Thought Process

How to Have a Eureka Moment during the Coronavirus Lockdown

April 23, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The best solutions to problems sometimes come about suddenly and unexpectedly when people aren’t actively working on their issues.

Psychologists call this phenomenon “incubation”—a brief shift away from a problem that could trigger a flash of insight as if from no additional effort. [Incidentally, “incubation” is very much a term in vogue during the current epidemic.]

Abundant anecdotes evoke creative breakthroughs made when inventors took breaks from working on their problems after many failed attempts to solve them.

‘Eureka Moments’ happen all the time

Perhaps the best-known case in point of incubation is that of the ancient Greek polymath Archimedes.

It’s plausible that Archimedes realized that he could investigate the suspected adulteration of Hieron II’s votive crown (“corona” in Italian/Latin, incidentally) by weighing it in water. The legend doesn’t appear in any of Archimedes’s known works.

That Archimedes leaped out from the bath in which he purportedly got the idea and ran home unclothed is likely a popular embellishment. The Roman architect Vitruvius first mentioned this spin to the story some 200 years after the supposed event:

[Archimedes] happened to go to the bath, and on getting into a tub observed that the more his body sank into it, the more water ran out over the tub. As this pointed out the way to explain the case in question, he jumped out of the tub and rushed home naked, crying with a loud voice that he had found what he was seeking; for he as he ran he shouted repeatedly in Greek, “Heúrēka, heúrēka.” meaning “I have found (it,) I have found (it.)

Millennia later, the scientific world is replete with the exclamation. In fact, the prospectors of California’s gold rush were so keen on the expression that it has appeared on the state seal since 1849, becoming the state’s motto in 1963.

Idea for Impact: To overcome a mental block, take your mind off the problem

After a period of conscious work, if you’ve reached an impasse that is blocking (“fixation”) your awareness of the solution to a problem, set it aside.

Remove yourself from the task. Take your mind off the problem. Go for a run, play with your dog, play an instrument, indulge in your favorite video game, take a shower, or embark on some optimally distracting hobby.

Creativity involves putting old ideas together in new ways. Your mind may be shuffling information at all times, even when you’re not conscious of it. You may just hit upon a solution during either your time away or when you return to the problem after the incubation period.

Five Where Only One is Needed: How Airbus Avoids Single Points of Failure

April 6, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In my case study of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft’s anti-stall mechanism, I examined how relying on data from only one Angle-of-Attack (AoA) sensor caused two accidents and the aircraft’s consequent grounding.

A single point of failure is a system component, which, upon failure, renders the entire system unavailable, dysfunctional, or unreliable. In other words, if a bunch of things relies on one component within your system, and that component breaks, you are counting the time to a catastrophe.

Case Study: How Airbus Builds Multiple Redundancies to Minimize Single Points of Failure

As the Boeing 737 MAX disaster has emphasized, single points of failure in products, services, and processes may spell disaster for organizations that have not adequately identified and mitigated these critical risks. Reducing single points of failure requires a thorough knowledge of the vital systems and processes that an organization relies on to be successful.

Since the dawn of flying, reliance on one sensor has been anathema.

The Airbus A380 aircraft, for example, features 100,000 different wires—that’s 470 km of cables weighing some 5700 kg. Airbus’s wiring includes double or triple redundancy to mitigate the risk of single points of failure caused by defect wiring (e.g., corrosion, chafing of isolation or loose contact) or cut wires (e.g., through particles intruding aircraft structure as in case of an engine burst.)

The Airbus fly-by-wire flight control system has quadruplex redundancy i.e., it has five flight control computers where only one computer is needed to fly the aircraft. Consequently, an Airbus aircraft can afford to lose four of these computers and still be flyable. Of the five flight control computers, three are primary computers and two are secondary (backup) computers. The primary and the secondary flight control computers use different processors, are designed and supplied by different vendors, feature different chips from different manufacturers, and have different software systems developed by different teams using different programming languages. All this redundancy reduces the probability of common hardware- and software-errors that could lead to system failure.

Redundancy is Expensive but Indispensable

The multiple redundant flight control computers continuously keep track of each other’s output. If one computer produces deviant results for some reason, the flight control system as a whole excludes the results from that aberrant computer in determining the appropriate actions for the flight controls.

