customers, expertise, offices, and growth will look like on December 31st 2018.
At the AEM Annual Conference last year, Peter Diamandis, CEO of XPRIZE, made a bold prediction to those of us in the audience. He predicted that a decade from now 40% of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be put out of business by disruptive technologies. Although that probably sounds extreme to many of us, I’m sure that former employees at Kodak, Blockbuster, and Borders are less blown away the prediction.
What are the nightmares that cause software engineers to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat? Is it a bad dream about finding their prized toy collection with all of the action figures out of the box? Maybe it’s a mythical sink hole that swallows up the town of Riverside, IA (the future birthplace of Captain James Kirk)? Or, could it be something work related?
DISTek recently surveyed engineers, engineering managers, and engineering executives from companies that manufacture off-highway equipment on the technical outlook for the industry. In the survey we asked respondents about their largest concerns with future on-vehicle technology. The largest concern, selected by 3 out of every 4 respondents, was reliability.
