Three different pieces of recent business writing that struck me as particularly interesting were on companies I've written about and posted on a number of times previously in Twitter, Amazon & Hewlett-Packard.
From the Nov 11-17 issue of Businessweek was "The Hidden Technology That Makes Twitter Huge" by Paul Ford and it featured tremendously interesting information about the amount of detail that each and every tweet contains, and how that detail can then be sliced, diced, categorized and segmented. Past pieces of writing on Twitter I've noted and linked to can be found here and the company strikes me as just remarkable in its value as a platform for information dissemination.
Another interesting piece of writing also from Businessweek was done earlier this week for the website with "Amazon's Drone Fleet Delivers What Bezos Wants: An Image of Ingenuity" by Brad Stone. The story was written on the heels of a much talked-about 60 minutes segment on the company and Stone very well qualified to write the piece given his recently published book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. I've written about and linked to pieces on Amazon quite a few times and it's so interesting to me how on top of its consumer efforts, Amazon Web Services cloud computing offering also a large business.
The final piece of business writing to note here was a recent piece for Wired with "HP Hides Monster 3-D Printer in Its Basement" by Robert McMillan. The company seems to be on the right track now after a number of board and executive stumbles and bumbles over the past few years (with me having linked to stories both positive and negative about HP) and it will be interesting to see how 3-D printing efforts go.
Showing posts with label 3D printing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 3D printing. Show all posts
Thursday, December 05, 2013
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Businessweek Feature Stories: on Jay Heinrichs / DNA Fold Manufacturing / 3D Printing / Manufacturing Efficiency / Clayton Christensen
There's been a number of interesting feature stories to mention from Businessweek lately.
From the Mar 19 issue, Peter Heller wrote the feature "Jay Heinrichs's Powers of Persuasion" on the communications consultant who charges five figures for corporate sessions. Specifically, he teaches Aristotelian rhetoric to organizations doing either leadership development or message creation. Heller covers Heinrichs's use of Aristotle's persuasion tools of ethos (argument by character), logos (argument by logic) and pathos (appeal to the emotion) and the assertion by Heinrichs that ethos carries the most weight of the three (though all important). Heinrichs sounds to have interesting ideas about this important area of communication effectiveness and he published in 2007 the book Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion.
The May 7 issue had two features of interest, with "Clay Christensen's Life Lessons" by Bradford Wieners and "Is Origami the Future of Tech?" by Drake Bennett.
This second piece was particularly fascinating and covers the topic of DNA fold origami manufacturing... and brings to mind some other interesting BW stories on the same topic of building stuff, like "3D Printers: Make Whatever You Want" by Ashlee Vance and "My Week at Private Equity Boot Camp" by Brendan Greeley on (among other things) efficiency gains in production.
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Blog post addition: After continuing to think back on (and then reread) the Drake Bennett piece, it seemed this story and it's topic of DNA fold orgami as a manufacturing method merited more written on it here. It's an amazing idea that departs completely from manufacturing paradigms based on sculpture (take a block and chisel away what's not needed) or piece-together assembly. Instead, Bennett describes a process of manufacturing for objects (both large and nano-sized) based at least in part on the work of mathematician and computer scientist Erik Demaine...
"Fold-and-cut allowed you to make any shape in the world, any collection of shapes, even, as long as they had straight sides. One could, in an angular font, create the entire text of this page with the right folds and the right cut. In a paper published two years later, Demaine expanded on this idea, extending it into three dimensions: Any faceted solid, he showed, no matter how complex or irregular, could be folded from a single uncut sheet of paper. Start with a piece of paper big enough, and you could model Notre Dame down to the last gargoyle."
The idea seems outlandish, but is actually based on objects in the natural world like flowers or snowflakes (with the idea of folding illustrated by paper snowflakes usually made in school). Remarkable concept that seems to me likely the type of innovation Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Perlman had in mind when he said the following (from an April 2011 Businessweek story that I wrote about in this blog post)...
"Facebook is not the kind of technology that will stop us from having dropped cell phone calls, and neither is Groupon or any of these advertising things," he says. "We need them. O.K., great. But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings."
It's not to find fault with communication platforms like Facebook or Twitter, but rather to highlight this case of what could be real true breakthrough innovation in the field of manufacturing.