By replicating critical sensors, computers, and actuators, Airbus provides for a “graceful degradation” state, where essential facilities remain available, allowing the pilot to fly and land the plane. If an Airbus loses all engine power, a ram air turbine can power the aircraft’s most critical systems, allowing the pilot to glide and land the plane (as happened with Air Transat Flight 236.)

Idea for Impact: Build redundancy to prevent system failure from the breakdown of a single component

When you devise a highly reliable system, identify potential single points of failure, and investigate how these risks and failure modes can be mitigated.

For every component of a product or a service you work on, identify single points of failure by asking, “If this component fails, does the rest of the system still work, and, more importantly, does it still do the function it is supposed to do?”

Add redundancy to the system so that failure of any component does not mean failure of the entire system.

If you can’t build redundancy into a system due to some physical or operational complexity, establish frequent inspections and maintenance to keep the system reliable.

Postscript: In people-management, make sure that no one person has sole custody of some critical institutional knowledge, creativity, reputation, or experience that makes him indispensable to the organization’s business continuity and its future performance. If he/she should leave, the organization suffers the loss of that valued standing and expertise. See my article about this notion of key-person dependency risk, the threat posed by an organization, or a team’s over-reliance on one or a few individuals.

What Happens When You Talk About Too Many Goals

February 28, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

To supplement this illustrious sketch by the British cartoonist Matt Pritchett, an excerpt from HuffPost’s article on “How Jeremy Corbyn Lost The Election,”

One big problem was the sheer size of the [Labour Party] manifesto and the number of policies on offer. Candidates complained that they didn’t have a single five-point pledge card like the one Tony Blair made famous. While the Tories had a simple message of ‘Get Brexit Done,’ Labour lacked a similarly easy ‘doorstep offer.’ “We had so much in the manifesto we almost had too much,” one senior source said. “It felt like none of it was cutting through. You needed to boil it down.”

“We tried to give a retail offer and also a grand vision and ended up falling between the two stools. To get across ‘you’ll be better off with Labour,’ we should have made our position clearer much earlier.”

Idea for Impact: Distill your goals into simple messages that others will find relevant and timely. When it comes to persuasion, clarity and conciseness are critical. Weak messages meander. Smart messages immediately express what’s important and help rally your resources towards your mission.

The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage

February 20, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you’re an entrepreneur entering a new market with a product or service that nobody else offers, you’ll seek the first-mover advantage.

You’ll move quickly to get established as a market leader. If your business idea has the potential to succeed, other entrepreneurs are possibly working on it at the same time or will be quick to emulate when they see what you’re doing.
You’ll validate your concepts quickly by identifying and partnering with a few enthusiastic “guinea pig” customers who can test your product or service early on and give you feedback regarding what customers really want.
You’ll create some barriers (“establish an economic moat” in Warren Buffett-speak) to inhibit other aspirants from entering the market—you’ll secure patents on your intellectual property, lock-in key locations, or negotiate longer-term contracts with customers.

Alas, many first-mover advantages are not sustainable, and many first-movers are as successful as what the superstars will have you believe.

First-to-Market is often First-to-Fail

New ventures have higher failure rates than more established businesses.

Creating market awareness, sustaining market acceptance, fending away aggressive competitors are often easier said than done for many new ventures, not to mention lining up suppliers and distributors. Besides, unless you’re well-capitalized by patient investors, you’re likely to face higher-than-foreseen marketing costs on top of lower-than-anticipated sales.

Instead, if you are the second—or later—entrepreneur to market, you’ll stand a better chance of success by learning from the forerunner’s mistakes. You’ll also earn better credence from your customers, suppliers, distributors, employees, and investors to help create a better product or service.

Idea for Impact: There’s an American adage that “many pioneers died with arrows in their backs.” The best time for an entrepreneur to offer a new product or service is after others have already gotten there and laid some groundwork.

The Best Leaders Make the Complex Simple

February 17, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The New York Times‘s Adam Bryant interviewed 525 CEOs for his Corner Office column and compiled two excellent books, The Corner Office (2012) and Quick and Nimble (2014,) on leadership and management advice. Foremost among the themes common with successful leaders, Bryant says, is “a simple mindset”—the ability to synthesize the simple from the complex and create organizational priorities.

