You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Technology' category.
Last week, I attended the Cahaba River Society’s (CRS) annual meeting. I’ve been a board member for about a year now. The Society protects our beautiful river and facilitates public conversations about environmental well-being.
While the CRS still focuses much of its energy on the River and its basin, it is also evolving into something much greater and more important from my perspective, and that is the business of “water education.” Without quality water, there’s not much life. The health and abundance of our water supply has immeasurable impact on our environment, both now and for future generations. It seems vital that we teach the public how to protect this resource.
Unfortunately, environmental campaigns are often politically charged and met with equal parts support, resistance and apathy. As the organization grows and matures, I’ve seen the CRS learn better ways of being collaborative in efforts to deal with those who might disagree. They are listening, being transparent and stating operations clearly. I have always found that if two sides are opposed, as long as there is a sliver of agreement, some kind of compromise can be reached. This has rung true for the CRS as they deal with local businesses and the public.
This meeting focused on educating about the environmental impact of storm water. Both as a conscious citizen and as a builder, I found these lessons valuable and thought I’d share takeaways here:
• How we build our communities and deal with storm water today will determine the kind of rivers we have forever.
• If proper designs are not put in place, the increased runoff from development will degrade water quality, increase flooding, collapse riverbanks, impoverish the river’s diverse life, and make our drinking water more expensive and scarce.
• A natural forest absorbs rain like a sponge, replenishing groundwater and keeping our rivers clean and flowing, even in droughts. Maybe we begin to think about fewer hard surfaces and single points of discharge.
• Designers might consider concepts of low impact development and green infrastructure – rain gardens, permeable paving, green roofs, cisterns – practices that use rain as a resource, infiltrating and reusing it.
• Low-impact development tries to keep as much water as possible on site so that it can be infiltrated to replenish groundwater or harvested and reused in a manner that reduces the use of treated municipal water.
• It’s important to get involved with municipalities and storm water partners to nurture a working relationship for a unified voice to the policy changes needed to protect us all. Would you consider using this knowledge to better the environment? More importantly, would you please share what you’ve learned with others? Simplistic as it may sound, together we can make a difference.
_____________________________________________________________
Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
When work and family time intersect and you have to be away from home for a couple of days because of a business obligation, there are ways to minimize the impact your absence has on those around you.
• Minimize the overnight stays – In today’s high-speed world, there is often a way to travel a big distance in a short amount of time. With good planning and a little luck, what used to be an overnight trip can be reduced to long day on the road. To me, an early morning and a late return flight is always better than hotel towels and a lobby breakfast. Changing a business dinner to a lunch, a cab instead of a rental car, and making more frequent but shorter visits can also help.
• Plan your travel on specific days – During the week in our household, Mondays are the busiest and Fridays are the most relaxing. I try to confine my trips to mid-week. It helps my family plan around my schedule even though there is often no advance notice of my departure.
• Find a time to talk, even from a thousand miles away — There is a very small chance that you can find everyone home in the evening hours at our house. We juggle too many activities, homework, etc. Instead of an evening call home, I try to phone in the morning and wake the kids up for school. It is a good time to talk to everyone, and a more pleasant time to chat.
• Take advantage of technology – By far, the best way I have found to visit with the kids when I am away is the use of video conferencing. With the investment of a USB camera and the use of the free Skype service available on the Internet, we can have a full screen interactive video call. It is easy to set up, easy to use, and an invaluable way to visit. Kids pop in and out of the room, the cat walks by, I’d say it’s the next best thing to being there, and it does not cost a dime.
• Never forget the goodies – I don’t know if there is an age where a person outgrows the excitement of dad unpacking his bags and producing a gift from a far away land, or the next state over. I have tried them all – candy, jewelry, toys… The best take home gift I have found is a destination t-shirt. My kids have a wardrobe of shirts from cities, states and landmarks. They wear them all the time. No more cheap toys to break, unhealthy treats, or expensive gifts that get lost in the drawers.
There are always going to be times when you must sacrifice and compromise the time with your family. I have often thought that those of us who do not get to spend seven nights a week tucking the kids in are forced to figure out how to make the time that we do have as special as we can. There is always time that is not used to its fullest potential, and only with the realization of how finite that time is are you capable of taking full advantage of it.
Robbie Cather is a project manager for the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
___________________________________________________________________________
Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
Recently, one of our long-term client relationships sponsored a forum in New York City on innovation of company culture through design. While I wasn’t able to attend, I did get my hands on some great notes from a friend.
