Engineering Careers: A Panel Discussion with ‘Brilliant!’ and ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’'

Engineering is a field that constantly evolves, and staying ahead requires not only technical skills but also the ability to communicate effectively and work collaboratively.

Join Steven Giako and Dianna Deeney in a panel discussion of central themes in the books Brilliant! Shuji Nakamura And the Revolution in Lighting Technology and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

How do these two books relate with one another, and what lessons can be learned by combining and contrasting their messages? How can the story in Brilliant! relate to the advice given in How to Win Friends and Influence People? What are potential lessons learned for engineers today who are leading in the edges of innovation?

Steven and Dianna explore these two books together by combining common themes for discussion points and add their own experiences from their engineering careers.

Discussion Topics

1.  Writing technical papers (9:12)
2.  Presentations - Adding Flair (16:05)
3.  Collaboration (23:31)
4.  Recognition of Others (31:37)
5.  Getting Buy-In on an Idea (39:00)

Steven and Dianna's Overall Rating and Reviews

How to Win Friends and Influence People (45:47)

Brilliant! (50:54)

Participant Comment

"I didn't realize, until you pointed it out, the need for dramatization in presentations or the need to recognize the politics of publication. I never before went for politics or personal relationships. It was always the technology. And what you've talked about tonight points me in a slightly different direction: [the] need to recognize the politics and the personality, the drama that goes with presentations or publication. I never before recognized the need for recognizing the personal relationships." - R

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

Welcome to the Quality During Design podcast. In our last podcast episode we talked about technical reports and presentation techniques. Let's continue this topic of conversation and this theme, but from a story point of view, with lessons learned, with ideas, so that we can all do better. After this brief introduction, hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less. I'm your host, diana Deeney. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. I consult with businesses and coach individuals in how to apply quality during design to their processes. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityduringdesigncom. Welcome back. I'm glad you can join me today. If you are new to this podcast, let me introduce you to quality during design. It's both a philosophy and a methodology. The philosophy of quality during design emphasizes the benefits of cross-functional team involvement in product design, and the methodology uses quality tools to refine design concepts early in our product development process. If this is not your first Quality During Design podcast, I appreciate you being a return listener. Thank you.

Speaker 1 1:29

Earlier this year, I had a chance to do a special project with somebody new that I had never worked with before. His name is Stephen Geico and he's currently a test engineer at Kima PowerTest in Chalfont, pennsylvania. We met because we were both new members of the PCS chapter of IEEE Philadelphia. Pcs is Professional Communication Society. They are a society within the IEEE family that is on a mission to foster a community that's dedicated to understanding and promoting effective communication and engineering, scientific and other technical environments. The PCS chapter of IEEE Philadelphia needed to have some meetings for the year and I proposed a book review discussion. If you've been listening to this podcast, you'll recognize that I've been part of a co-host for this kind of event before, where we review two different books about engineering and explore different themes and topics about them and add our own experiences on top of that, and that's what I got to do with Stephen.

Speaker 1 2:39

For the PCS chapter, stephen and I hosted an engineering book review and discussion at the end of May. The two books that we reviewed was Brilliant, shuji Nagamura and the Revolution in Lighting Technology by Bob Johnstone. The other book is how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Stephen and I read these books around the same time as each other and we developed this engineering book review and discussion. The whole purpose of having this kind of a review is. We wanted to see how these books related with one another and what lessons could be learned by combining and contrasting their messages. How can the story in Brilliant relate to the advice given in how to Win Friends and Influence People? What are the potential lessons learned for engineers today who are leading in the edges of innovation? We explored these two books together by combining common themes for discussion points, and then we added our own experiences from our engineering careers to it.

Speaker 1 3:47

Stephen and I ended up pulling five different discussion topics out of these two books writing technical papers, presentations, how we can do better with presentations by adding flair, collaboration techniques in engineering, recognizing others and how important that is for our careers and, finally, just getting buy-in on an idea. We recorded our presentation and I got permission from the PCS chapter of IEEE Philly to share it on this podcast, because they were a sponsor of this meeting. I also want to encourage you to take a look at the PCS chapter of IEEE. You can join them as one of the societies that you sign up with as part of your IEEE membership. On the website blog for this episode, I'll include a link to the IEEE PCS chapter so you can learn a little bit more about it and see if it's a good fit for you.

Speaker 1 4:46

I really enjoyed working with Stephen and I think between the two of us we brought some different perspectives to common engineering problems. I think at the end of this you'll be inspired toward action, to try something new, read one of the books or ways to make new connections with other people and generally we just wanted to help inspire you with your engineering work Without further delay. Here is the engineering book review and discussion of Brilliant and how to Win Friends and Influence People.

Speaker 2 5:20

I'm Stephen Geico.

Speaker 1 5:22

We just met through the IEEE, through the PCS chapter of Philly, and we've been talking on Zoom but we haven't met in person yet. But it's been a pleasure getting to know you and planning this event.