There’s a really important quality [in great CEOs] that I call a “simple mindset,” which is the ability to take a lot of complicated information and really boil it down to the one or two or three things that really matter, and in a simple way, communicate that to people.

In big organizations—frankly, in any company—there are always a dozen or more competing priorities. And it is the leader’s job to stand up in front of the troops and say, “These are the three things that we are going to focus on this year,” or “These are the goals and this is how we are going to measure them.” If you really want to galvanize people and get them operating as a team, you’ve got to create a simple scoreboard that everybody understands.

The communication style, to me, is secondary to getting the content right. And what I’ve been so often impressed by is leaders who can essentially boil down the company’s goals and operating model into, literally, less than a page.

This is a real trick to leadership—creating a simple structure so that everybody in the organization can understand how the work they are doing contributes to the broader goals.

Rob Andrews, CEO of the executive headhunting firm Allen Austin, underscores this “boil the complex into the simple” approach in his leadership manual, High-Performance Human Capital Leadership (2015,)

I have found that when I go into a company to lead, it is important to have a plan and to make that plan a simple one that everybody can understand. I am constantly asking the question,—What are the two or three levers that, if done right, if pulled correctly, will really turn this business? What are the two or three things that really matter? And I find that most leaders do not really do that often.

Idea for Impact: One of the essential attributes of a modern leader is the ability to cut complexity everywhere. Develop the ability to take large, complicated things—and information—and make them very simple.

What You Learn from Failure

February 3, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One common theme among people who cope particularly effectively with failure is their ability to acknowledge the failure, put it in perspective, and seek causes, not blame. As the Dalai Lama XIV writes in The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Inner Peace (2009,)

If a misfortune has already occurred, it is best not to worry about it, so we do not add fuel to the problem. Don’t ally yourself with past events by lingering on them and exaggerating them. Let the past take care of itself, and transport yourself to the present while taking whatever measures are necessary to ensure that such a misfortune never occurs again, now or in the future.

American investor and superstar hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio writes in his very instructive Principles: Life and Work (2017,)

I learned that everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them. I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it, i.e., a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future. I learned that each mistake was probably a reflection of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective. I learned that wrestling with my problems, mistakes, and weaknesses was the training that strengthened me. Also, I learned that it was the pain of this wrestling that made me and those around me appreciate our successes.

In short, I learned that being totally truthful, especially about mistakes and weaknesses, led to a rapid rate of improvement.

Much is written about the notion of failures as gifts, but the key to dealing with failures is to attribute those failures to weaknesses in a thought process, not to personal flaws. Failures expose a weakness in your underlying process, which you can now fix. Fine-tune your tactics until you find out what doeswork. Dalio instructs,

When a problem occurs, conduct the discussion at two levels: 1) the machine level (why that outcome was produced) and 2) the case-at-hand level (what to do about it.)

Idea for Impact: Don’t rationalize failures and magnify them in your mind. Fix them. Then, reflect on what they teach about what didn’t work. Inquire, “What was missing?” rather than “What went wrong?” The latter results in finger-pointing. The former opens up possibilities and results in personal growth.

Inspirational Mess, Creative Clutter

January 27, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Biographer Roland Penrose (1900–84) writes in Picasso: His Life and Work (1958,)

Disorder was to Picasso a happier breeding ground for ideas than the perfection of a tidy room in which nothing upset the equilibrium by being out of place.

Once when visiting Picasso at his flat in the rue la Boétie, I noticed that a large Renoir hanging over the fireplace was crooked. “It’s better like that,” he said. “If you want to kill a picture, all you have to do is to hang it beautifully on a nail and soon you will see nothing of it but the frame. When it’s out of place you see it better.”

Studies suggest that, for some people, messiness can boost creativity by spurring inspiration flow and helping them explore different avenues. One researcher explained, “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights.”

But don’t use this concept as a crutch to defend your clutter.

Avoid Decision Fatigue: Don’t Let Small Decisions Destroy Your Productivity

January 20, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Making some decisions depletes mental resources for making more important ones

Every decision you make impacts the quality of successive decisions you’ll have to make, even in totally unrelated situations.

