What Greg Learned #28

Editorial note: I screw up my last sentence of Japanese. Gomen.

A Japanese man never says no! It’s a super extra-ooshi episode of everybody’s favorite reflection on business education. This was a pretty exciting weekend, hope you enjoy the podcast! My script after the break (I wasn’t too bad about it this time!)

What Greg Learned 28
Hajimemashite! Watashi no namae wa Guregori desu. Kore wa “What Guregu Learned” desu. Sumimasen, ima wa Eigo o hanashimasu.

Hey, term 5 is winding down, with just one more class to go. I had a long weekend this time around, thanks to additional meetings for our trip to Japan, which is terrifyingly only three weeks away! I still have some more bits and pieces to buy for the trip – a new dress shirt or two, some nice dress socks, and so on, and of course I’m not spending nearly as much time in Rosetta Stone as I wish I would, but at least I’m spending more time saying I should. I also need to contact some of our hosts for more information.

So both Friday and Saturday nights we had additional two-hour sessions for a crash course in Japanese culture, history, ettiquette, business practice, language, geography… in other words, too much to do in two two-hour sessions. It was a nice moment to see the basic language stuff that the presenter wanted to show and to see how far beyond it I am. I also liked the chance to connect a few dots and learn some of the history, and it was fun to hear some of the business coaching for Americans dealing with Japanese. (Note: I’m not going to write out the story here that I’ll likely drop into while recording this).

Aside from all that, I also had all three classes this weekend. Let’s switch things up and go backwards. The last class of my weekend is always the 4G Wireless technology class, and we had a special guest, a very high placed technology guy from Research in Motion, or RIM, the Blackberry people. He’s been very involved time and again in standards creation, and these days RIM is even more into that because the lion’s share of their business is in Europe and Asia and global-focused, which tend to be markets in which standards really matter. Unfortunately, despite having a wealth of experience and knowledge, the guy wasn’t the most engaging speaker, largely because he had trouble tuning himself to the group. Some topics kept him almost word-for-word verbatim saying what the professor had said in the previous four sessions, which was boring, and sometimes he’d drop into shop talk, making jokes that were so inside-baseball that nobody in the room really got what he was saying. He’d deliver a line like “And then they were trying to do HDCSP, but they took it from 3300 to 4 and I don’t know what they were doing.” And the phrasing would sound like he was expecting a laugh or at least a chuckle, but all he got was a room full of blank stares as we tried to figure out what there were 3300 of. I was the least attentive I’ve been for any lecture this term. On the plus side, that same day I got back some of my assignments and the in-class pop quiz and actually am pleasantly surprised on how well I did. So that’s good.

The middle class is always Supply Chain. We had a special little treat this week, as we met in the computer lab to do the “Root Beer game”. In the root beer game, students get put into groups of 4 and to some degree you shouldn’t even know who you’re grouped with. The four players on a team get assigned one of four roles in a supply chain for root beer: the factory where it’s made, the distributor who bottles it, the wholesaler that holds it in distribution centers, and the retailer that puts it on shelves. There’s a time delay for new orders to travel up the chain, and time delay for the shipments to come down, and of course consumer demand fluctuates somewhat randomly. There’s a cost for having too much root beer, and a bigger cost for falling short. I was the retailer, and oddly enough the prof decided to show us all who was on what team, and I have to admit… I saw my team and cringed a bit. Things were not going to be pretty. As we started, I realized I should try to put some data into Excel so I could follow the rules for ordering. A few rounds of the game later I realized I wasn’t even keeping track of the most important data. So my model improved over time, and while I was worried sometimes that it may not work out, I just stuck with it. And as the game progressed and we occasionally looked at overall cost (which is what we were measuring as our “score”), my group started out a little behind first place and then, by the second break, we were majorly outperforming other groups – by the end we had half the cost of our nearest competitor and a fifth of the cost of the worst group. Something went really right. So the rest of the team did a great job, but in comparing our experience to others, the big difference is that there was never a panic. I held to my plan and had faith my suppliers would get my goods to me eventually, and they did, so I never had to try to adjust my order to compensate (which would have just messed up their world). In other groups, somebody would put in a huge order to try to spur a supplier who hadn’t been able to fulfill earlier orders… but what does that huge order do? It just creates waste. As one despondent student asked at the end, “Um, if I’m not wrong, we just finished taking a class in Supply Chain, and yet 4 of 5 groups just failed miserably at this simulation.” The professor smiled and just said that he’s seen 5 out of 5 fail at times. The thing is, like any academic discipline, it’s hard to take what you learn and stand there in the field and rely on what your brain and training tell you to do, rather than what your gut says. That’s why pilots need simulators. That’s why doctors go through years of residencies and stuff. You need that extra time, feeling the emotions and strains and tensions of real situations and reflecting on the experience to connect the dry classroom training to the actual steps and actions taken on the scene. Which is all a grandiose way of saying my team rocked.

Finally, or first, I guess, since this is backwards, our robots class was very different too, as we had a guest speaker talking about haptics. Haptics is actually a poorly defined field but has to do with physically moving stuff and directly acting on that motion, either as input or output. So the vibration of a phone is haptics. There’s a number of controllers that look like a ball held up in air by a bunch of robot arms so that you can move the ball around in 3-d space and it’ll track your motion and provide resistance. The challenge of course is that there’s no way to model a full haptic reality using just machines, but unlike other interfaces, it turns out we have more challenge abstracting touch – it’s really hard to fool it because it depends not only on pressure on your skin but also texture, temperature, the position of your body. This makes it a tough research field because solving one aspect isn’t all that commercially exciting unless you figure out the rest too. Nonetheless, we then went to visit her lab and got demos of various products and then visited some of the other robots labs, including where the PR-2 is kept. The PR-2 is a huge humanoid robot (don’t ask how much it’s worth) that has been awarded to a dozen or so schools for research. After we were shown the basic functions of it, I think I annoyed the grad students by asking, “Well, what are you actually doing with it? Just taking pictures of this room?” since that’s what they had shown us so far. They huffed a bit about how what they do is figure out algorithms for basic actions, like moving your arms thorugh a crowded space without hitting anything, so that other (the implication was, less intellectually pure) places then just slapped their libraries together into end actions. Out of curiosity, I looked up the videos of those end actions and understood the attitude – there are videos of some other lab’s PR-2 shooting pool and fetching beers for the researchers. So of course here at the serious intellectual robot school, we turn our noses up at the party robot lab.

Oh my that’s a lot of talkin’. Let’s call that enough. One more class session, and it’s all presentations and finals and stuff, and then… JAPAN! Thanks for listening!