Speaker 2 5:36

It's been great. I really appreciated your experience with presentations and professional communications for this. With presentations and professional communications for this I initially joined this chapter to try to expand my abilities in professional communications, since I'm pretty new to the professional field. I've only been working as an electrical engineer for eight months or so now and I graduated just two years ago, so this is all pretty new to me, but I'm glad I could help out with the small chapter that we have here and be a part of this.

Speaker 1 6:06

And me too, I'm also glad to be able to help and I'm a senior member of IEEE so I've been around with medical devices. So just even in our preliminary talks about some of these topics related to these books, I think we'll have some interesting discussion. Stephen, did you want to introduce the brilliant book? Just a little bit about it.

Speaker 2 6:29

Yeah, I think initially both of us were excited about this book because we had both recently seen the Vertacium video, I think, or at least a video recently about a general synopsis of his career. This book it's interesting because I assumed it was going to be just a biography but it ended up diving not only into Shuji's experience as a professional and eventually developing what we know as blue LEDs today, but also it dove into other people's experience in researching the similar fields and eventually it even went on to talk about his experience after the blue LED and how blue lasers were a big part of his career and how he eventually came to the US and worked in California for in the higher education system. This book was cool because I assumed it was going to be really technical and biography feeling, but it ended up being more of just like a review of his personality and his experiences in the professional field, which I found very rewarding.

Speaker 1 7:36

The other book that we read was how to Win Friends and Influence People, which has been around for a long time and, peter, when I told you that was one of the books, you said, wow, that's a really old book. And I looked into it. Yeah, and it was published in 1936. But they keep releasing new revisions to it. I read the latest revision, where they took out some of the old stories that maybe people wouldn't have been familiar with the people, the uh people that are featured in the stories. They took some of that out and kept the most important stories.

Speaker 1 8:11

It's a mainstay in a lot of people's bookshelves, the first self-help books. So we read brilliant about shuji and his experience with developing the blue LED and we read how to Win Friends and Influence People and we came up with five topics that were kind of overlapping between the books and that we felt that we can contribute to a little bit in a discussion. Just let me run through them about what we're going to talk about. One of them is about writing technical papers. There was a lot of that in the Brilliant Book with Xu Zhi, and then there's influences of that and how to win friends and influence people too. There's also something about presentations, how to give them and how to add flair, collaboration with others, recognizing others and their work and then finally getting buy-in on an idea. So those were the common themes that we saw, and the first one we wanted to talk about was writing technical papers.

Speaker 2 9:12

I think I'll go first on that one. I think the biggest takeaway from Shuji's book, when it was talking about him as a person, really was his persistence and his drive for what he wanted to do, and I think that that was especially highlighted when he was writing starting to write professional papers about his development of blue LEDs and his work with gallium and the other materials that he was developing in his lab. It got very technical at times about semiconductors, which was interesting, but also took me back to some difficult classes from school, I'll say. So that was fun.

Speaker 2 9:47

I think the awesome thing about Shuji's story is no one at his company wanted him to work on what he was working on and no one in his field wanted to develop blue LEDs anymore, because they had all given up. None of them thought they could make a bright blue LED. They didn't think it was possible. They didn't think it would make a profit. They could make a bright blue LED. They didn't think it was possible, they didn't think it would make a profit.

Speaker 2 10:08

And, on that note, shuji was big on researching what he found interesting and thought could be impactful, whether or not it was going to be profitable, and I think that kind of passion was huge If you go back before his work at Nietzsche, the small company he developed the blue LED at. In school, he was really big on the technical side of things and he really liked researching what others didn't really think was applicable or interesting. He wanted to take these theories and these concepts that others didn't want to incorporate into things and he wanted to really dive into them and see how they could be added and eventually he broke through with the blue LED and found something that was just like more impactful than we can know.

Speaker 1 10:48

The book also went into a lot about how Shuji used technical papers to help advance his network of people, that he knows, how to gain access to conferences and then also get a little bit of the recognition that I think he was looking for being an independent worker working in a small town in Japan by himself, and in how to Win Friends the technical papers I mean there wasn't an obvious section about technical papers and how to win friends and influence people, but the common theme with that was just being able to communicate your ideas and sort of get some of that recognition from peers. I think, stephen, you had some ideas about. How to win friends is all about selling.

Speaker 2 11:36

a of Carnegie's favorite topics to talk about was selling a car or selling a product to a customer. He really took the business side of the approach. And that really ties into technical papers, in my opinion, because although we talk about technical papers as just sharing information, a lot of the times you're trying to sell an idea. You're trying to sell a new concept, a new way of thinking about a technology or an advancement in an older technology. To me that was big, because in school and even in my work now it feels like a lot of times people are a little too cut and dry with their technical papers. Some papers need to be that way because they're just presenting facts. Others, whenever you're presenting an idea and then going into the theory of what it could do, you have to be really good at appealing to your audience and selling the idea to them. And that was the main point of the entirety of how to Win Friends was appealing to your audience, knowing your audience and selling them your ideas.

