A Vivid Vision: Planning for the Future

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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.

Integrated Projects Engineering Overview

IPE Team

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you probably know a lot of about the areas that DISTek works within. Our expertise ranges across the off-highway vehicle industry (including agriculture, construction, and forestry) with engineers that specialize in a variety of disciplines. Out of convenience, we typically group these disciplines into three big areas (“embedded software”, “automation and test”, and “modeling and simulation”), but the reality is that we do all kinds of projects that cross-over between these disciplines.

Implementing the Fred Factor

The first Ken Baxter Award is presented

In a previous blog entry, I provided a book report on The Fred Factor by Mark Sanborn. I discussed how people can make a positive difference in how they go about their lives, turning something ordinary into the extraordinary. I also shared Sanborn’s acronym FRED to explain how to develop “Freds”.

SAE 2014 Commercial Vehicle Engineering Congress

SAE Commercial Vehicle Engineering Conference

This year’s theme focused on “Engineering Leadership – Changing, Guiding, Influencing”. I had the opportunity to sit in on several technical sessions that included some of the top panelists from across the country. The list included Deere & Company, Case New Holland, Caterpillar, Inc., Eaton and a variety of university professors.

One of the common topics I came across was how to address the increasingly complex and volatile landscape of vehicle products and control systems. How today’s engineers, across all organizations, need to develop strong adaptive thinking abilities and problem solving skills for their customers.

Teamwork as a TACO

Team members of all personality types

You wouldn’t have to look too far to find various forms of media dedicated to teaching you how to overcome your shortcomings. If you are having problems meeting people you can find seminars that will show you how to be more outgoing. If you are always on the go and can’t settle down you can find books that will teach you how to focus. If you are stressed out about your best friend’s health issues you can find a web site that will let you know that it’s ok to not get so involved in other people’s lives. All this seems to me like rowing against the stream so I’m very pleased when I find sources of information that show us how to harness our strengths instead of fixing our weaknesses.

The Eruption of Disruption

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.