From the Mar 19 issue, Peter Heller wrote the feature "Jay Heinrichs's Powers of Persuasion" on the communications consultant who charges five figures for corporate sessions. Specifically, he teaches Aristotelian rhetoric to organizations doing either leadership development or message creation. Heller covers Heinrichs's use of Aristotle's persuasion tools of ethos (argument by character), logos (argument by logic) and pathos (appeal to the emotion) and the assertion by Heinrichs that ethos carries the most weight of the three (though all important). Heinrichs sounds to have interesting ideas about this important area of communication effectiveness and he published in 2007 the book Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion.
The May 7 issue had two features of interest, with "Clay Christensen's Life Lessons" by Bradford Wieners and "Is Origami the Future of Tech?" by Drake Bennett.
This second piece was particularly fascinating and covers the topic of DNA fold origami manufacturing... and brings to mind some other interesting BW stories on the same topic of building stuff, like "3D Printers: Make Whatever You Want" by Ashlee Vance and "My Week at Private Equity Boot Camp" by Brendan Greeley on (among other things) efficiency gains in production.
-----
Blog post addition: After continuing to think back on (and then reread) the Drake Bennett piece, it seemed this story and it's topic of DNA fold orgami as a manufacturing method merited more written on it here. It's an amazing idea that departs completely from manufacturing paradigms based on sculpture (take a block and chisel away what's not needed) or piece-together assembly. Instead, Bennett describes a process of manufacturing for objects (both large and nano-sized) based at least in part on the work of mathematician and computer scientist Erik Demaine...
"Fold-and-cut allowed you to make any shape in the world, any collection of shapes, even, as long as they had straight sides. One could, in an angular font, create the entire text of this page with the right folds and the right cut. In a paper published two years later, Demaine expanded on this idea, extending it into three dimensions: Any faceted solid, he showed, no matter how complex or irregular, could be folded from a single uncut sheet of paper. Start with a piece of paper big enough, and you could model Notre Dame down to the last gargoyle."
The idea seems outlandish, but is actually based on objects in the natural world like flowers or snowflakes (with the idea of folding illustrated by paper snowflakes usually made in school). Remarkable concept that seems to me likely the type of innovation Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Perlman had in mind when he said the following (from an April 2011 Businessweek story that I wrote about in this blog post)...
"Facebook is not the kind of technology that will stop us from having dropped cell phone calls, and neither is Groupon or any of these advertising things," he says. "We need them. O.K., great. But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings."
It's not to find fault with communication platforms like Facebook or Twitter, but rather to highlight this case of what could be real true breakthrough innovation in the field of manufacturing.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Fast Company Feb issue: Changing Business & Careers
Couple of really good features in the latest issue of Fast Company.
First two pieces that stood out both relate to the cover verbiage and and get into how business as well as career management differs from their past iterations. Starting things off, magazine editor Robert Safian wrote the long (and long titled) This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business. Really interesting content that looks at change in business and how people are navigating careers from the standpoint of a toolbox of skills to take anywhere rather than simply hitching early to a corporation and hanging on.
Closely related to this career management path was the companion piece of The Four-Year Career by Anya Kamenetz. Solid stuff about how jobs and people's employment in them is going to change over time and workers should expect, be ready for and use to their advantage this change.
Not really connected to the first two stories, but also interesting was MakerBot's 3-D Printers Let Consumers Dream Up Prototypes Of Pretty Much Anything. But Do We Need More Plastic? by Rob Walker. The creation of actual objects at home based on the specs... an entirely new concept that could well become common in the future.
First two pieces that stood out both relate to the cover verbiage and and get into how business as well as career management differs from their past iterations. Starting things off, magazine editor Robert Safian wrote the long (and long titled) This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business. Really interesting content that looks at change in business and how people are navigating careers from the standpoint of a toolbox of skills to take anywhere rather than simply hitching early to a corporation and hanging on.
Closely related to this career management path was the companion piece of The Four-Year Career by Anya Kamenetz. Solid stuff about how jobs and people's employment in them is going to change over time and workers should expect, be ready for and use to their advantage this change.
Not really connected to the first two stories, but also interesting was MakerBot's 3-D Printers Let Consumers Dream Up Prototypes Of Pretty Much Anything. But Do We Need More Plastic? by Rob Walker. The creation of actual objects at home based on the specs... an entirely new concept that could well become common in the future.
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