Speaker 1 12:41

That was a common theme that we pulled out from both of these books was just in writing the technical papers and being able to communicate your ideas and share them with others. One of the things that we wanted to explore personally is just the kind of strategies that authors can use to avoid taking feedback personally and maintain a positive mindset during revision. In the brilliant book when Shuji first started writing papers he started publishing in 1991, the book said and he would submit to the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics and it was returned like five or six times and on each occasion the reviewer's comments weren't necessarily about the content of the paper but who he referenced or cited in his technical paper and he didn't realize some of the politics that were involved. When he was getting his technical papers reviewed. It was actually somebody that was doing research in the same field, sort of competitively, who was reviewing his technical papers and providing that feedback. He was saying, yeah, you don't want to reference that source, you want to reference my research instead. So there were some politics that were learned about technical papers.

Speaker 1 13:59

So back to the question is just strategies to avoid taking feedback personally and maintaining a positive mindset during revisions. I think one of the things to keep in mind is maybe you don't have politics like Shuji ran into, but there is a broader context of whoever you're submitting to. So there's certain topics that a journal will want to see, or certain other reviewers that might influence your paper, have a different viewpoint than you would have based on their background and that kind of thing. What kind of things do you do to avoid taking feedback negatively, stephen?

Speaker 2 14:41

I'm really good at giving feedback and not great at receiving, and so whenever I'm trying to receive it and I'm thinking well in the moment I often try to put myself in the other person's shoes, as though I was the one who noticed the fault or the lack of success in the argument or whatever I was trying to make in a paper or something where I'm getting feedback.

Speaker 2 15:01

I took that as a big argument in how to Win Friends too was in that book by Carnegie. He talked a lot about putting yourself in the other person's shoes and understanding what it is that they're trying to get out of a situation or what it is that they want, and a huge part of feedback is being able to take it. And for me to take feedback, I can't always do it if I'm staying closed-minded on my perspective, and so, like I said, I just always try to put myself in their shoes, because I'm very quick to judge but not always quick to accept judgment. And if I'm able to take myself out of my own mindset, where I'm thinking I'm always right, I don't think I did any wrong there, and then I look from their perspective and try to actually take it that way. I think that helps me a lot with feedback.

Speaker 1 15:46

Yeah, sometimes you may need to gift yourself a little bit of time to step away, distance yourself, I guess emotionally, from what it is that you're submitting and getting feedback on, to kind of give yourself that different perspective or allow yourself to have that different perspective.

Speaker 2 16:05

Our next topic was presentations, which I think ties really well into technical writing, because it's essentially the same concept You're presenting an idea, it's just more verbal. This can often be super difficult for engineers, especially because we're not always the most verbally talented of communicators, because we're not always the most verbally talented of communicators, and I think that Shuji really showed that in his book. It talked a lot about how he was actually a bit of a lone horse, a lone horseman in his company, where he didn't make a lot of friends because he would do his own work and he would work on these projects that other people were interested in, and so early on in his career he didn't always have that kind of connection with other people and Shuji, whenever it came to presenting for him. He was a lot better later in his career when he learned how to appeal to people's personal sides and he started taking in how he would have preferred people to treat him early in his career and I think that was a big takeaway for me. And then I also think he got a little bit lucky when it came to his ideas. If it weren't for the CEO of his company, I don't think he would have ever gotten the backing to make the blue LED, and then we probably would have taken another decade or two before we got to where we were.

Speaker 2 17:25

To admit, when you're presenting that not every presentation is going to go perfectly and the audience is always going to be the perfect audience for what you're talking about. But if you're passionate about what you're talking about and presenting about, you'll eventually find the right audience.

Speaker 1 17:34

I understand what you're saying, with Shuji being a little bit lucky because Ogawa was the one that hired him. But he sort of had a similar viewpoint about engineering and technology right, where they both just wanted to roll up their sleeves and try out some things and see what works and happens. So in that case they were of the same spirit. So, yeah, it would have been easier for Shuji to relate to the boss in order to get approval on something. But then later in the story Ogawa wasn't really in charge anymore. He was a chairman, but his son-in-law had taken over the company and his son-in-law didn't have the same kind of viewpoint. He was more direct business and less research development, less of the same cloth that the other two were cut from. So there was a more difficult time with that.

Speaker 2 18:30

Yeah, I think when it got to that point, shuji's persistence really came to fruition. He charged ahead and he never stopped charging at the ideas that he thought was important, and if it weren't for that, I don't think he would have survived the transition between leadership.

Speaker 1 18:45

The other thing that I noticed is when he started writing technical papers he would get invited to speak, and the book did mention about the first speech was really cut and dry. A lot of sly was reading a lot, but the book seemed to indicate that he did that once and then that was it. And then after that he had more flair to his presentations. He would show the lights, he would do dramatic effects and that sort of thing, and that came out in how to Win Friends too is to dramatize your ideas. So, written back in the 1930s, it said you know, it's a time of dramatization. Merely stating a truth isn't enough. It has to be vivid, interesting and dramatic. You have to use showmanship. And boy is that ever even more the case today, I think. And Shuji kind of tapped into that when he finally got to be able to present at some of those conferences.

