There are lots of ways to get fired and there are lots of ways to get laid off, the distinction being that getting fired is directly about you and getting laid off is purportedly first about your position.  When you get laid off it is because the company has decided that it needs to avoid the costs of your compensation more than it needs the services you are providing.  When this happens it is because something has changed.  It might be the general business environment.  It might be how your particular company is doing in the market, perhaps because you are losing to direct competition or perhaps the buggy whips your company makes are in less demand.  Or it might have something to do with your job function.  Maybe it is being replaced by automation or outsourced or management figured out that they don’t really need it after all, at least for now.  Whatever the cause, you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.  How does this happen and what can you do to prevent it?  Read on.

New drawing: Amanda

I am occasionally asked by friends about prospects for all sorts of “green” technologies to have an impact on satisfying the world’s energy consumption.  It is difficult to get ones mind around the scale of the problem but there have been some pretty good attempts. To these quantitative analyses I want to add a test that any layperson can use to sort out plausible new energy technologies from the implausible.  That test is a test of poetry.

One of the more central concepts in product marketing is the minimum viable product.  Especially when entering a new market, the question of what functionality to include in a product and what to leave out is critical to a timely and successful product launch. The most stunning recent example of a minimum viable product is the Apple iPhone. Here’s why.

A new bronze just came back from the foundry.  It is a statue of a magical beast that is half man, half lion (which actually makes him a sphinx).  Take a look.

Some new artwork has been added to my art site.

’Tis the season for holiday cheer, max’d credit cards, and joyful gatherings. And every year around this time we hear at these gatherings of some poor soul who has lost their job in the run up to this merry season. What should we make of the Scrooges that wrote out pink slips in the season of red and green? link to blog 

In this paper I discuss four business concepts that will impact the adoption of e-beam direct write (EbDW).  They are: (1) The economically advantageous region for EbDW.  At what costs and volumes EbDW is economically advantageous is controlled by a two-sided constraint involving the cost of reticles on one hand and the cost of design on the other.  (2) The important role of product derivatives and other markets that can be satisfied by designs with heavy IP reuse.  The natural long tail in demand for differentiated products is today chopped off by the high costs of reticles.  We show data on the elasticity of the product derivative market with respect to certain costs.  (3) That because reticle prices typically decline at a 30% per year for the first few years after a new node is introduced, delaying the fabrication of that first reti­cle set for a new product can save millions, more than paying for EbDW.  The applicability of this technique is, however, limited by the need for product requalifaction.  (4) Finally, we introduce the business concept of the virtual reticle as a possible component in EbDW pricing. E-beam direct write is free.

It was the Summer of 1987. I was sitting in my living room drinking Jack Daniels and listening to the Grateful Dead while trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I had just spent seven years on the M.I.T. faculty, teaching VLSI and doing research, but had been denied tenure and so had to leave. It hurt like hell to be denied membership in that club because there were people there, such as my thesis advisor Professor Hermann Haus, whom I lionized. It was time to do something different. Really different. I wandered down to the kitchen and kissed my wife on the nape of the neck and asked, “How about we go to Japan?” “OK.” So three months later my wife, my three kids, and I landed at Narita. My oldest child was nine and the youngest was under two. It was Black Monday. The stock market lost 22.6% while we were in the air [continued].

Like many in Silicon Valley high tech, I have faced the question of how we take advantage of globalization in technology development.  Last year, as part of pulling together my thoughts on this topic, I polled my immediate direct reports, that is the nine people who reported directly to me and whose performance reviews I filled out, but not including the people who reported to them or indirect (dotted line) reports.  Remarkably, together they speak or write 13 different languages: English, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Klingon, Mandarin, Portuguese, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Tamil.  If one were to go down another level in the organization there are, of course, even more languages.  I may not have had a great globalization plan, but I am sure I had a great globalization team!  How can anyone doubt that technology is global or that Silicon Valley is still magical? The Silicon Valley Melting Pot.