Blog 1 11/16/2024

A big part of BADM 261 is the guest speaker portion. At least, that is what attracted me to the course in the first place. Before applying, I wanted to see how the Technology and Management Program could potentially affect my career path and future. Recently, there have been a handful of guest speakers that really stood out to me. Just last week, we had someone from P&G come in to talk. He decided to bring in some physical examples to be used as presentation aids. One of his physical examples was a bottle of Dawn dish soap. Although, the example itself may seem boring, the presentation and enthusiasm that went along with it made the speaker stand out in such a way that I feel the need to write a blog post. The whole purpose of bringing in a bottle of dish soap was to show the changes they made to their bottle. They changed the cap of the bottle so that it is now able to stand upside-down without falling over: an issue with the previous dish soap bottles that Dawn used. Not only did he bring in a physical example to show a change that he made, but he also described the process of what it was like to make seemingly small changes like that. The speaker detailed the very bureaucratic and slow process that was required to make a change like that. First, you must come up with the simple change. Some of the simplest changes can be the most difficult to consider, as they can be meaningless and minuscule when looking at the physical product itself, however, it can completely change the functionality. You then have to present your change to a group of higher-ups who will then determine whether your alteration is fit to move forward in the process. After this, you have to incorporate the change and see if it works in your own testing facilities. The final step before rolling out your change to the public is releasing it to a smaller sample size. This could be as simple as releasing it to a handful of smaller towns that have a population with a high density of your target audience. Once you see the performance results from this small sample size, you can finally release your change and incorporate it permanently after making minor tweaks. One of the specific tweaks that the speaker talked about in his new bottle design was that the spout released more soap than the old one, so the bottles would run out faster, and the consumers would have to buy a new bottle a tad more frequently. Some of the drawbacks of releasing a change are changing how you produce the items in the plant and how long it will take to phase out the older version of the product. I thought this guest speaker was really interesting since he could go into a lot of depth with an example as small as that. Imagine how much more complicated the process is for bigger changes. Another big part of being a guest speaker is the ability to engage your audience. This speaker did a great job of engaging his audience, however, I want to shift your focus to another guest speaker we had. This speaker was from a beef jerky company called Righteous Felon, and I had the opportunity to sit down with him during one of our coffee chats. Toward the beginning of our talk, he mentioned that he was in the aerospace industry for most of his career before switching to the food industry. This made it a lot easier to engage with him and ask certain questions that I would not have been able to ask had I not known his past. He was able to tell me about how the engineering and business sides of certain aerospace and defense companies work together. Sometimes we tend to generalize certain companies and separate the different divisions. We look at a defense company such as Lockheed Martin and completely ignore that they also have a corporate side to their company, and are not just building fighter jets and missiles all the time. The same can be said about retail companies, we look at the clothes they push out and think there’s only a marketing team as the sole face of the company, however, the design and manufacturing process of the clothes themselves were made by engineers and scientists. Even though these departments hold different roles within one company, they all work together to make the company even better. The speaker put this into perspective for me and I understood a lot better, all because I found out he was in the same industry in which I am looking to find a career. What I appreciated about this speaker was that he was able to find common ground for us to stand on, even though he was business, and I was engineering. This common ground made it a lot easier for me to absorb the information he was pushing onto us, as he was able to relate it better to me specifically, and other engineers in the audience. These were just some thoughts on the speakers I have found super interesting so far throughout the course. While every speaker has had something valuable to say, these two in particular piqued my interest. I look forward to hearing from the rest of the speakers we have throughout the remainder of the semester.