Speaker 2 19:40

I think that's very apparent, not just professionally but also personally, when it comes to the title of the book how to Win Friends. When it comes to making friends, even in a non-professional environment, a lot of the times we find ourselves dramatizing, over-exaggerating our interests and the things that we find common points, and I think that, although we're not always that excited about those topics, that dramatization makes both parties just as excited to talk to each other and to communicate.

Speaker 1 20:12

Yeah, I think so too. A question we had about this section was what makes a presentation memorable and impactful. What's the most memorable presentation you've ever seen? What's the most memorable presentation you've ever seen? I took some speaking classes to make my presentations more memorable and they told me a lot about improv and adding humor and using props and a lot of this engagement kind of thing.

Speaker 1 20:38

And those are the kind of presentations where, if they're to the point, I know there are some people that do research and they say, well, I can't have just 30 minutes, I need a whole hour to present my idea, whereas I think we should turn that on its head a little bit and say I should be able to explain the major points and the things I'm excited about within 30 minutes and I don't have to prove out everything in my research as I'm presenting it. We can approach presentations a little bit differently than we do our papers Papers can back up our presentations, and that we can be a little more dramatic and engaging when we are presenting. Now, how about you, stephen? What's your most memorable, favorite kind of presentations?

Speaker 2 21:26

In my experience, the best presentations have always been when I was in an open mind going into the presentation. I think some of the most impactful speakers I've ever listened to was when I was young and I was still in elementary or middle school and I was so easily influenced that I was just going in all go lucky and they just said all these things. That got me really excited. And there's been a small handful of times since then where I've gone into a presentation and I just happen to be in a good mood from something else, or an event as a whole had got me prepared to actually listen and be excited about something. And I think that ties into what you were saying is the engagement. And you're not always going to get lucky with your audience, they're not always going to be in that mood, but if you're engaging enough and entertaining and you're able to tie it into them personally, you're going to make them remember it a little bit better, whether or not they actually care about the topic.

Speaker 2 22:23

It's the engagement and the entertainment that's key. And like I was trying to think of some ideas the other day about this and the best ideas I could come up with were movie scenes, and it was. Those are just dramatized versions of arguments and presentations, whether whether it be like a random like inception, when he's trying to explain the idea of inception and sell it to the guy, convince them. It's just so dramatized, so entertaining has so many. It's not just him talking one-on-one, he has interactive things and I think that's always the key to a good presentation. It's not just the content.

Speaker 1 22:58

I never thought about the movie aspect. I'm going to have to start looking at things a little differently when I'm watching movies.

Speaker 2 23:05

Yeah, the first act of a movie is they're selling you on a movie.

Speaker 1 23:09

Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 23:10

It's a presentation to entice you to watch the rest, to be entertained. Sometimes you'll force yourself to watch the rest anyways, but it doesn't mean they actually pulled you in.

Speaker 1 23:23

I tend to just duck out of a movie. If I'm not, I'll give it a good go, but then you know.

Speaker 2 23:26

I may not finish it. The more movies I watch, I feel similarly.

Creating a Collaborative Work Environment

Speaker 1 23:31

All right. Collaboration was another theme that we saw as coming out in both books. In Brilliant, collaboration was happening between different entrepreneurs, between businesses. There was collaboration between academia and industry, and then industry to real-life application, and then also there was a lot of history about the researcher-to-researcher collaboration, and Stephen mentioned earlier. Suzy did a lot of independent work for the initial development of the blue LED, but as that came out and became successful, then, once Nishiya had some success, they started putting more money and more effort into R&D. So Shuji had a team working with him and as he moved on from Nishiya into academia, he tended to have even more collaboration and stronger collaboration with a more diverse group of people. What did you see as far as collaboration and brilliant.

Speaker 2 24:35

I think it was really apparent when you looked at the timeline of his story when the collaboration began, because early on he was working alone, he was a lot slower with his progress and while his own individual motivation was the fuel for the rest of his career, it wasn't until he started working with people from the US or talking to his old professor again, or eventually when he became a professor in the US and had students of his own, that he became more of a stable name and I think, whether or not he actually was more successful alone or not, I think people liked him more and wanted him to be more successful once he started collaborating and once he had those students under him.

Speaker 2 25:20

My favorite thing that he talked about in the book from an interview was about how he dreams of the day when one of his students will make a discovery like he did under him and like. There's very few professors who are like that these days and we all think of these like perfect professors who just want their students to do good, but some professors are very, very selfish and don't care as much about the success of their students. They just want them to help with their own projects, and I think it was very eye-opening to see how, even though he had been shunned for so long early in his career at his company, he still wanted other people to have success.

Speaker 1 25:56

I like that. At the end of the book they interviewed his students about what it was like working with him. I did like reading those chapters because it got a better insight into how he's grown into his new role in academia, but he's still doing the same kind of research that he loves. I really did like that too, and how to win friends. It really came down to just being genuinely interested in other people and talking in terms of the other person's interest. We kind of touched upon this earlier, I guess when you were talking about being engaging with presentations and being able to accept feedback is understanding where the other person is coming from. With collaboration, we talked about a question that we would discuss what is necessary when creating a collaboration-friendly environment? Do you want to start that one off, stephen? Maybe you'll prompt some additional ideas from me.

