The Vaults

An innocent remark and a story unravels, a story the suggests some of the challenges that women face in trying to climb into the leadership ranks of high technology. It begins with Maddie, student at the Lillian Moller Gilbreth School for Disruptive Innovation, and the CEO of a new startup called “Watcher Dogs” and ends with our business manager and cohost trying to make sense of an incident some nine years in the past. This is the world that high technology offers to women and these are the stories we tell.

How do you fix a troubled startup? How do you mend a broken heart?

When your startup is in trouble, you can look for solutions in every possible direction but the right one. Vinny considers the possibility of a simple technical fix for Maddie’s increasingly complex Watcher Dogz.

We sent the cast to Bangalore. We went looking for an office. It was a hard task. Harder than any of them thought.   There are a lot of choices for a small tech organization in india and a lot of opinions among the cast.  So they ultimately resorted to numbers – not because they trusted numbers. They used a numerical process to build trust in themselves.

Can  Scrum Masters learn something from Sous Chefs?  Or Sous Chefs from Scrum Masters?  Both represent a kind of job that is being overlooked in this age.  Skilled.  Managerial.  Professional.  Disciplined.  Yet not quite academic.    Our Master Scrum Master, Bix, and the Sous Chef from Washington’s Green Rice and Natto talk about their respective jobs and ultimately get sidetracked by the roasted Sweet Potatoes.

Do young employees find it hard to finish tasks? Is it somehow difficult for them to bring a job to completion? So we ask the question and start to look for an answer.

Our cast moves from the problem of finishing tasks to the problem of finishing MOOCS – Those Massive Open OnLine Courses that seem to be everywhere and no where at once. And from finishing MOOCs, they return to the problem of finishing tasks and grasp, for a moment, that they are the same thing. In a world where information is ubiquitous, why do we need to finish anything?

Machine Intelligence is going to take over the world, right? We know this? Driverless cars. Computer bosses. All the information that you could ever know captured in a few silicon chips? Can the new generation of workers look ever look forward to having a satisfying career again? The Podcast How We Manage Stuff is about to embark on a study of machine intelligence, as our very intelligent intern, Anna, explains.

We Read It So You Don’t Have to. There is so much new information published every day that one person can’t possible read it all much less get any perspective on it. Take Automation, Autonomous Cars, Machine Learning. All of these technologies pose new challenges to the organization and at the same time, they represent forces that are quite old. In this episode, we take a look at a new book on these topics, Industry 4.0, and an old one Automation.

A pair of guests. A Blue Screen of Death. The Perils of Live Podcasting.

The time is rapidly approaching for the Consumer Electronics Show and its engineering counterpart, the International Conference on Consumer Electronics. Anna, our intern, wanted to give a preview to the show and talk about how it will be emphasizing cybersecurity but events got in the way.

CES: January 7-12, Las Vegas Nevada

ICCE: January 12 -14,  Las Vegas Nevada

Not only does it have to be good, it has to be secure. That’s the problem. And it’s now the problem with everything. Everything including cars.

It’s such an issue, that the ICCE, the Engineering Conference on Consumer Electronics, is devoting its entire session to cybersecurity.

To bring attention to the important issues of automotive electronics, we have invited retired Formula 1 Champion Mario Sciocco to talk about his experiences with Automotive Cybersecurity. And to offer a bit of advice, just a bit, to our cast.