That’s because, according to the much-debated “muscle metaphor” of willpower, your mental stamina is limited.

As Roy Baumeister and John Tierney explained in their bestselling book on Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (2011; my summary,) you have a finite strength of will for making prudent choices. As you go about your day, your willpower is depleted and “decision fatigue” sets in. Consequently, you’re likely to employ one of two cognitive shortcuts in decision-making: you avoid the act of deciding altogether or make an less-thoughtful, sub-optimal decision.

Don’t get overloaded with so many pointless decisions that your cognitive productivity ends up falling off a cliff.

President Barack Obama claimed that he makes deliberate efforts to avoid decision fatigue so that he can devote his mental energies to things that matter. Michael Lewis quotes Obama in the October 2012 issue of Vanity Fair,

You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits … I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. … You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.

In the same way, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sports a limited wardrobe. He has previously declared that doesn’t waste time and energy to pick his daily outfits: “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve the community.”

Idea for Impact: Establish healthy routines that can eliminate unnecessary deliberation

Life is the sum total of all the mundane and momentous choices you make. Being monotonous in handling the former enables you to excel in the latter. Limit decision fatigue by

putting as much of your life as possible on an autopilot using routines / rituals and checklists,
limiting the choices you have (read Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less,) and
delegating decision-making where possible.

Good routines can provide structure to your day, protect you from your more effective negative impulses, and bring order and predictability to your life. Besides, according to renowned career coach Marty Nemko, “modern life, increasingly defined by unpredictability, can be anxiety-provoking, and routines provide an anchor of predictability.”

What James Watt and the Steam Engine Teach You about Creativity and Invention

December 9, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

The arc of development of the technique to harness the properties of steam to power mechanical devices embodies the notion that “necessity is the mother of invention” (Latin: “necessitas ingenium dedit.”)

Towards the end of the 17th century, Britain faced the problem of pumping and draining water out of mine shafts. In response, the military engineer Thomas Savery (1650–1715) invented an “engine to raise water by fire” in 1698. However, the “Savery Pump” was limited in practical usage to 20–25 feet of suction. Savery’s rudimentary pressurized boiler was liable to explode, particularly under high-pressure steam (over 8 to 10 atmospheres.)

Independently, and later in partnership with Savery, blacksmith Thomas Newcomen (1664–1729) developed the more practical—and more successful—atmospheric-pressure piston engine in 1698. Newcomen’s engine solved the limitation of the Savery Pump by having atmospheric pressure push the cylinder’s piston down after the condensation of steam had created a vacuum in the cylinder. Therefore, the pressure of the steam did not limit the intensity of pressure.

For five decades, Newcomen’s engine was the most complex technological object of its time anywhere in the world.

Difficulties Compel People to Found Creative Solutions to Problems

Then came along the Scottish instrument maker James Watt (1736–1819.) At age 21, Watt opened a shop in 1757 at the Glasgow University to make quadrants, compasses, scales, and other mathematical instruments.

Watt was tasked with repairing a Newcomen Engine at the university for a lecture-demonstration. He initially had difficulty getting the Newcomen Engine to work because its parts were poorly constructed. When he finally had it running, he was surprised at its efficiency. However, the engine was constantly running out of coal because every cycle required the heating and the cooling of the cylinder, thus resulting in a large waste of energy.

In 1769, Watt devised a system whereby the cylinder and the condenser were separate, making it unnecessary to heat and cool the cylinder with each stroke. Watt’s invention of the separate-condenser steam engine (also called the “double-acting” steam engine) decreased fuel costs by 75 percent.

Watt’s “steam engine” was able to produce continuous rotary motion and expanded its use far beyond pumping water. Continuous rotary motion sparked the transition from hand-production methods to machine-power and became the driving force of the Industrial Revolution. Playwright George Bernard Shaw even declared in Man and Superman (1903,) “those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine.”

The steam engine continued to power industry and transportation during much of the 19th century and early 20th century, at the same time as engineers developed the internal-combustion engine. Towards the end of the 19th century, with the invention of the first practical steam turbine by English engineer Charles Parsons (1854–1931,) turbines started replacing reciprocating steam engines in power stations.

Reference: Richard L. Hills’s Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine (1989.)

Many Businesses Get Started from an Unmet Personal Need

October 21, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi 2 Comments

Many successful entrepreneurs never set out with the goal of launching a large company, let alone hiring scores of people. They are motivated enough to develop solutions to a direct problem they are facing. Before long, they discover that they are not the only ones with that problem—and, like so, a successful business is born.

How “The Cult of Lulu” Got Started

Consider the genesis of Lululemon, the Canadian athletic apparel company (from The Atlantic‘s narrative of how sports changed the way Americans dress.)

In 1997, a retail entrepreneur in British Columbia named Chip Wilson was having back problems. So, like millions of people around the world, he went to a yoga class. What struck Wilson most in his first session wasn’t the poses; it was the pants. He noticed that his yoga instructor was wearing some slinky dance attire, the sort of second skin that makes a fit person’s butt look terrific. Wilson felt inspired to mass-produce this vision of posterior pulchritude. The next year, he started a yoga design-and-fashion business and opened his first store in Vancouver. It was called Lululemon.

[Yes, that’s the Chip Wilson who gained notoriety for blaming in-poor-shape women for ruining their Lululemon yoga pants by rubbing their thighs together too much. “Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work for it [his apparel],” he condescendingly declared on Bloomberg TV.]

At present, Lululemon has the highest sales-per-square-foot of any American apparel retailer. Its pricey workout clothing has become a wardrobe staple, prompting other retailers to launch competing apparel lines to cash in on the growing market.

Lululemon kindled the prevailing fixation on a healthy appearance. Its brand continues to be an elite fitness status symbol for the skinny and wealthy set. More broadly, over the last two decades, Lululemon has redefined how the current generation dresses and lives. The company pioneered the “athleisure” fashion revolution, which has blurred the lines between yoga-and-spin-class outfits and regular street clothes.

Sara Blakely’s Personal Undertaking Morphed Spanx into a Big Business

In a similar vein, entrepreneur Sara Blakely started the Spanx hosiery company after searching for a solution to improve the way she looked in a pair of her cream-colored pants. Blakely started her wildly successful entrepreneurial journey by making sure that the specific type of undergarment she ideated to solve her clothing problem did materialize commercially. From her biography on Wikipedia,

Forced to wear pantyhose in the hot Floridian climate for her sales role, Blakely disliked the appearance of the seamed foot while wearing open-toed shoes, but liked the way that the control-top model eliminated panty lines and made her body appear firmer. For her attendance at a private party, she experimented by cutting off the feet of her pantyhose while wearing them under a new pair of slacks and found that the pantyhose continuously rolled up her legs, but she also achieved the desired result.

Idea for Impact: Learn to Pay Attention to the Subtle Clues to Opportunities All-Around

Many entrepreneurs initially got their start by first recognizing and responding to a personal need or a localized problem and later discovering that they struck a universal chord.

If you want to become an entrepreneur, find out if you can solve a problem that you’ve personally experienced. Uncover opportunities that you may otherwise have missed by asking, “Does this have to be time-consuming, arduous, expensive, or annoying?” “How can I improve on this?” and “Can I do this better or different from the other fellow doing it over there?” Then expand your opportunity by asking, “Who else may be experiencing the same problem?”

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Thought Process

‘Eureka Moments’ happen all the time

Idea for Impact: To overcome a mental block, take your mind off the problem

Wondering what to read next?

Case Study: How Airbus Builds Multiple Redundancies to Minimize Single Points of Failure

Redundancy is Expensive but Indispensable

Idea for Impact: Build redundancy to prevent system failure from the breakdown of a single component

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

First-to-Market is often First-to-Fail

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Making some decisions depletes mental resources for making more important ones

Don’t get overloaded with so many pointless decisions that your cognitive productivity ends up falling off a cliff.

Idea for Impact: Establish healthy routines that can eliminate unnecessary deliberation

Wondering what to read next?

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Difficulties Compel People to Found Creative Solutions to Problems

Wondering what to read next?

How “The Cult of Lulu” Got Started

Sara Blakely’s Personal Undertaking Morphed Spanx into a Big Business

Idea for Impact: Learn to Pay Attention to the Subtle Clues to Opportunities All-Around

Wondering what to read next?