Speaker 2 26:55

Yeah, I think I want to pull in our poll a little bit into this question. I didn't remember our poll super well until rereading them just now and I think the answer about that you participate when asked. I think that's huge for a lot of people, especially young professionals like myself, is a lot of the times we don't want to collaborate unless we're asked to. But then once we're asked to, we get really excited and knowing that, I think if you want your environment to be more collaborative whether you're a manager or you're just a typical employee in a team, being the one to reach out to others, asking them if they want to collaborate not forcing, not expecting others to reach out to you I think that's huge and it builds a bridge of trust and expectations and even enjoyment in that collaboration.

Speaker 2 27:46

My workplace is very intimidating because there's people here who have been working for the same company for 20 years developing the same kind of tests and I'm doing all these tests that they know how to do like the back of their hand, and a lot of the times they leave me on my own, but at the very beginning, for the first like three months, they drilled it into my head. They're like you have a question, you have any concern, just come and ask, and I think opening that door to others is the first step to take when it comes to collaborating yeah, I would frequently work as a quality professional in my workplaces and we have a reputation for crossing lots of different silos functional silos in a business Over different projects.

Speaker 1 28:29

I would reach out to people in different cross-functional groups like marketing and research and development, and I would walk on the shop floor where the products were being made and get feedback and see how people were doing things and talk with them. I think being in quality affected a lot of the collaborative kind of work that I would do and it just kind of seemed normal. I guess it depends on what it is you're responsible for in your work. Sometimes you may need to be more proactive about reaching out to other people. That's great that the people that you work with say, hey, come and talk to me whenever you want. It's also good when they come to you with a hey, I have an idea. What do you think about this or how can you contribute to helping us get this done? That's another nice thing to do.

Speaker 2 29:26

Yeah, nothing makes you feel more valuable than someone asking for your input on something, and especially in a workplace, a technical workplace that can be so challenging and intimidating. When someone comes to you and asks you for help, it's like, oh, they think I have good ideas, they think I can contribute, and then you're going to be more confident in everything from then on.

Speaker 1 29:47

So those are some ways that we can create collaborative environment. It's just becoming generally interested in other people, not just as people, but also what they do, and then that will also just naturally lead to better collaborations, understanding what other people are interested in and can do.

Speaker 2 30:04

I think collaborating also builds really heavily into networking, professionally and personally. And if you're more willing to collaborate more often and ask others for input, you'll start to learn what others are better at than you and you'll learn who's useful to keep in your network and what people's values why they're valuable to you. And then the more you know that they're valuable, the more that they're going to see that you're valuable when you collaborate.

Speaker 1 30:30

So it's a self-feeding mechanism.

Speaker 2 30:33

Exactly I think I wanted to touch on before we go to the next one too. You were talking about how you've experienced so much collaboration, you got so used to it. I think a big part is sometimes we, if we're lucky enough to be in a really collaborative environment, we start to take advantage of it and stop forgetting about, stop thinking about how much value there is in that collaboration. And I think a big part of how to win friends was staying aware of the benefits of those around you and those situations, aware of the benefits of those around you and those situations. And I think it's an important takeaway of the collaboration from both of these is that even after years and years of having that collaboration, you have to stay aware of how valuable it is, so that if you ever go into a situation without that kind of collaboration, you can bring that to that group or that organization, and just keeping that in the front of your mind is really important.

Speaker 1 31:25

And just maintaining relationships. Is that what you mean?

Building Recognition and Collaboration in Engineering

Speaker 2 31:30

Yeah, and remembering the value of collaboration, because eventually a lot of collaboration will kind of make you forget the value of it.

Speaker 1 31:37

I feel like that you just get so used to it that you don't appreciate it for what it is. Well, good points. Should we move on to the next one recognition of others? We have two more topics to talk about.

Speaker 2 31:50

Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1 31:51

Do you want to talk about where this showed up in Brilliant Stephen, and I'll introduce the other one.

Speaker 2 31:58

Yeah, I touched on this before.

Speaker 2 32:00

A huge part of Shuji's lovability is his ability to recognize and care about others' achievements too, and his students and I think this is theory because it wasn't directly talked about.

Speaker 2 32:14

I think because of how little recognition he got from Nishia and how he eventually had to I guess we haven't brought this up, but eventually he had to sue the company because they wouldn't give him any money for his achievement in like developing the blue LED and they wouldn't recognize the effect he had on their company and their success, and I think because he had been slighted.

Speaker 2 32:40

In that way he really values what it means to recognize others and pull them up and he really cares about other people's achievements too. I also think it's pretty cool that, even though he was probably the leading person in the development of the modern blue LED, when he won his Nobel Prize in physics, two other scientists also got the prize along with him for their work in the same field. And he talks often about how, if it weren't for the developments that had already happened in that field and the technologies that already existed and the scientists even though many of them had given up who had started those researches, he never would have had those ideas or that path to follow and he's very humble in that way and the way that he talks about his successes yeah, there was.

