Another Startup

During my research, I found another company that will be interesting. The Canadian company, also named MediPrint, is providing 3D printed replacement bones. They even offer 48 hours turnaround time for your custom ordered replacement bones.

Conclusion

When you’re looking for some sectors to invest, you will find a lot of potential in HealthTech companies. There still is a lot of space for improvement. I can’t say if one of the two mentioned companies is a good investment. So make your decision to invest based on your own due diligence. And get someone with better Spanish knowledge than me.

The post NovaCast a 3D printed cast by MediPrint appeared first on Rene Windegger.

When dealing with stressed out people you have to keep calm. I was standing guard at a checkpoint, I just took over the position from a colleague the day was very quiet up till then, unloading of the trucks went smooth and delivery stop approached fast. There was a small blockage at the way to the venue, so I had to keep people form driving there.

You really might think people are calm, but not when you don’t have much time left for delivery. So I was standing there when a car approached. The driver slowed down and said something about getting to the venue. He was totally stressed out. I tried to explain what was going on and he would have to wait behind a truck already waiting to do delivery. Instead he just drove right to the venue.

Another car approached, the driver was calm and just did as I said, at least until another car approached. So after a short conversation with the driver, I made clear to park behind the other car. I moved on to the next car and didn’t even spent another minute thinking about that car. As I’ve reached the other car, I’ve turned around and the driver just ignored my clear orders.

That lead to the driver of the first truck, that ignored my orders, came up the hill. He was stressed out and started to shout around. To be honest I wasn’t really able to follow what he was saying because he was shouting to fast and to loud to really spent attention to the words.

After a few minutes shouting around he ordered the driver, that was waiting for a car to come out, to start his engine and drive in. So, what do you do to don’t make the situation worse for everyone? Just stand in front of a car without the fear of getting run over. The stressed out guy was still shouting around and tried to intimidate me.

After a while a colleague, showed up and actually was able to calm down the driver of the first car. The said car to get out from the venue arrived after a while and everything was able to go on as required.

During the next days the stressed out driver approached me and told me to get a drink at his booth. You could easily get intimidated by him but he totally changed his behavior.

So what happened?

From my observations, I would say he was impressed by my behavior. Many people try to intimidate you, but as long as you keep calm and the person you’re dealing with is not totally nuts, you can almost bet on being safe. Keep that in mind while dealing with stressed out people. Let them vent off their steam and try to calm them down. After some time they will realize that what they are doing isn’t helping making anything faster.

After he had done his duty he started to relax. He approached me and my colleague, was really friendly and invited us to visit him at the booth.

During the festival I didn’t have time to visit him but while starting to clean up the venue he invited me over for a drink and gave me 2 coupons. So I’m going to check out his place Claire’s. I think I’ll like Sri Lankan Cuisine.

The post Keep calm and don’t get intimidated appeared first on Rene Windegger.

Why do I tell you about the Simple Sabotage Field Manual?

It’s not that easy to answer. Actually I can somewhat relate to the manual and I’ve done some observations during my work life. There was a time in my work life, during that I faced some very strange feelings, that some of the stuff you get thought in business school, can kill all innovation and progress in a company.

After my study of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, I knew that my feeling was on the right track.

I’m going to take a look at the section I found most interesting while reading the manual. Everything I’m going to talk about can be found in the chapter “(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production“.

The first section in that chapter lays the further rule set for the saboteur regarding corporations. Some of the stuff I could observe in multiple companies I’ve worked for and with. I would even say that some of that behavior can be found in almost every corporation. One of the examples I’ve actively noticed multiple times is about building committees.

A word about committees

What I’ve learned about committees is that as soon as you need a committee to solve a problem you’re doomed and have to deal with immense time scales. Nowadays most committees meet at defined times, once a month or even once a quarter year. During their meeting they need to have all the information available to make decisions. Since no one wants to be blamed for wrong decisions, in many cased that decisions get postponed. You can imaging what that means for a project.

About written orders

Another thing I’ve actually seen is the demand for written orders. Without written orders you’re doomed, when you have written order you might still be doomed. So there is not to much difference to having a written order or not. The only thing about a written order is you don’t have to discuss afterwards about what was included in the offer.

Little impact large issue

There is another thing managers tend to do unintentionally. Refer to point 7 in the manager section. It’s hard to believe that stuff like that really happens, but I’ve seen stuff like that happen. When dealing with data in large quantities from an unstructured source and import it in a structured manner, you almost always happen to have to deal with data issues. So let’s say we have a set of multiple millions of entities and then we have 4 to 5 errors. How would you approach that issues? I would say let’s have a look at that specific entries and see if we can solve the issue or if they simply don’t fit with the new data structure. You won’t handle that 5 corner cases in an automated way. You’re wrong, I’ve seen multiple project go way over time because of issues like that.

Multiply paperwork

Another thing I’ve noticed is point 12. In every company, there was some sort of time tracking. So you have to do time tracking for your attendance and about what you did during that time. That’s something that should be easily handle able by a single system. Everywhere I’ve worked there were at least 2 systems to solve this issue. The worst I saw, was a written paper form, that was signed by the customer, to be transferred into a digital system by the consultant. It’s all OK you would say but in that case there where 3 places to keep track of. Another example is filling out a form for one € 4,– USB Cable (even that’s something I was able to observe).

Conclusion

So why did I write this post. I always thought there must be a reason behind such behavior. Now that I’ve learned about the Simple Sabotage Field Manual i know better. I really wonder where and how the middle management get’s educated in that direction. Maybe there is a textbook out there, I don’t know about, that sheds a different light on behavior like that.

Feel free to discuss your thoughts or your stories you can recall that could come directly from the inside of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

The post A closer look at the Simple Sabotage Field Manual appeared first on Rene Windegger.