You can’t say that!!

I recently attended our company’s annual National Sales Meeting in Schaumburg, IL. The National Sales Meeting is always a fun event that brings most distributors and company marketing and sales people together to review the results from last year and be motivated to do even better in the coming year. It also provides excellent opportunities to meet a lot of people and build camaraderie among us.

This year’s event was even more interesting since a “Technical Summit” was added to the event such that engineers also participated in the overall activities. There were general events for all the participants and specific “Technical” and “Sales” tracks for “gearheads” and marketing/sales professionals respectively. I must say the general events such as the motivational speaker discussing Behavior Types and Team Building exercises were the two highlights of the event.

I also had the privilege to share a topic at the “Sales” side of the meeting. Being an engineer by training, it is always fun for me to share with sales and marketing folks. So I prepared myself pretty well and told the audience that I was going to throw out my engineering hat and wear my salesman’s hat for this presentation. About two minutes into my talk, I mentioned that I was going to share with the audience the advantages and disadvantages of the solutions and products that I was presenting. No sooner when those words left my mouth, I knew I made a pretty bad mistake! Sure enough, someone from the audience shouted out: “A GOOD salesman will never talk about any disadvantages of the products he is selling!!!” Well, I guessed my attempt to wear the salesperson’s hat didn’t go as well as I had planned.

The experience reminded me of a demo that I did many years ago for some high-level executives when I was a young engineer at my previous company. As usual the demo was put together in the last minutes, and sure enough it broke during the presentation. Glued together hardware and patched software (i.e. smokes and mirrors) usually do not work very well for technical demos! Instead of figuring out how to recover and gracefully move on to other things, I started to go into detailed technical discussions on why the system did not work and what should have been done to correct the problems. Well, the executives just smiled and moved on to the next demo when I was done. But after the whole thing, I was chastised “BIG” time by my boss for not knowing what NOT to say under the circumstances. I guess I didn’t learn about knowing what NOT to say very well, did I?

Is it in the engineers’ DNA that we just have to explain everything the way it is? We sure know that no product is perfect so what’s wrong with explaining the disadvantages or issues of a product? We know the issues and we know how to fix them, so why can’t we talk about them so people can REALLY understand???  Hmmmm… May be engineers should have listened to their parents better when we were told “If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.”

Anyway, I am glad the company did not hire me as a sales person and I better stay with the tasks I know how to do. Of course, I am sure you want to know the problems with this plan of staying with the jobs I know how to do. Let me describe them to you ……… NOT!

Changes, Changes!! Are they Good?

April is an interesting time for a lot of reasons: the start of the baseball season (Go Tigers!), the “real” transition into spring (well, it is supposed to anyway!), the tax season (depending whether you are paying more or getting a refund may dictate whether it is a bad time or a good time)…., but it is also quite interesting at the work place also.

April is the beginning of a new fiscal year at Mitsubishi, and with it also comes a lot of organizational changes in the U.S., at the Headquarters in Tokyo, and at the factories in Nagoya. Many of the people that I worked with regularly in Japan switched jobs, moved to organizations overseas, promoted to totally different groups and areas for examples; it will take me a while to re-establish all the contacts and channels of communication. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the changes. The changes always bring new opportunities for me to know new people, to expand my network of connections, to establish new friendship. It just needs time for me to adjust to these new changes.

I don’t believe any organization change is made with the intention of making things worse. There are many reasons why the changes are made, and in the minds of decision makers the changes are necessary to improve efficiency, to reduce costs, etc. I have lived through many org changes in my career. I have gone through consolidation efforts to combine different departments and divisions into centralized organizations, all in the names of “efficiency” and “economics of scale.” Of course a few years later I would live through the changes of breaking up the organizations into smaller ones in the names of “flexibility” and “agility.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We will have a “large” government for a while and then a “smaller” one for a few years. So what is it? Is centralized or large a better form of organizations? Or is decentralized or smaller better?

Well, of course the answer is that there are no perfect organizations or systems. After we execute under one set of rules for a while, people started to notice the deficiencies of the system or organization and demand changes. The problem usually is that the pendulum will swing to the other extreme because people are “fed up” with the problems and start to believe drastic changes are needed and the other form of the organization must be better.

Allow me to diverge for a bit. Making no change is not good; making too many changes too frequently is not good either. We can apply the same arguments to explain why some end users are not willing to switch automation suppliers for their manufacturing operations and some others will change automation suppliers on every new project. I knew people who complaint about all the problems they had with a particular automation supplier but when the next project came along, they picked the same supplier anyway just because they already knew all the problems they would have to deal with, and knowing that gave them some level of comfort instead of dealing with unknown problems from a new supplier. On the other hands, there were customers who changed suppliers just because one or two minor issues they encountered. Which one is right? Humm…. it depends….

Anyway, back to our issue at hand, are organization changes good? I don’t think there is a definite answer to the question. Personally I don’t think the structure itself is the most critical factor to achieve the desirable results of an organization; good people with dedicated working attitude will make any organization effective. Correct organization structure will help them do their jobs easier, but having good people and knowing how to utilize them properly are the foundations to the success of any organization changes.

I am leading a new organization at start of the new fiscal year. I am confident that this change is good just because I have good, capable and dedicated people in the new group. So, if you’ve just gone through an organization change, do you think the change is good? I guess only you can answer that question. And remember that you are the one who can make the change good!
Happy new adventure, nevertheless!

I Got Bars!!

Yea! Blue sky, bright sunshine, gentle waves, warm breezes …

No, I was not dreaming and I was not in Michigan either! I was on a cruise ship last week in the Eastern Caribbean, and those were the elements I enjoyed for the whole week! I haven’t been on a cruise for a long, long time and I got to realize again how relaxing and wonderful the experience was.

I am sure you all know the common “complaint” that every cruiser has is “eating too much!” But everyone complaining seems to be saying that with a big smile on his or her face and turns around to grab another piece of desert as soon as the words are out. A lot of happy people on the ship, I must say. The only real problems that one has on a cruise ship are …. there are no “reasonable” cell phone and internet connections!! Sure, you can purchase the “internet package” from the cruise ship for 65 cents a minute to get on the slow internet connection, and I don’t even know how much they charge for phone calls through satellite connections. But how many emails you can answer or webpages you can surf without breaking the bank?

I know, I know, I was on vacation and I was not supposed to answer emails and phone calls. With so many things to do on the ship and places to visit, who has time to surf the web anyway? But I must confess that it felt really “uncomfortable” that I couldn’t simply turn on the cell phone and read emails and make phone calls, all the little things that had become parts of our lives that we didn’t appreciate until we didn’t have easy access to them anymore. A couple of our friends who cruised with us own a real estate business in California, and they were in even deeper panic without the easy connections. They purchased the 500- minute internet connection package just to keep up with all the real estate transactions through the snail-pace internet. I must say that using Skype to make phone calls through this connection was quite a painful experience.

A “break-through” came when the ship docked at St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands after three days. All of a sudden we got “bars” on our phones! You should see the excitements on all the faces! Not only that, I found out that the cell phone services were “free” as parts of my regular services! What a relief, especially to our friends who must have made close to a hundred calls and answered all the emails, they were so busy they even missed the dinner.

No wonder one of the key technologies in automation is also network connectivity! The need for people to get information are far greater than we realized until the communication is lost or only substandard communication is available. This experience re-emphasized the importance for us, Mitsubishi, to provide faster, better, cheaper communication products and be even more effective in executing the eManufacturing strategy that was in place. We can really help improve the productivity by doing so!

Anyway, I have all the comfort feelings back now that I am at home and connected again! But come to think of it, being on the sea for a week and losing “bars” is not too bad of a tradeoff. Now, will it be nice if they can only build some 4G LTE towers in the oceans to make the cruising more “productive?”

Which Way You Are Looking..

Do you know that the Chinese New Year is coming up this weekend? It is the year of “Snake”. I know, it may not sound “cute” as the “Rabbit” or the “Dog”, but it is my year and it will be a great year just because of it.

I like the New Year, and the change to a new season. Like many people, I like it because the new gives me an opportunity to start from scratch and bury the past that I don’t particularly like or want to remember.

At this time of the season when the Old has gone by the wayside and the New is upon us, we see people like to create a lot of lists of events, songs, stories, people…. that are most memorable for the past year, or lists of predictions that will happen in the New Year. I am sure you all have seen the “The top news stories of 2012”, “Top Ten Weirdest Stories of 2012”, “2012 TIME 100: The Most Influential People in the World”, or something similar to those. Or you might have read “Top ten tech predictions for 2013”, “News for predictions for 2013”, “20 Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2013 and Beyond”, or something even more bizarre than those. The question is: “Are these lists any use for you other than somewhat interesting reading?”

Somehow people like to look back and some forward, and most the time we are not totally sure why we do either. Sure, we thought we do, but in reality, we do that without even thinking why. I always believe that we do need to look back for two reasons: to remember the mistakes that we made so we don’t make them again, and to remember all the good things happened to us so we can really appreciate what we have. I am not the one who dwells in the failures and mistakes of the past and constantly mesmerized by them and felt pity for myself. As a matter of fact, you should not either since doing so produces absolutely no positive effects on your future. I am a forward looking person. I like the excitement of new tasks waiting for me to complete, opportunities to do something new, chances to expand the good things we have accomplished. How exciting and challenging!

So I looked back and see the two automotive powertrain solutions that the team developed were adopted by two large automotive customers and being implemented on two large scale automotive projects. That really is good because of the good people, good team and individual efforts, good results. And I look forward to taking the solutions to the higher level in the New Year and expect to complete the implementations successfully, enhance the solutions, and gain new customers. I am excited to see the opportunities that are opening up to Mitsubishi and the excellent joint effort globally to promote these solutions.

So celebrate the beginning of the Snake this weekend and look forward to a great year in your own life!

Decisions, Decisions

We are in the thick of football season, and depending on how your team is doing, you may have some heart-burn moments like I had in the past few weeks being a Lions fan. If you are a football fan, you probably know about the “non-touchdown” that was a touchdown that couldn’t be challenged because the coach threw the challenge flag “illegally” that doomed the Lions in the Thanksgiving day game. Just to show you when people made decisions based on emotion and frustration, the results were generally not very good! (p.s. if you are not a football fan and you don’t know what I am talking about, that is okay. Just remember that the comment still applies!)

Being football fans, we were all very good Monday Morning Quarterbacks; just like we all should be multi-millionaires if we make our investment decisions after the fact. Unfortunately we don’t make decisions that way. Americans are people who have a lot of opinions for sure, and sports’ fans are just a reflection on the overall population. If you think debates and opinions are bad for a ball game, I am sure you know the same are even worse for politics. So how did people decide whom to vote for or what plays should be called during a game? I am always interested in understanding how people make decisions, for examples in politics, making up a line-up for a baseball game, or making a call during a football game. We all make choices on a lot of different issues every day, and how do people make those decisions anyway? What are the factors that were considered? What is the most important one that makes a decision final? Is gut-feel a valid criterion in making a decision? Do people consider the economic issues, social issues, moral issues, foreign policy issues or any other issues before they vote? Which ones are the most important ones that persuade people to vote for their candidates?

Similarly, in the factory automation business, we all compete for pretty much the same customers. So knowing how customers make supplier selection decisions should be very important to us. Should we compete on price? Delivery? Product features? Support? Customer services? All of them? None of them? I don’t think there is a standard answer since each situation and every customer are different. We all know that the lowest cost or the best product features will not guarantee sales, but we seem to approach every sales opportunity emphasizing these two factors with the belief that customers most likely will make supplier decisions based on them. However, my belief is that most the customers don’t! After working for an End User company for 25 years and having been through a lot of supplier selection decisions, I couldn’t really say there is a pattern on how a supplier decision was made. Decisions were made based on “the way we had done it before”, “following corporate standard”, “comforting personal relationship”, “suffering the least pain among all the suppliers”, “personal preferences”, “strong support commitments”, and many others. All I can say is that there were not a whole lot of systematic analyses being done. That is why “converting” a customer from his existing automation supplier to a new supplier is such a tough task! Most people seem to fall back to what they are familiar with because even the “pain” with the existing supplier is okay since the customers become comfortable with the “pain” they will be suffering instead of experiencing “new pain” that maybe facing them.

Thus, the process of “relating” is so important because it gives suppliers a much better chance to understand how customers make decisions and what their most important decision factors are at this particular time. Knowing these factors give suppliers the opportunity to influence their decision making process and tilt it toward our favor. But the sales cycle should not stop there. The even more important factor is to keep the customers satisfied by addressing their concerns and providing solutions to whatever problems they have after the supplier decisions are made. When I was an end user, I usually didn’t have issues with suppliers having problems; however, I had real difficulties with suppliers who didn’t want to understand what the problems are and admitted that there were problems and committed to fix them. Those were the suppliers who were “converted” later in most cases.

After all, keeping an existing customer should be much less work than converting a new customer, and we certainly don’t want to give the customers any reasons to make a decision to select anyone else!!

What’s the Secret?

I spent quite a few days at IMTS a few weeks ago demonstrating the Mitsubishi Electric CNC software solutions that were designed to enable our high performance CNCs to be used in new application areas. If you ever been to IMTS, you know that it is a huge machine tool and manufacturing show with all four halls of McCormick Center occupied. I had a great time explaining the solutions and other Mitsubishi products to many visitors and also appreciated the opportunities to meet and discuss many subjects with Mitsubishi people from different parts of the world. It was a lot of fun since it’s my first experience working at the show.


If you had a chance to stop by the Mitsubishi booth at IMTS, you probably noticed the young lady, Holly, who did the Mitsubishi presentations on the stage in our booth three times an hour. When the show first began on Monday morning and she started her presentations, I was so impressed by the way she presented the information and her ability to repeat the presentations word-for-word after the first two or three appearances! I was thinking that maybe after a couple of days and she had done it a few dozen times, she might be able to memorize the lines perfectly, but certainly not after the first two or three presentations. But there she was, time after time, and perfect every time! Very impressive! Finally, I had to talk to her during one of the breaks and tried to learn how she could do it so perfectly. She was kind enough to tell me the “secret:” she had the lines pre-recorded and played back in her one of her ears when she was on stage, and was able to follow the script perfectly just by repeating what she listened on the tape recorder. Well, if you have ever tried to listen to someone talk and repeat what they say word for word, you know that is not easy. It takes training and practices. But the results were pretty amazing if one does not know the “secret.” Well, it still was pretty amazing to me even after I knew the secret

It is very similar in our everyday work places. When we see someone is able to perform the job functions at the highest level, we wonder in our minds how they can do their jobs so consistently and perfectly. They may not have a tape recorder playing back instructions in their ears, but they all have some methods they learned over the years to help them do their jobs and they are able to exercise the same proven methods consistently. Those become their own “trade secrets” to help them shine!

I believe we all need to develop our own trade secrets to help us perform our job functions better. If we have the desire to do a better job, we will seek such secrets diligently, and there is no shame copying what works from someone else! However, having the secrets is just the first thing. We should not forget the parts of training and practice that are also important to help us execute these “secrets” perfectly.

See, you will never know what else you can learn at a trade show!

Let Go!

I know it is still August and the temperature is still in the 70’s or 80’s most days, but can you sense the feel of the autumn in the air? Maybe it is the slight chilliness in the morning, the angle of the sun, or the football games that started to be seen on TV, but I am getting that weird feeling the summer is slipping away. Whatever happens to the summer anyway? I can count on the rounds of golf that I played this summer using one hand, and that is somewhat depressing. No wonder that I shot more than 100 the other day when I finally got a chance to play, I just don’t play enough!!


One of the reasons that I didn’t get to play much golf this summer was that my 11-year-old nephew, Victor, and my sister-in-law visited us from Taiwan and spent almost the whole month of July with us. Victor has been studying English in Taiwan for a few years now, and this was the opportunity for him to experience the “American life” and learn how to practice his English outside of the classroom environment. It was quite interesting watching him handled the use of the English language; not so much on how well he understood or expressed himself but how his confidence and what situations he was in dictated how willing he was to use the language. When we were at home, he would not speak English to us even though I tried a few times to start a conversation with him in English. He always fell back to Mandarin which is his native tongue. When we were out, he was quiet and let me handle the conversations, unless there were questions directed at him. Even then, he was a bit timid and only answered in simple words. On the other hand, he participated in several summer camps and Sunday school classes by himself with no problems and seemed to fit in really well. He was even invited to spend a whole afternoon at a kid’s house whom he met at one of the summer camps.

We all do that, don’t we? When we are in a new situation or we need to do something new, we feel uneasy and seem to always fall back to something we can count on, as long as we can get away with it. We will not step-out and try new things voluntarily until we have to, like Victor was left alone among a group of people who don’t speak Mandarin. Then we found out the new situation is not really too bad and we can actually do pretty well with the new “thing” also, whatever it is.

In the business world, we all know that we need to change or do something different sometimes to make progress, to improve, to be more productive. But we all have the tendency to hang on too long with what we are comfortable with, like trying to fix everything with the same screw driver that we have for years. I am not saying anything new or different is better. However, the old “things” may be perfectly fine but they simply may not fit the jobs or the tasks. When we throw away the “security blanket,” a whole new world opens up, and we can go on to enjoy new experiences and explore new things!!