Speaker 1 33:27

I like the story where um it was. I would call him, like the grandfather, the one that did early research on the blue leds yeah, it was fun how they mentioned him as like grandfather, father and like the different.

Speaker 2 33:41

Yeah, it was a goofy way that they put it, but it was fun.

Speaker 1 33:45

Oh, nick Holonyak. When he invented the first visible LED he wasn't part of the Nobel Prize and he sort of felt bad about that because he felt like without his research the other researchers wouldn't have had anything to base their stuff on. And Shouji wrote a letter to him in appreciation and acknowledgement of how he contributed to that research. I like that part of the story.

Speaker 2 34:12

It was impressive how he didn't get cynical with how he was treated early on in his company. I was very impressed with the way that he grew throughout his career, because the story started off and it made it seem like eventually he was just going to become this lone horse who made all these achievements. But that was not at all how he took the direction of his career, his life.

Speaker 1 34:32

And that sort of tracks, along with how to Win Friends. One of the major themes through it is just to make other people feel important, but do it sincerely. If you try to make somebody else feel important, it's going to look like schmoozing and they're not going to like it. To look at other people as the important things that they contribute or how they're important to you and to other people, making them feel important within the context of what you're talking about, is one of the recurring themes in that book and how to win friends Just being sincere and giving appreciation for other people and that kind of tracks, along with being humble. Do you want to start us off with the question on this one, stephen?

Speaker 2 35:41

of experience so far in engineering but even when I worked as a barista and a bartender and other college jobs throughout school, I feel like you get used to the small things that you do right at your job and a lot of the times they stop getting acknowledged. But when you have a good day and someone at the end of the day was like good job, today, you did well, that helps build motivation and encouragement to keep doing what you're doing and it's going to make you enjoy the workplace even better. And that's huge at my work is we have a lot of stressful days where clients can be wonderful. Clients can be torturesome sometimes, and that's true in every client-based business, and when you have a hard client that day and they finally leave and it was a long day, you're an hour over time and your coworker comes over and they're like I noticed today was difficult but you did really well dealing with that client. That makes a huge difference and I think remembering to compliment your colleagues about the little things can go a long ways.

Speaker 1 36:37

I like that idea. For me, I think it's even more impactful to get just a personal, well-timed comment like that than some big awards and recognitions, although those minute and stop sort of moving on to the next thing, just to stop, do a lessons learned but then also recognize that you know we did a good job and these were the things we did a really great job on and that we want to do again. But just stopping to take a moment for that recognition is important. I think sometimes we feel so rushed that we want to just move on to the next thing. Or, as you mentioned earlier, just kind of when you're in collaborations and you're used to collaborating, you kind of take people for granted. Just stopping once in a while and really appreciating the people that you're working with is important.

Speaker 2 37:38

I think recognition can also go towards recognizing when others are having a hard time too. It's really great to get compliments, but whenever you notice like co-workers or friends having a difficult time, you don't always have to directly recognize or talk about this situation. But distracting them from a stressful situation, giving them a breather or talking about what they're doing good, even when the majority of things are going poorly, can really boost someone when they're feeling down. I know that I have a coworker who he can get really into his head and once one thing sets him over the edge he just starts spiraling and sometimes just going over to him and chatting with him about the most unrelated thing for five minutes will help him calm down. And then he comes back later and he's like thanks for that chat. That really helped calm me down and I wasn't directly acknowledging his difficulties at that time. But sometimes recognizing those situations and being a distraction or just a helping friend can really make a huge impact on you.

Speaker 1 38:44

It's a great story. Good thing to remember, not to just celebrate the good stuff, but just to better understand the people that you're working with. I like that story.

Speaker 2 38:53

I like him. Him and I really have similar tendencies at the workplace sometimes, so we really help each other balance.

Speaker 1 39:00

That's nice to have sometimes.

Speaker 2 39:01

So we really help each other balance. That's nice to have. Our last topic, which was essentially the entirety of how to win friends, was getting a buy-in on an idea. Every chapter, every anecdote that he had from a president 80% of them being Abraham Lincoln, because he's obsessed with Abraham Lincoln, understandably. But it was always about getting the people to buy into your idea. Getting the people to buy into what you're selling or to buy into your idea to collaborate or your new technology or any of those things was always huge.

Speaker 2 39:34

Or one of his favorite things to say that he emphasized in a chapter was getting a person to say yes, yes, immediately, and you emphasized this in our notes about the books and I think that was huge.

Speaker 2 39:45

His whole point was, if you have an idea that you think the person might go against or might be difficult for them to get down at first, talking about subjects that you know they'll agree on, talking about common points between you and the person. Knowing your audience once again, that's a common theme of both of these is huge. And if a car salesman comes up to you and is like, hey, you want to buy this really expensive car, you're probably going to say no, and that's not what I need, but if they start talking to you about features that you care about in the car and then they bring you over to this expensive car that has all those features, you're going to be more likely to take it into consideration. And I think that initial yes, yes is very huge, because if you get someone to say no right away, they're never going to go back to yes. It's way harder to go from no to yes than it is from yes to no.