Design of function has evolved to be much more in the center of technology, business and people. Innovation now flows from all these points of view and enables design to flourish in a real way. With this in mind, these guidelines for action should drive design:
Differentiate: Set yourself apart from your competitors.
Simplify: Offer efficiencies and help the supply chain support the customer.
Innovate: Don’t simply be an observer. Set imperatives around insights and you will create a cycle for new solutions, moving from abstract to concrete. People will come along with you.
As a designer of the function, your focus is different. Engineers start with technology. Business minds and venture capitalists start with the money side—profits. Design starts with the people side and then moves into thoughts of technology and profit. As a function and process designer, you are always thinking about what people want as your key driver, or at least you should be.
Hire Renaissance employees who can see the big picture
There are three categories of knowledge bases that will categorize your team: “Silo-ed,” “T-shaped” and “Pie shaped.”
Silo-ed is the traditional type of employee. They have highly specialized expertise, which used to be desirable, but is now becoming less acceptable.
T-shaped employees have deep expertise in one area, but are collaborative.
Pie shaped team members have diverse combinations of experience like engineering + business or art + finance. They are quickly becoming the most desirable hires.
In my opinion, we should look for people who have broad perspectives, teamwork capabilities and maintain a balance of innovation and creativity. For example, a team should have financial modelers from the inception, showing the monetary impact of the design in addition to the creative side. Employees who have a passion for change and the ability to work with others are huge assets and can capture the “collective IQ.” Interdisciplinary collaboration yields real innovation—Fight “Silos!”
Conquer the fear of failure
If team members come from the business perspective that “they do not wish to look stupid,” they will narrow decisions, dooming them from the start. Research shows that people fall into 2 kinds of intelligence:
Entity Theory: Every encounter you have is a measure of IQ. One works hard not to look stupid.
Development Theory: One seeks out those challenges as a way to learn and the values it bring.
How can we encourage risk taking while balancing finances? There’s a need to accept failure as a part of change. Position the innovation as a “learning launch” with management. It is an experiment that we expect to learn from and change. This gives freedom, helps prevent failure from capital “F” emphasis to a small “f” acceptance and can yield real successes.
Round Up
Maybe we all should be thinking more about what we can do to make design innovations in the organization and our people more innovative?
*Panel discussion moderated by Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future with Bill Moggridge, 2009 Lifetime Achievement National Design Award Winner, co-founder of IDEO, Sam Lucente, Vice President of Design, Hewlett-Packard Company and Jeanne Liedtka, Professor, University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business
___________________________________________________________________________
Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
When business is good, it’s far too easy for leaders to get busy, ignore their company’s weaknesses and forget to brainstorm ways to improve. It’s an easier focus now since business is down and we all have a little more time. As a company, we are using the lull to evaluate and reevaluate every aspect of our infrastructure, ensuring that we have the best and most current tools in our “tool drawer.” It’s my belief that our efforts now will give us competitive advantage when this cycle ends.
In the spirit of getting ahead, we’ve been working with Los Angeles-based consulting firm WP2DC to develop a systematic approach for sharing information within our organization. Before we commissioned their services, our knowledge sat in too many places, which stirred up confusion and often resulted in team members recreating the wheel, so to speak.
The industry term for that fragmentation is an information silo – a management system that operates independently, incapable of reciprocal operation with other, related management systems. The goal is to have cloud computing – a pool of shared resources that can be accessed on demand on the Internet.
This concept is logical to me. Why not make use of the networking capabilities that are available now? We’ve been pleased with WP2DC’s work for us and are launching the first phase of our “cloud” this month. Here are the benefits I’ve seen so far:
- Having one complete database ensures that everyone has the same information and none of it is lost.
- We can track our projects and see the progress as they move from concept to reality.
- All employees have the ability to stay current with our customer relationships.
- We can share information with contacts outside the company if we’d like.
WP2DC has already begun developing an additional cloud where we will manage our subcontractor and vendor data. This has always been a challenge since we build across the Southeast and mid-Atlantic states, creating a huge chunk of contacts. The system will make our knowledge more efficient by tracking current subcontractors/vendor capacity in almost real time. We will also be able to locate and evaluate new talent, so that we can provide the best product for our customer relationships.
What are you doing with your extra time? Can you make way for clouds in your office? It might just prepare your for the next big storm of new business.
For more information, see this Wall Street Journal article on cloud computing.
___________________________________________________________________________