Speaker 1 40:39

I feel like I can tell when that's happening to me, though and I don't know if it's because I'm in engineering or maybe a little cynical, but I start like putting on the brakes, or you know, my other sense starts telling me somebody's trying to sell me something here, and that was something that he did. Comment in how to Win Friends is you have to be sincere about it, not manipulative, but really sincerely interested in the other person, because people will pick up on that rather quickly if you're not. So he did have a lot of antidotes and a lot of methods to try. I tried one. I have two teens. I tried one on my teen the other day the yes, yes thing and it worked, but I don't know how many times it'll work. We'll keep trying it.

Speaker 2 41:28

They're going to catch on.

Speaker 1 41:30

Yeah, they may catch on, but you know, in Brilliant, xu Zhi had trouble getting buy-in from people on what to research and even to continue his research. In fact, he would get letters from the boss saying you need to stop research on this and he would just throw it, you know, cripple it up and throw it away and just kind of ignore it. So there's multiple layers of relationships with people. You know we talked about politics a little bit and having commonality with other people and that just getting buy-in at work or with your family. We're constantly negotiating with other people. You've mentioned several times, stephen. Just understand their point of view and where they're coming from. You can get to a common place a little faster. The question we had oh, how were we convinced to buy into a new idea? I'm going to let you start this one, steve.

Speaker 2 42:29

I told you how.

Speaker 1 42:30

I'm not convinced.

Speaker 2 42:32

This one is such a hard question For me. Growing up, sports was a huge part of my identity, and once I got to college and realized I couldn't play baseball at that level anymore, I kind of had to find another idea. Finding an audience that's open to buying into an idea is huge. I was super open to any sport that I could find that could be competitive but also had a great community. I knew that from my experience. I love the competitive side of baseball, but the hardest thing for me was the community.

Speaker 2 43:01

I didn't always get along politically or personally with baseball players, and so I knew what I was looking for and I think this ties into what I've been saying the whole time is knowing your audience and finding who can buy into your idea.

Speaker 2 43:19

And you have to try to convince people that are unconvincible and you just have to accept them saying no and that was a part of how to win friends that he talked about was you can have all these great tactics and ideas and be truly sincere, but some people are just going to say no. And knowing your audience, finding the people who could buy into your idea, finding those commonalities, is huge. Even if they're a complete stranger, you have to be able to pick and prod at small things and figure out what you have in common. I think everyone has something in common and there's always going to be something to build off of. But finding those people open to the ideas, willing to buy in, I think is huge, because once you get those first few people willing, then they start bringing the people that they're like, that you're not like and it just it's a chain reaction.

Speaker 1 44:03

Yeah, I can see that with the chain, the chain reaction getting people on board, because I can see myself in situations, even non-professionally, where there's there's a group of us that that are trying to organize something, and I'll jump on just because you know I want to be helpful and I can. The other ways that you know thinking about how people convince me to buy into a new idea is I like people to tell me what the idea is. Just get to the punchline. You know what is it that you want from me. Maybe not that cruelly, but I think you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 44:42

Just what is it that we're trying to get to, instead of handing me breadcrumbs in order to make it there? That's a little bit opposite than the yes, yes thing, and it's definitely something you can build up to, building commonality with somebody until you get to the big ask. But just knowing where it is we're going and what it is that we're talking about, and in the end game, I guess I'm better able to be convinced in the end. Thinking about my teens again too, if they get to the pendulum, what is it you really want here?

Speaker 2 45:22

And then we can talk about that.

Speaker 1 45:25

And why do you want to go out to this thing? You know where is it and then you can just kind of talk about the details, knowing where it is or what I'm being asked to do. We can go from there and then discuss different options for that.

Reviews

Speaker 2 45:40

I think that ties in a bit to my uh summary of how to win friends and yeah, let's go.

Speaker 1 45:47

Let's go into our conclusion, shall we?

Speaker 2 45:49

shall we? Uh, I was very excited about this section. Um, I really took these books on a more personal and like thematical way of writing they wrote the books than the like facts that they presented us and to me. I had a really hard time buying in to how to win friends and it wasn't until I realized that the he was using the techniques that he talks about in the book to sell the book to you throughout that I realized I needed to put myself in his shoes and stop thinking so cynically about the book, because initially it feels like every idea he posed was how do you manipulate someone to buy your product. But when I started thinking about it more towards how can I use this not just for buying products but for building relationships I already have or making new friends, like actually making friends rather than making professional friends in the way that he was talking about I think that was a really cool part of this book was initially I was not sold whatsoever and it wasn't until I took my own twist on the ideas and incorporated it into like my everyday life that I was like, oh, that's really cool. Like this weekend I had a friend visit for Memorial Day weekend.

Speaker 2 47:09

I really wanted to just sit by the pool and read all day because the pool was open. So, like, what else do you do? And he was like, I know he likes to read, but he's not the biggest reader. And so initially I was like, well, how about we get up late and we have a late breakfast, early lunch, I'll cook us something, and then we'll go play disc golf. And he's like, yeah, and we love those things.

Speaker 2 47:30

And then I was like and then after disc golf we could just like relax by the pool, stick our feet in the pool? And he's like, yeah, that sounds great. And I was like, what if we just sit by the pool and read for hours? And eventually he was like that doesn't sound too bad. But if I had presented that idea right away, I don't think he would have been sold on it, and so I kind of it was a little bit manipulative if you look at it that way. But at the same time I made us both have a great day and find things that we enjoyed, and I got to sit by the pool and read. So it was, it was a wonderful time. I think that that twist on that book really helped me appreciate it, even if initially I found it a bit obtuse.

Speaker 1 48:11

I know what you mean about it reading like it's how to manipulate people, and you do have to have that different viewpoint that you took about it in order to really gain something I wouldn't say useful, but Substantial.

Speaker 1 48:29

Yeah, yeah, I mean, this was a really early self-help book, right, and with old, antiquated examples about Lincoln, like you mentioned, and there's been dozens. How many books have been published now that are self-help how to relate to other people? So I think they're all variations on a similar theme that he had. But a book that was written recently that I liked more is how to Know a Person, by David Brooks, and that really had the theme of being open and interested in the people around you so that you can better relate to them and understand where they're coming from. I like that one a little bit better than the how to Win Friends and Influence People, maybe because it's more modern, more modern stories, or maybe it's just different times. So how many stars would you give? How to Win Friends and Influence People?

Speaker 2 49:29

If you ask me, halfway through the book I'd give it a one star, but after the end of the book and when I finally flipped my perspective, I'd probably give it three and a half stars. Four stars for a self-help book. I found thinking about how early it was published. Like you said, I found it very impressive how many of those ideas are still so prevalent and the foundations of the way that we create our relationships today. Like that was 1936. To me that feels impossibly far away and I would think that people thought differently, that people had different relationships. But people are always people and I thought that was really cool and I think that's the most impressive part of that book is how much it stood up over time.

Speaker 1 50:17

I think I would give it a four star because it's still kept my interest. I still know who Teddy Roosevelt was and I remember my history lessons and stuff.

Speaker 2 50:29

I still do all the reviews I read online. I was like these are such antiquated references. I don't know half of these people. And I read the book and I was like did you go to school? Yeah, Do you care about history? I don't know. I guess it helps for a certain audience. Nowadays it's a little more of an niche audience than when it first came out. Yeah, what about the other book?

Speaker 1 50:54

With Brilliant. I really liked it so I would give it a four star. Now they really went into some of the technical things like how you build this and that, but I think they went just deep enough to give an appreciation for all the nuances of creating LEDs and all the problems and how finicky and picky the process is. So it gave me a better appreciation for that, and I liked hearing a story about an engineer doing research and his whole journey to winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I just enjoyed that because I'm an engineer too and I could relate to Shuji and his situations that he was in. Sometimes there would be a tangent that would not be part of Shushi's story. So it was more of a development of other LEDs and what happened after the blue LED, like the lasers and different companies that were forming. So the author was really trying to capture a wide spectrum of the technology and how it was developed and all the players involved. That got a little old for me I.

Speaker 2 52:05

I completely agree those were. Some of those sections were slow but they did a really good job at making those chapters shorter than the other chapters early on in the book. Eventually there was a whole section that was completely about not shuji, which was a little harder to get through. But the early sections, the long sections, were always about Shuji and then the short sections were quick time travel to another, to the, to the past or to the future Unrelated to him. They were difficult to get through but I think they did a good job at pacing. I think if I were to give the book stars, I think I'd actually give it a five star. I found it really eye opening to in the way that it talked about his personality as an engineer and his ability to adapt from being this like very stubborn lone rider to becoming a really well appreciated mentor.

Speaker 1 52:59

I like that too, yeah.

Speaker 2 53:01

I found that very motivational and it makes me want to. I am extremely stubborn and I work alone most of the time and I get my own motivation for myself and I don't listen to others a lot of the time. But his ability to adapt and change throughout his career was extremely impressive and it makes me excited to age and mature and see where my career takes me, and I found this book very encouraging throughout.

Speaker 1 53:27

That's great. That's a great review. That's the end of our engineering book review and discussion. There were some comments from listeners which I posted on the podcast blog at Quality During Design. Each podcast has its own blog with extra links, information and show notes that you're just not going to get on your podcast player. Other things that I will link to in this podcast blog is the previous podcast that I had about collaboration, which is a summary of some of the lessons learned just by working with Stephen on this project. There'll also be a link to the PCS chapter of IEEE and you'll also see that the PCS chapter of IEEE Philadelphia is having another virtual event coming up here on September 24. While you're visiting the website, join the newsletter. There is a sign-up form at the bottom of the podcast blog. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening.