July 4, 2025 • 56 mins
Join Aaron Moncur as he interviews Stephen Hinch about his remarkable career in innovation, discussing how companies can foster breakthrough technologies, overcome corporate innovation barriers, and create a culture that supports creative thinking.
Main Topics:
- From Engineering to Leadership: Steve's Career Journey
- Turning Innovative Ideas into Profitable Realities
- Creating a Culture of Innovation
- Challenges of Corporate Innovation
- The Role of Persistence in Technological Breakthroughs
- AI's Current Potential in Engineering
About the guest: Stephen W. Hinch is a seasoned innovation and high-tech management expert with a career spanning R&D, marketing, and executive leadership at companies like Hewlett-Packard, Agilent Technologies, and TeamLogic IT. An engineer with degrees from Harvey Mudd College and Claremont Graduate University, Steve played a key role in advancing surface mount and fiber optic technologies, earning honors like the IPC President’s Award.
He is also a prolific author, with his 2025 book Winning Through Innovation offering practical, team-focused strategies for driving innovation based on real-world leadership experience. Known for blending theory with hands-on practice, Steve now works as a consultant, guiding senior leaders through the challenges of innovation in today’s digital landscape.
Links:
Aaron Moncur, host
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Stephen Hinch (00:01):
If that innovative idea doesn't pan out
and you lose some money on it,your career is permanently
damaged, and a lot of managersin the corporate world don't
feel like they want to take thatrisk, particularly since
typically there's no penalty fornot taking it. You
Aaron Moncur (00:31):
Hello and welcome to the being an engineer
podcast. I am so excited todayto be speaking with Steve Hinch,
a seasoned high tech executive,award winning author and
innovation consultant withsenior leadership roles at
Hewlett Packard, AgilentTechnologies and team logic it.
(00:53):
Steve brings decades ofexperience driving both
incremental and disruptiveinnovation. His latest book,
winning through innovationdistills lessons from a career
spent on the front lines of Rand D, marketing and general
management. Thank you so muchfor being with us today. Steve,
Stephen Hinch (01:11):
thanks, Aaron, I appreciate it.
Aaron Moncur (01:12):
So what made you decide to get into the field of
technology and engineering andinnovation?
Stephen Hinch (01:21):
Actually probably one of the few people I know
that figured out early on Iwanted to be an engineer, and up
until I went into high school, Ihad always thought I was going
to be a paleontologist. Oh,interesting. But when I went
into high school, the counselorsaid, you know, we don't have a
(01:43):
course on paleontology for you,but we do have a course on
electronics that's open tofreshmen, and so let's sign you
up for that. And I took that. Iloved it. I loved it so much
that they allowed me to takethat course for four years. All
four years, Oh, wow. And afterthe first year, I probably knew
(02:07):
more than the teacher, and so Ihelped being basically a
teacher's assistant for all ofthe younger students that were
coming in just learning aboutelectronics. So I knew I wanted
to be in electronicsengineering, pretty much from
the first day of high school.
And so it was fairly easy topick a college that was
(02:29):
consistent with that objective.
And so I went to Harvey MuddCollege in Southern California.
Stayed there for both bachelor'sand master's degrees in
engineering. One of the thingsabout Harvey Mudd College is
they offer a degree inengineering. It's not a degree
(02:51):
in electrical engineering orcivil engineering or mechanical
engineering. It's electrical andit's engineering. And so
theoretically, I could be asgood an engineer designing
bridges as I could be designingcircuits, but I did sort of
focus as best I could on coursesin the electronics area. And it
(03:13):
was I was fortunate enough toget a job at Hewlett Packard
just after I graduated, andstayed with hp, and then they
spun off into a separate companycalled Agilent Technologies in
the year 1999 and so I had a 35year career there, before I
decided to take theentrepreneurial bug and started
(03:36):
a small company here in SantaRosa.
Aaron Moncur (03:39):
And what's the company that you're doing in
Santa Rosa now. So
Stephen Hinch (03:43):
the company is actually a national company
called Team logic. It theyprovide IT support for small
businesses, businesses thatdon't have their own it
technicians. And so I bought thefranchise in Santa Rosa that was
not open. I opened the franchisein Santa Rosa, ran that
(04:04):
franchise for about six years,made it one of the top three in
the in the company, and then Isold that And ever since, the
corporate offices, which arelocated down in Southern
California, have been hiring meas a consultant to do all sorts
of project related work, becauseunlike the rest of the people
(04:27):
that are running the corporateoffice, I actually ran a
franchise. I know what it's liketo be an owner, and they're sort
of the, I would say, theconsultants that sort of help
you, but they've never actuallyrun a franchise themselves, so I
bring a perspective to thecorporate offices that they
wouldn't otherwise have and andthat's kept me busy for for
several more years.
Aaron Moncur (04:48):
Yeah, I'm sure that's massively valuable to
them, to have someone with yourperspective. Well, you spend a
long time in in r, d, and a lotof. Engineers who listen to this
show are in r, d ormanufacturing process
engineering, but they spent timein that, in the trenches, you
(05:11):
know, coming up with the newtechnology, figuring the things
out that just don't exist yet.
What Not many of our listenershave deep experience in is the
other side of that equation,which is like the marketing and
the sales aspect, but you alsoeventually moved into a
marketing role. Can you talk alittle bit about how that
(05:33):
changed your perspective or yourunderstanding of innovation and
the engineering process.
Stephen Hinch (05:43):
Yeah, that was really quite an experience for
me, and it really changed myperspective. And I'll get more
into that in a minute, butbefore I do let me just sort of
highlight the three or fourdifferent aspects of my career.
I started out as a productionengineer at Hewlett Packard in
(06:05):
their microwave test equipmentarea. So I was not inventing the
new products. I was fixingproblems on the products that
had been invented by the R Dengineers a couple of years
earlier. But they were offinventing new products. They
didn't want to fix productsproblems on the stuff they'd
worked on before. So weproduction engineers were the
(06:26):
ones that took care of that. Iwas in production engineering
for about 10 years. Eventuallymoved into R D not as an R D
engineer. I've never been reallyas an R D engineer. I moved in
as a an R D project manager, andthen moved up eventually to be
an R and D manager of a wholedivision. And I always wanted to
(06:52):
move even higher in managementto run my own business and at
HP, and it's spin off AgilentTechnologies, you know, they
form several differentdivisions. A division is sort of
the smallest organization that'scompletely responsible for its
own profit and loss. It'stypically between 50 and $100
(07:14):
million $300 million a yearbusiness. And I wanted to do
that, and I got coaching from mygeneral manager at the time,
saying, you know, Steve, you'vebeen in manufacturing, you've
been in r, d, if you run, wantto run a business, you really
need to learn about marketing.
And so he was able to get meinto probably the only marketing
(07:39):
division responsibility, jobresponsibility, that I was
qualified for, and that wasbeing the division marketing
manager for a $300 million ayear business. I didn't have to
actually figure out how to gosell products. I didn't have to
actually write the all of thethe collateral for selling the
(07:59):
new products, I was bringing ahigher perspective. And up until
then, you know, I'd never serveda day in marketing. And my only
experience that this is probablygoing to date me, but you
remember the cartoon Dilbert,and there was a one cartoon
showing that Dilbert was beingsent to marketing, and there was
(08:22):
this big arch in front ofmarketing. It says, Welcome to
marketing, to drink minimum. Andthat was my perspective of
marketing, until I became themarketing manager. Just a big
party, huh? Just a big party.
And that was not it at all thesepeople. You know, I was
(08:43):
responsible for productmarketing, for sales
development, for Marcom, forproduct support. There were
really sharp engineers therethat I had really never given a
lot of credit to before. Now, inmy role as R and D manager, I
had worked very closely with mycounterpart in product
marketing, so I sort of knewproduct marketing. They would be
(09:06):
the ones that take the newproduct I was developing and
launch it out into the world. SoI knew that part of it, but all
of the you know, how do you puttogether a marketing support
program, all of the you know,the the Marcom collateral, I
thought, I thought Marcomcollateral was all of the stuff,
the little freebies that yougive away at a trade show and
(09:30):
the mark on manager alwayswanted to strangle my neck,
because that was a very smallpart of the job that a marketing
organization does. But I learneda lot. And I have to say that
when I first came in, thereeverybody in marketing thought,
Who is this guy from R and Dgoing to be running marketing?
(09:51):
And I tried not to come inthinking I knew all the answers.
I came in wanting to pull thebest I could. And. Out of all of
the people that were working forme, because I knew they knew
their jobs better than I did,but I had the higher
perspective, because I hadworked with customers before,
you know, selling, going outwith the R and the marketing guy
(10:14):
when we were launching our newproducts, I knew that part of
the business, and I knew how tosort of pull it all together,
but it was really an eye openingexperience, and I would strongly
recommend any engineer thinkingabout eventually wanting to move
into higher level management, Csuite management, or even
opening their own company thatserving time, not only in R D,
(10:35):
but also in marketing, to learnthe ropes of both of those sides
of things is very important.
Serving time in in manufacturingmight not be as important,
depending upon what kind ofbusiness that you're going into,
software company, maybe notquite as much, but, but you're
always going to want to knowabout r, d and marketing,
Aaron Moncur (10:56):
if you had to distill at a very high level the
essence of marketing, especiallywithin the context of an
engineering environment, down tojust a few words or maybe a
short sentence. How would youdefine marketing? So
Stephen Hinch (11:12):
I'm not going to be good at distilling it down to
a few words, but let me just saytwo points. Okay, there's a
difference between marketing andsales, I never manage sales.
Sales is those are the hunterkillers that are going out
closing deals. Marketing istheir responsibility is to get
the message out to the customersso the sales guys can close the
(11:38):
deals.
Aaron Moncur (11:39):
That's a good way of distilling it, getting the
message out. I like that a lot.
In your book, winning throughinnovation, you talk about
turning ideas not just into areality, but how to turn ideas
into a profitable reality. Andnot everyone gets that second
aspect of profitable realityright? Why do you think that
(12:01):
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Stephen Hinch (13:13):
Okay, so let me first say, not every innovative
idea that you have is going toturn out profitable. And that's
because you know when you startan innovative idea, especially a
disruptive, innovative idea,where you're going to go off
into a new market that you'venever dealt with before, you
(13:36):
don't necessarily know thatmarket. You don't know for sure
the technology that you'rethinking of is going to work,
and so those kind of disruptiveinnovations may fail over half
the time, and that's okay. And Iuse the word fail carefully
there, because they're notreally failures. They are ways
(13:57):
for you to learn more about howyou can be successful in the
future. The problem with a lotof companies, particularly
larger companies, is they don'tgive the innovative ideas the
opportunity to really provethemselves out. If you're not
(14:18):
delivering results immediately,it's time to chop it. I just
read a post today from theformer CTO of Hewlett Packard,
Aaron Moncur (14:32):
who
Stephen Hinch (14:35):
he spent about $1.2 billion buying a company.
It was actually palm that theybought, and he had a great idea
for how to turn that into a itwas a, you know, a struggling
company at the time, and he, he,he has some ideas on how to turn
(14:55):
it into company, or to aprofitable company. But his. Is
CEO did not want to wait withinwithin I think it was like 60
days after they bought thecompany, the new CEO shut it
down. He didn't give it achance. And that's the big
(15:15):
problem with why a lot ofinnovative ideas don't pan out.
Is the C suite doesn't have thepatience to prove it out, to
wait and show that it's reallygoing to work. And I had to
struggle with that myself. Thebiggest innovation that I had at
HP that actually brought in histhis was like around the year
(15:36):
2000 when we launched it, and itis a product line still going
strong today and has brought inseveral billion dollars of
profit to the company. But Ialmost wasn't allowed to do that
innovation, because it was adisruptive innovation that they
didn't know how to structure theorganization. But fortunately,
(15:59):
the Vice President in charge oftest and measurement at the
time, said what we're going todo, Steve, is we're going to
treat you like an in housestartup company. We're not going
to hold you responsible formonthly profits, monthly
revenues until you launch theproduct. What we're going to do
is we're going to measure you onare you meeting the deadlines,
(16:20):
the commitments that you saidyou were going to in order to
invent this new product. And ittook me two years to launch that
product. But if I had not hadthat kind of support from the
vice president of the company,it would have never
Aaron Moncur (16:35):
happened. Ideas really just need time to find
their way and grow on their ownright. Can you talk about what
that product was, that productline?
Stephen Hinch (16:46):
Yeah, so I was responsible for rd manager for
the high performanceoscilloscope business. And you
don't need to know a lot aboutan oscilloscope, but hopefully
your readers have at least usedoscilloscopes before. An
oscilloscope measures electricalsignals, and the ones that I was
(17:08):
responsible for had bandwidthsup to about 50 gigahertz at the
time. That was really, reallywide bandwidth. And there was
this new market called fiberoptic telecommunications that
had a need for measuringwaveforms, but they needed to
(17:29):
measure the waveforms of anoptical signal going down a
fiber optic cable, not anelectrical signal, but so the
oscilloscope would have been thegreat way to Do it, but
oscilloscopes measure electricalsignals and so people had
already put little opticalconverters on the front of
oscilloscopes, and were usingthat as sort of a crude way to
(17:50):
make the measurements, but itwasn't fully calibrated, and the
standards for the industry werejust starting to evolve. For
saying this is how good themeasurement needs to be. And we
had this brilliant idea of notonly putting that little optical
converter inside theoscilloscope, which would have
(18:11):
not done very much differentthan what they were already
doing, but to develop acompletely calibrated process to
make sure that when you'remaking the measurement, you know
that it was very accuratemeasurement. And that was
something that nobody had donebefore. You could sort of make
the measurements, but theyweren't very accurate at the
(18:33):
time. HP had only 25% marketshare, and our biggest
competitor was Tektronix, withabout 75% market share, and we
had to invent this new productin a way so that Tektronix did
not find out what we were doing.
Because if, if they did, theywould have gone off and invented
(18:56):
their own product, and sincethey were already the market
leader, they would havemaintained their market
leadership. So one, one of thethings I did is we invented a,
what I'll call a phantom productthat was a, not a very good
product at all, but we leaked itout to the world, and Tektronix
found out about it and said,Well, that's not anything to
(19:18):
worry about, and they completelyignored us until we launched our
product two years later. And ittook them several years to
respond, and by then, we hadcompletely swept the market
Aaron Moncur (19:30):
up. Oh, that's phenomenal. Wow, what a great
strategy.
Stephen Hinch (19:34):
It's not the kind of thing you'll read about in
other books on innovation, but Italk all about it, and that's
just one of the things that wedid that that made our product
successful, there talk
Aaron Moncur (19:46):
a little bit more about that. What? Why was the
decision made to leak a phantomproduct, the that would be seen
by your competitor as as notdangerous to them, not a threat,
versus just not saying. Anything
Stephen Hinch (20:01):
good, good point.
And so we did not primarilyinvent this phantom product. In
order to fool Tektronix, weneeded a way to go out and talk
to customers to find out whatthey really are doing and what
they really needed. Now, sincewe didn't have much market
share. They were all buyingproducts from Tektronix. They
(20:22):
did not want to talk to us aboutit, but by bringing out this,
this, but it's called a phantomproduct, if it was actually we
sold some, it gave us an excuseto go out and talk to customers
that otherwise would not havetalked to us, and we got to find
out what they really wanted. Andyeah, those customers said,
(20:42):
yeah, no, this is not reallyvery good, but it's maybe a
little better than you got rightnow. And so we didn't
deliberately try to leak thatinformation out to Tektronix.
That just sort of leaked outbecause the customers would go
back to tech. And yeah, we justsaw this new product from HP,
you have nothing to worry about.
(21:04):
So anyway, so that was, was, wasreally why we did it is, was not
primarily to fool tectronics.
Aaron Moncur (21:12):
That's hilarious that it had that unintended side
effect. How funny. Okay, howsmart Do you think people need
to be to develop disruptiveinnovation? Is this reserved
only for the cream of the crop,the top 1% of intelligence out
(21:32):
there?
Stephen Hinch (21:34):
If it were, we would have no innovations out
there. So, I mean, you have to,there's a couple of parts to
this. One is you have to havethe innovative idea. In my book,
I only touch on how to come upwith the innovative idea, sort
of peripherally, because there'snot a process that I can really
(21:58):
quote for saying here's how Icame up with this idea, what I
can do is map out an environmentthat allows people to nurture
those innovative ideas. But theactual idea of, you know, the
light bulb coming on over yourhead is not something that you
can really write. Might map outa prescriptive process for how
(22:21):
to do that.
Aaron Moncur (22:24):
What's the environment look like?
Stephen Hinch (22:26):
So there's different environment depending
upon whether you're doingdisruptive innovation or
incremental innovation. And letme just quickly summarize the
difference between the two.
Incremental innovation is whereyou make minor improvements to
your existing product line. Andexample, the automobile
(22:46):
industry, the gasoline poweredautomobile industry, have been
doing incremental innovationsfor years. You know, the cars
that they sell today sell to thesame customers as they sold 10
or 20 years ago, but they're notexactly the same cars. They've
got anti lock brakes, they'vegot crash protection, they've
got improved warranty periods,but they're still familiar to
(23:11):
the people that bought cars 10or 15 years ago, and they're
happy to trade in their old carsfor new cars that they see are
better. That's incrementalinnovation, disruptive
innovation. The prime example Iuse in my book is from the
middle of the 20th century, theearly part of the 20th century,
up until about 1949 almost allthe locomotives that the
(23:35):
railroad industry bought weresteam engines. Steam
locomotives. By the 1950s theywere all diesel powered
locomotives, and not a singlemanufacturer of steam
locomotives survived thattransition, because it was such
a disruption, they were tryingto make better steam locomotives
(23:57):
when the the industry wasalready saying steep locomotives
are passe diesels are muchbetter. They're more reliable,
less expensive to operate, butso sort of a long way to get to
the question you were asking,incremental innovation is
(24:18):
typically best done by thepeople who are managing that
product line. So the the themanagers that are managing the
automobile manufacturing, youknow, it's time to put a better
anti lock brake in, or improvesome other aspect of it, or put
a flat panel display on thefront panel. Those are all
(24:39):
incremental innovations. The thebusiness managers leading that
business are the ones best ableto do those kind of incremental
innovations. But for disruptiveinnovations, those managers are
trying to preserve the productline they already have that. Not
going to be the ones to switchfrom steam locomotives to diesel
(25:02):
locomotives. So you really needto manage that disruptive
innovation under an organizationthat's completely separate from
the current product line. Andthat doesn't need to be a giant
organization. In fact, itgenerally you staff that with
just a few key people, and thenas you prove the technology, and
(25:26):
as you start getting morecustomers, you can add more team
members and start doing moreproduct development. But you
want to start that disruptiveinnovation slowly and a small
part of the market first toprove that your your technology
is working and that there'sreally a market need for it. And
(25:47):
then as you capture that smallpart of the market, you can
expand into other parts of themarket and take over from those
people are still trying to sellsteam locomotives. That's a
great
Aaron Moncur (25:59):
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Stephen Hinch (26:57):
So I actually don't mind. I'm going to pull up
my book, because I've got sixthings to do to encourage people
to innovate, right? The firstthing that they need to be able
to do is the employees need tounderstand the company's
business strategy. That's theresponsibility of the company
(27:19):
leadership C suite to explainwhat this company is all about,
what we're trying to do, whatmarkets we're trying to go
after, where we're putting ourpriorities. Because if, if the
employees don't understand thatthey don't know where to go off
and innovate, or they may comeup with great ideas for
something that has nothing to dowith this company now that that
(27:43):
maybe means those, thoseemployees should go off start
their own company, but, but, butthe first thing that really
needs to happen is thatemployees need to understand
what this company is all aboutand and what the strategy is.
Number two is you got toemployees. Have got to
understand that innovation ismore than just ideas for new
(28:05):
products or services. I mean,not every innovation that you
come up with is going to be thenext Tesla or SpaceX or iPhone.
There are going to be lots ofsmaller innovations that will be
just as valuable to the company,and those are the kind of
innovations that people lower inthe organization are more likely
to have the ability tocontribute to the next iPhone is
(28:31):
not going to be invented by somefirst level engineer down in the
trenches, but that first levelengineer, or even The people on
the production line that arebuilding products may say, you
know, this process is not themost efficient way. If we could
just change this, I could build10 more products an hour, and
(28:53):
that's the kind of insight thatthe C suite is not going to
know. They're going to need todepend on, on the people in the
trenches to bring that kind ofof insight into the
organization. Now, once thethose ideas come up, then you
got to give people time toexplore those innovative ideas
(29:14):
and test them out and and trythem. And you've got to provide
employees with resources to dothat. Now, when I was the
general manager of theoscilloscope business at HP, I
tried to make sure peopleunderstood that I felt
(29:35):
comfortable giving people about5% of their work time to explore
innovation in ways, you know,new ideas that may or may not
pan out, but, you know, take twohours a week to test things out,
and if it looked like somethingwas going to work out, then I
would figure out a way to staffa full project about it. But,
(29:58):
but those innovative ideas.
Giving people time to explorethose innovative ideas and some
resources, space or materials totest things out, is is really
important to encouraging thatthat culture of innovation.
Aaron Moncur (30:13):
Are you familiar with Flaming Hot Cheetos?
Stephen Hinch (30:18):
Tell me about them. This
Aaron Moncur (30:20):
sounds like a complete tangent, but I promise,
promise. It's not so you know,Cheetos, right? Like the snack
Cheetos, I can't rememberexactly when it was, but 15
years ago, whatever it was, afactory worker who was Hispanic
and and felt like the Cheetosdidn't resonate with with his
(30:43):
demographic, the Hispanicpopulation. Thought there needs
to be a spicy version ofCheetos. And he, he approached
manager, management about this,and they, they kind of poo pooed
the idea. Didn't think it wasrelevant, and so now we're not
going to spend anything on this.
Well, this this guy who's afactory worker, right, just like
(31:04):
a lowly factory worker, and hebelieved strongly enough in his
idea that he spent his own timeand resources testing and doing
user groups within his communityand trying different recipes and
putting the the spicy, theflamin hot on the Cheetos. And I
think it took him a while, ayear or two years, something
(31:26):
like that, but he eventuallycame up with a recipe that he
really liked, and his communityreally liked, and he he somehow
finagled his way into getting aprototype run of these flamin
Hot Cheetos and and they justcrushed it. They did so well,
yeah, and now these flamin hot,you know, Cheetos, Doritos,
Funyuns, they're they're allover the marketplace, but it was
(31:48):
just like you talked about,right? Very small group him and
a couple couple of closefriends. And in this case, his
organization did not give himthe resources, but he found them
on his own, just using personalresources, time, a little bit of
money, a lot of testing andexperimentation, and eventually
it blossomed into this huge,huge, multi billion dollar
success for the company.
Stephen Hinch (32:11):
I love that example, and it actually points
out two things that I was goingto bring up at some point in the
conversation anyway. One is itwas really poor of the C suite
to poo poo it when they shouldhave given him some time to
experiment. You know, notunlimited time and not unlimited
(32:32):
budget. But Okay, try it out,and let's see what happens. So
that's the first thing, is,that's a really good example of
why a lot of large companiesaren't successful at innovation.
They don't have the support thatthey need. The second point is,
he didn't stop, even though theysaid no. And that level of
(32:52):
persistence, that's impressive,and that's exactly what it takes
at time to really driveinnovations through. And so
don't give up just becausesomebody says, No,
Aaron Moncur (33:01):
I love the word persistence that you used. I
think that earlier I asked, Isinnovation reserved only for the
cream of the crop, the mostintelligent people out there?
And I happen to think thatsuccess and innovation is much
more about persistence than itis about brilliance. I think
(33:22):
nine times out of 10, maybe 99times out of 100 it's the
persistent person, not not justthe brilliant person that that
wins out there. I know I've seenthat over and over. I don't
consider myself to be the mostbrilliant engineer, not by a
long shot, actually, but onething I do think I'm good at is
(33:44):
being persistent. I can continueto attack a problem, and I've
definitely seen successes there,where perhaps others who weren't
as persistent would have failed.
Stephen Hinch (33:53):
I love that. I think that's a great way to put
it, and I'll also stress thatpart of that persistence is
knowing how to get help fromothers, because, you know, the C
suite says no, but you know thisguy over here, and it sounds
like he did that. It was a smallgroup of people, and they tested
probably a variety of ofdifferent formulas before they
(34:16):
found some that really resonatedwith their demographic. But, but
trying to get that that, andit's small group of people, I
another thing I really stress isnever put a person on an
innovation project that doesn'twant to be there. If you're only
putting him there because he's amechanical engineer, they need a
(34:36):
mechanical engineer go help himout, and he doesn't want to do
it. That's a recipe for failure,but so good. Okay,
Aaron Moncur (34:45):
I think that's another really important,
important point that you make,that innovative projects are
best staffed by people who arepassionate about them. And I
think I'd love to hear your yourfeedback on this, but I think
the reason for that. Is thatinnovation requires a lot of
upfront time, and often moretime than the standard 40 hour
(35:09):
work week can afford. And soit's typically the teams who are
willing to put in extra timethat they're not necessarily
getting paid for, at least notup front. It's those teams, I
think it's really required for alot of innovative technologies.
It's just it requires more timethan than the the market at that
point can afford. So people haveto just spend extra time to get
(35:34):
it going, probably not 100% ofthe time. For a large
organization with lots ofresources, maybe not so much,
but for smaller organizations, II think that's true. What? What
are your feelings on that?
Stephen Hinch (35:45):
I completely agree with that, which is why,
you know, if you look at startupcompanies, they don't work 40
hour weeks. Yeah, they work 80hour weeks, and they're not
getting paid for 80 hours, butthey love what they're doing, or
they see that there's a reallygood future for it. And I don't
think most of those people willsay that they're in this because
(36:06):
they want to be millionairesdown the road, or they're going
to get multi millionaire stockoption kind of stuff. They do it
because they're reallyenthusiastic. They have this
great idea. They want to provethat it really will work, and
they're willing to put the timeinto it to make it successful.
Yeah,
Aaron Moncur (36:23):
yeah, that comes down to purpose, right? Do you
have a compelling purpose forwhy you're doing something? And
if you do, boy, that sure is amuch greater motivator than just
a paycheck, right? That's right,all right. Well, let's see. We
talked a little bit about howlarge organizations sometimes
(36:44):
can struggle with innovationbecause they aren't willing to
provide the time and resourcesfor a new, disruptive idea to
really take hold. How can acompany know if they've sort of
slipped into unknowingly TheCurse of the corporate business
model. What are some of thewarning signs?
Stephen Hinch (37:04):
Okay, so let's talk about what the curse of the
corporate business model is. Iclassify it as sort of three
things. And again, I'll pull upthe book somewhere. I've got it
here. So the first thing aboutthe curse of the corporate
business model is that in largecorporations, multinational
(37:24):
corporations, and we sort ofmentioned this, investors
measure the success of thecompany based on how well
they're doing to deliver thismonth's profits and growth and
disruptive innovations that takea year or two or more to pan out
aren't consistent with having todeliver results this month or
(37:47):
this quarter. Now there is a wayaround it. I'll get to that in a
minute, but that's the firstthing. The second thing is that
the managers in a largecorporation don't see the
rewards being worth the risk.
Now, what I mean there is thatin a small startup, if you
(38:10):
innovate successfully, and thatthe startup goes IPO or gets
bought out, you can become amultimillionaire. Doesn't happen
very often, but at least it can.
But in a corporation, if you'rea leader that drives innovation
(38:33):
successfully, you may get a few100 stock options. You may get a
promotion. But if thatinnovative idea doesn't pan out
and you lose some money on it,your career is permanently
damaged. And so a lot ofmanagers in the corporate world
don't feel like they want totake that risk, particularly
(38:55):
since typically there's nopenalty for not taking it in the
corporate world, you're notbeing measured by how much risk
you're taking. You're beingmeasured by Did you deliver this
month's results and and thethird part of the this curse of
the corporate business model isthat a lot of the managers that
are in large corporations areless prone to take risk anyway
(39:19):
than the people that are in thesmall startups, because, because
of all of what I said there, andif, if you were in as large
company, and you love takingrisks, and you're not getting
the opportunity to do so, you'regoing to leave that that
corporate environment and Gostart your own company. So, so
(39:42):
those are the curse of thecorporate business model and
why. You know, think of ofcompanies that are not
successful or haven't beensuccessful. Do you remember a
company called SmithCoronavirus? They used to make
typewriters back in the day?
Before word processing. Younever hear about them anymore,
but they were one of the primemanufacturers of typewriters,
(40:05):
palm you know, they didn'tswitch to the the smartphone as
the market evolved. And so yourquestion about, How do I I know
when a company is victim of thecurse of the corporate business
model is because they're goingdown the tube. They're not
(40:26):
continuing to grow. They're notgoing after those new markets
and and sort of, it's sort of bythe time you discover that it's
too late, usually to fix things,they're still trying to make a
better steam engine. They'restill trying to make a better
steam engine. Great point. Yes,
Aaron Moncur (40:45):
I love that analogy that just it illustrates
so clearly for me. I'm not sureI've heard it explained so
clearly before. So I was goingto stick with me.
Stephen Hinch (40:55):
I actually spoke with and there's a professor at
the University of Kennesaw thatwrote his whole master's thesis,
or PhD dissertation on thetransition from steam to diesel.
And so I picked his brain, andhe helped me with the chapter I
(41:17):
wrote on that, because I didn'tknow what I mean. I knew that
steam engines were no longeraround anymore, but I didn't
know all of the story behind it.
It's really an enlighteningstory. There were steps all
along the way for about 20 yearswhere any of those steam
locomotive manufacturers, ifthey'd just taken the right
step, they could have been stillthe leaders, but none of them
(41:39):
did that.
Aaron Moncur (41:42):
Do you know Clayton Christensen? Oh, yeah.
Okay, so his book, andChristensen, right? Yes, I can't
remember the exact title of thebook, The Innovators Dilemma, or
disruptors, something like that.
But he talked about somethingsimilar, where hard drive
companies, right were, weredisrupted by by solid state
drives, and yes, and how theycouldn't really catch that
Stephen Hinch (42:06):
was another good example. And I I figured he'd
already did that one. He hadalso used an example, I think,
in the same book about steamshovels being replaced by diesel
shovels. So I didn't want torehash those examples in my
book. And I thought, Well, whydidn't he talk about steam
locomotives? That seemed like aperfect example, but since he
(42:27):
hadn't talked about it, Ithought I would Terrific. Well,
Aaron Moncur (42:30):
I'm glad you did.
Let's talk about AI a littlebit. AI is just, you know, it's,
it's the the next huge thing andhas the potential to really
revolutionize not just the waythat we work, but the way that
we we live, and in some casesalready, is how, how should
engineering manufacturingtechnology companies be be
utilizing AI and and how aresome companies Maybe misusing
(42:55):
it?
Stephen Hinch (42:58):
So a couple of points here. First is there's a
lot of hype around AI that isprobably being promoted more by
people that want to make a lotof money off of it, as opposed
to by the fact that it's reallygoing to help in certain areas.
So you got to be careful aboutthat. But I do believe it really
(43:23):
has a place, but you've sort ofgot to learn to walk before you
can run, kind of thing you can'tuse AI yet to come up with the
next disruptive innovation. AIfrom what I can tell and what
I've seen and how I've talkedwith people that use it, it can
(43:47):
be very effective at some of thelower level kinds of analysis of
data, of being able to trackthings that are going on at sort
of a regular level, and thisstuff that if it does something
(44:08):
wrong, it's not going to driveyour company to bankruptcy. I,
you know, I still do a lot ofwork, consulting, work for Team
logic, it, and one of the keythings that that we do for our
customers is we're continuallymonitoring their IT networks,
(44:30):
and immediately detecting ifsomething is wrong, if you know
if a server goes down or ifThere's malware coming in. The
idea is that we're we're runningsoftware on their network that
tracks this and and canimmediately notify us that
(44:50):
there's a problem. Now, fiveyears ago, that meant that a
technician funding in front of ascreen was getting a notice. Has
said there's something going onwith the server. You better
check into it. Now. AI can lookat these kinds of things and
immediately say, Okay, here'swhat's going on. This is what I
(45:11):
need to do to fix it. And theydon't ever have to even involve
a technician for routine stuff.
And if it's something that isnot routine, then the AI process
can escalate it so that that'sthe kind of stuff that the real
technician needs to work on. ButAI can eliminate what used to be
a real time sink. I used to havethree first level technicians
(45:36):
sitting in front of screens allthe time just watching all of my
clients networks to figure outwhat needed to be fixed or if
something was haywire was goingon, and now a lot of that can be
done automatically. So that's agood way of using AI in a way
that is effective in now. Now Ican't say that I know how a
(46:00):
company like HP, in their R Denvironment is using AI. I mean,
you know AI is good at writingsoftware, but it's not great at
writing software code withoutbugs in it. So you can generally
use AI to give yourself a firstdraft of code to do something,
(46:25):
but then you've got to have a anengineer look through it and
make sure that it's it is reallydoing everything that you think
it is, without a bunch of ofgaps or, you know, things left
open, where hackers can breakin, that kind of thing. So AI is
still good at the lower levelstuff, and maybe in future
(46:46):
years, it'll be better at movingup in the food chain to hire in
the environment. But I don'tthink it's there yet.
Aaron Moncur (46:58):
Yeah, agreed. I use it a lot, because I do a lot
of marketing and sales andwriting and communication, and
it's great for that, but it'snot going to develop a new CAD
model for the machine that we'retrying to design right now, not
Stephen Hinch (47:10):
yet. That's right, yep. And my son is the
chief technology officer of a alittle bit more than a startup
now in in the AI area, they'reproviding, he lives in in
England, and they're providing aAI technology for the European
(47:35):
banking industry, which is, youknow, you gotta be careful there
Up in the banking industry, andhe says, we're very careful
about what we do use AI for. Infact, the European Union refuses
to let him use any kind of AIwhere the large language models
(47:56):
are stored in the United States.
Oh, interesting, because theydon't trust that the protection,
security protection is there. Sohe's had to set up his own large
language model in Amazon WebServices that that allows him to
provide services that he wouldnot otherwise be able to
(48:17):
provide.
Aaron Moncur (48:21):
Well, let's see, Steve, let's let's do just a
couple more questions here, andthen we'll wrap things up for
engineers who want to move intoleadership, what are some things
that they should start doing nowto build a innovation focused
career? So
Stephen Hinch (48:37):
it's easy for engineers just focus on whatever
code they're being asked towrite right now, or whatever
circuit design they're supposedto do. And, you know, just keep
their head down and and do whatthey're being asked to do. If
you want to move higher into theorganization, into leadership
roles, you've got to thinkbeyond that. You've got to
(49:00):
understand what is this businessthat I'm in? Try to understand
how the leaders of that businessare thinking and where they set
their priorities and and sort ofunderstand why are they doing it
this way? And have discussionswith them. You got to be a
(49:20):
little careful about that,because not every manager is
comfortable with that kind ofthing. He's going to feel like,
why are you questioning me aboutthe decision I made? But a lot
of them, they'll love to see anengineer, first level, kind of
individual contributor who isshowing more interest in what
(49:43):
the business is all about,because they know that those are
the kind of people that willhave the innovative ideas that
can drive that that thatbusiness even further, so that
that's really importantunderstand the business. And
then, as I did, understand notjust R and D. Strategy, but
learn about what is it like tobe in marketing. It doesn't mean
(50:04):
you have to move into marketing.
You can work closely with the Rand D, the marketing
counterparts that are launchingthe products that you're
inventing, but But learn moreabout the whole business than
just the part that you're in. Ithink those are a couple of key
points that engineers justgetting into their career should
(50:26):
understand.
Aaron Moncur (50:29):
I really like your point about understanding the
business because, you know,businesses aren't don't exist to
do engineering or to domanufacturing or even to do
innovation, businesses exist tomake a profit, and that's the
only way the business can remainin business and employ all the
wonderful engineers and otherswho work there in and so for
(50:54):
engineers to understand thebusiness, it really just allows
them to contribute in a muchmore meaningful way to the
purpose of the business. I knowthat we've had engineers on our
team in the past that had beenjust wonderful, wonderful human
beings. I've loved working withthem, but ultimately they they
(51:14):
couldn't do the work effectivelyenough for the company to be
profitable on their time. And,you know, those engineers, they
don't, they don't last longterm. That's right. So
understanding the business what,what the business needs, and how
your your direct contributions,can support and facilitate those
(51:37):
business outcomes is just it'shuge, and
Stephen Hinch (51:40):
that's especially important in today's climate,
where things are changingrapidly. And the knowledge that
you have today and theunderstanding of how to do
things today may not besufficient for three or four or
five years down the road, youknow, the more AI comes in, or
maybe there'll be some other newHot Topic three years from now
(52:00):
that you need to stay aware ofhow business is evolving and
what it takes to stay relevantas markets are evolving as well.
Yeah.
Aaron Moncur (52:17):
Well, Steve, last question I have for you, what is
one thing that you've done orseen to accelerate the speed of
engineering,
Stephen Hinch (52:27):
the thing that I've done is in a leadership
role, not as an engineer. In aleadership role, my job is
creating an environment thatmakes the engineers feel like
they are supported and that theyhave the authority to do what
they think is right. That maynot be what I think I would have
(52:51):
done if I was in their shoe, butI give them the flexibility to
do things the way they think isright. And that doesn't mean
it'll work out all the time.
Sometimes it'll it'll not workout, but that'll be a learning
experience for both of us, andit'll make them better engineers
in the future, if they arefeeling like they have the
flexibility to do things the waythey want to, as opposed to only
(53:12):
doing things the way I'm tellingthem to do, any
Aaron Moncur (53:18):
tactical recommendations that you can
share, or specific practicesthat you've implemented to
create that environment whereengineers feel safe to safe and
empowered to do the rightthings.
Stephen Hinch (53:35):
So again, it sort of my role as the manager is not
to be the best engineer mymanager, my job is to give them
that environment. And so a lotof my job is to work with higher
management to keep those highermanagers out of the way so that
my engineers can do what theyneed to do. And so I'll a lot i
(53:58):
in the book, I give an examplewhere I needed to give my
engineers time to inventsomething new before top
management shut us down. And soI spent close to a year where
pretty much all my job wasputting together financial
forecasts and order forecaststhat said this is what we're
(54:20):
going to do, and this is why youshould need to keep us open long
enough for those engineers. Sothe engineers were happy I was
not telling them what to do, butI was keeping the higher
management off of their theirnecks, and so that buffer
between higher management andthe engineers doing the work is
a key thing that a good managershould be able to
Aaron Moncur (54:42):
do. That's a great example. I bet not many people
would think of something likethat, just the fact that that's
a necessary and critical part ofthe business. But great example.
Thank you for sharing that.
Well, Steve, this has beendelightful. How can people get
in touch with you?
Stephen Hinch (54:58):
So I've got a website. It's. Is www, dot
Steven, S, T, E, P, H, E N,hyphen, W, hyphen, Hinch, h, i
n, C, h.com, and the publishingcompany also has a website,
atenara.com a T, E N, E R, a.comeither of those two websites are
(55:23):
easy ways to get a hold of me. Ialso have a a LinkedIn page. You
can search me on LinkedIn andand communicate with me that
way. And I'm happy to haveconversations and answer any
kind of questions, give any kindof coaching advice that people
may have
Aaron Moncur (55:41):
awesome, awesome.
Well, we will include thoselinks in the show notes. And
Steve, thank you so much forspending some time with us
today. What a fun conversationthis has been. You just have a
plethora of experience andwisdom, and thank you for
contributing to this body ofknowledge and the being an
engineer podcast and and sharingall of that experience wisdom
Stephen Hinch (56:01):
with us. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Aaron Moncur (56:04):
I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and
engineering. If you liked whatyou heard today, please share
the episode to learn how yourteam can leverage our team with
expertise developing advancedmanufacturing processes,
automated machines and customfixtures, complemented with
product design and R D services.
Visit us at Team pipeline.us. Tojoin a vibrant community of
(56:28):
engineers online. Visit thewave. Dot, engineer, thank you
for listening. You.
If that innovative idea doesn't pan out
and you lose some money on it,your career is permanently
damaged, and a lot of managersin the corporate world don't
feel like they want to take thatrisk, particularly since
typically there's no penalty fornot taking it. You
Aaron Moncur (00:31):
Hello and welcome to the being an engineer
podcast. I am so excited todayto be speaking with Steve Hinch,
a seasoned high tech executive,award winning author and
innovation consultant withsenior leadership roles at
Hewlett Packard, AgilentTechnologies and team logic it.
(00:53):
Steve brings decades ofexperience driving both
incremental and disruptiveinnovation. His latest book,
winning through innovationdistills lessons from a career
spent on the front lines of Rand D, marketing and general
management. Thank you so muchfor being with us today. Steve,
Stephen Hinch (01:11):
thanks, Aaron, I appreciate it.
Aaron Moncur (01:12):
So what made you decide to get into the field of
technology and engineering andinnovation?
Stephen Hinch (01:21):
Actually probably one of the few people I know
that figured out early on Iwanted to be an engineer, and up
until I went into high school, Ihad always thought I was going
to be a paleontologist. Oh,interesting. But when I went
into high school, the counselorsaid, you know, we don't have a
(01:43):
course on paleontology for you,but we do have a course on
electronics that's open tofreshmen, and so let's sign you
up for that. And I took that. Iloved it. I loved it so much
that they allowed me to takethat course for four years. All
four years, Oh, wow. And afterthe first year, I probably knew
(02:07):
more than the teacher, and so Ihelped being basically a
teacher's assistant for all ofthe younger students that were
coming in just learning aboutelectronics. So I knew I wanted
to be in electronicsengineering, pretty much from
the first day of high school.
And so it was fairly easy topick a college that was
(02:29):
consistent with that objective.
And so I went to Harvey MuddCollege in Southern California.
Stayed there for both bachelor'sand master's degrees in
engineering. One of the thingsabout Harvey Mudd College is
they offer a degree inengineering. It's not a degree
(02:51):
in electrical engineering orcivil engineering or mechanical
engineering. It's electrical andit's engineering. And so
theoretically, I could be asgood an engineer designing
bridges as I could be designingcircuits, but I did sort of
focus as best I could on coursesin the electronics area. And it
(03:13):
was I was fortunate enough toget a job at Hewlett Packard
just after I graduated, andstayed with hp, and then they
spun off into a separate companycalled Agilent Technologies in
the year 1999 and so I had a 35year career there, before I
decided to take theentrepreneurial bug and started
(03:36):
a small company here in SantaRosa.
Aaron Moncur (03:39):
And what's the company that you're doing in
Santa Rosa now. So
Stephen Hinch (03:43):
the company is actually a national company
called Team logic. It theyprovide IT support for small
businesses, businesses thatdon't have their own it
technicians. And so I bought thefranchise in Santa Rosa that was
not open. I opened the franchisein Santa Rosa, ran that
(04:04):
franchise for about six years,made it one of the top three in
the in the company, and then Isold that And ever since, the
corporate offices, which arelocated down in Southern
California, have been hiring meas a consultant to do all sorts
of project related work, becauseunlike the rest of the people
(04:27):
that are running the corporateoffice, I actually ran a
franchise. I know what it's liketo be an owner, and they're sort
of the, I would say, theconsultants that sort of help
you, but they've never actuallyrun a franchise themselves, so I
bring a perspective to thecorporate offices that they
wouldn't otherwise have and andthat's kept me busy for for
several more years.
Aaron Moncur (04:48):
Yeah, I'm sure that's massively valuable to
them, to have someone with yourperspective. Well, you spend a
long time in in r, d, and a lotof. Engineers who listen to this
show are in r, d ormanufacturing process
engineering, but they spent timein that, in the trenches, you
(05:11):
know, coming up with the newtechnology, figuring the things
out that just don't exist yet.
What Not many of our listenershave deep experience in is the
other side of that equation,which is like the marketing and
the sales aspect, but you alsoeventually moved into a
marketing role. Can you talk alittle bit about how that
(05:33):
changed your perspective or yourunderstanding of innovation and
the engineering process.
Stephen Hinch (05:43):
Yeah, that was really quite an experience for
me, and it really changed myperspective. And I'll get more
into that in a minute, butbefore I do let me just sort of
highlight the three or fourdifferent aspects of my career.
I started out as a productionengineer at Hewlett Packard in
(06:05):
their microwave test equipmentarea. So I was not inventing the
new products. I was fixingproblems on the products that
had been invented by the R Dengineers a couple of years
earlier. But they were offinventing new products. They
didn't want to fix productsproblems on the stuff they'd
worked on before. So weproduction engineers were the
(06:26):
ones that took care of that. Iwas in production engineering
for about 10 years. Eventuallymoved into R D not as an R D
engineer. I've never been reallyas an R D engineer. I moved in
as a an R D project manager, andthen moved up eventually to be
an R and D manager of a wholedivision. And I always wanted to
(06:52):
move even higher in managementto run my own business and at
HP, and it's spin off AgilentTechnologies, you know, they
form several differentdivisions. A division is sort of
the smallest organization that'scompletely responsible for its
own profit and loss. It'stypically between 50 and $100
(07:14):
million $300 million a yearbusiness. And I wanted to do
that, and I got coaching from mygeneral manager at the time,
saying, you know, Steve, you'vebeen in manufacturing, you've
been in r, d, if you run, wantto run a business, you really
need to learn about marketing.
And so he was able to get meinto probably the only marketing
(07:39):
division responsibility, jobresponsibility, that I was
qualified for, and that wasbeing the division marketing
manager for a $300 million ayear business. I didn't have to
actually figure out how to gosell products. I didn't have to
actually write the all of thethe collateral for selling the
(07:59):
new products, I was bringing ahigher perspective. And up until
then, you know, I'd never serveda day in marketing. And my only
experience that this is probablygoing to date me, but you
remember the cartoon Dilbert,and there was a one cartoon
showing that Dilbert was beingsent to marketing, and there was
(08:22):
this big arch in front ofmarketing. It says, Welcome to
marketing, to drink minimum. Andthat was my perspective of
marketing, until I became themarketing manager. Just a big
party, huh? Just a big party.
And that was not it at all thesepeople. You know, I was
(08:43):
responsible for productmarketing, for sales
development, for Marcom, forproduct support. There were
really sharp engineers therethat I had really never given a
lot of credit to before. Now, inmy role as R and D manager, I
had worked very closely with mycounterpart in product
marketing, so I sort of knewproduct marketing. They would be
(09:06):
the ones that take the newproduct I was developing and
launch it out into the world. SoI knew that part of it, but all
of the you know, how do you puttogether a marketing support
program, all of the you know,the the Marcom collateral, I
thought, I thought Marcomcollateral was all of the stuff,
the little freebies that yougive away at a trade show and
(09:30):
the mark on manager alwayswanted to strangle my neck,
because that was a very smallpart of the job that a marketing
organization does. But I learneda lot. And I have to say that
when I first came in, thereeverybody in marketing thought,
Who is this guy from R and Dgoing to be running marketing?
(09:51):
And I tried not to come inthinking I knew all the answers.
I came in wanting to pull thebest I could. And. Out of all of
the people that were working forme, because I knew they knew
their jobs better than I did,but I had the higher
perspective, because I hadworked with customers before,
you know, selling, going outwith the R and the marketing guy
(10:14):
when we were launching our newproducts, I knew that part of
the business, and I knew how tosort of pull it all together,
but it was really an eye openingexperience, and I would strongly
recommend any engineer thinkingabout eventually wanting to move
into higher level management, Csuite management, or even
opening their own company thatserving time, not only in R D,
(10:35):
but also in marketing, to learnthe ropes of both of those sides
of things is very important.
Serving time in in manufacturingmight not be as important,
depending upon what kind ofbusiness that you're going into,
software company, maybe notquite as much, but, but you're
always going to want to knowabout r, d and marketing,
Aaron Moncur (10:56):
if you had to distill at a very high level the
essence of marketing, especiallywithin the context of an
engineering environment, down tojust a few words or maybe a
short sentence. How would youdefine marketing? So
Stephen Hinch (11:12):
I'm not going to be good at distilling it down to
a few words, but let me just saytwo points. Okay, there's a
difference between marketing andsales, I never manage sales.
Sales is those are the hunterkillers that are going out
closing deals. Marketing istheir responsibility is to get
the message out to the customersso the sales guys can close the
(11:38):
deals.
Aaron Moncur (11:39):
That's a good way of distilling it, getting the
message out. I like that a lot.
In your book, winning throughinnovation, you talk about
turning ideas not just into areality, but how to turn ideas
into a profitable reality. Andnot everyone gets that second
aspect of profitable realityright? Why do you think that
(12:01):
some of the organizationsstruggle with that aspect,
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Stephen Hinch (13:13):
Okay, so let me first say, not every innovative
idea that you have is going toturn out profitable. And that's
because you know when you startan innovative idea, especially a
disruptive, innovative idea,where you're going to go off
into a new market that you'venever dealt with before, you
(13:36):
don't necessarily know thatmarket. You don't know for sure
the technology that you'rethinking of is going to work,
and so those kind of disruptiveinnovations may fail over half
the time, and that's okay. And Iuse the word fail carefully
there, because they're notreally failures. They are ways
(13:57):
for you to learn more about howyou can be successful in the
future. The problem with a lotof companies, particularly
larger companies, is they don'tgive the innovative ideas the
opportunity to really provethemselves out. If you're not
(14:18):
delivering results immediately,it's time to chop it. I just
read a post today from theformer CTO of Hewlett Packard,
Aaron Moncur (14:32):
who
Stephen Hinch (14:35):
he spent about $1.2 billion buying a company.
It was actually palm that theybought, and he had a great idea
for how to turn that into a itwas a, you know, a struggling
company at the time, and he, he,he has some ideas on how to turn
(14:55):
it into company, or to aprofitable company. But his. Is
CEO did not want to wait withinwithin I think it was like 60
days after they bought thecompany, the new CEO shut it
down. He didn't give it achance. And that's the big
(15:15):
problem with why a lot ofinnovative ideas don't pan out.
Is the C suite doesn't have thepatience to prove it out, to
wait and show that it's reallygoing to work. And I had to
struggle with that myself. Thebiggest innovation that I had at
HP that actually brought in histhis was like around the year
(15:36):
2000 when we launched it, and itis a product line still going
strong today and has brought inseveral billion dollars of
profit to the company. But Ialmost wasn't allowed to do that
innovation, because it was adisruptive innovation that they
didn't know how to structure theorganization. But fortunately,
(15:59):
the Vice President in charge oftest and measurement at the
time, said what we're going todo, Steve, is we're going to
treat you like an in housestartup company. We're not going
to hold you responsible formonthly profits, monthly
revenues until you launch theproduct. What we're going to do
is we're going to measure you onare you meeting the deadlines,
(16:20):
the commitments that you saidyou were going to in order to
invent this new product. And ittook me two years to launch that
product. But if I had not hadthat kind of support from the
vice president of the company,it would have never
Aaron Moncur (16:35):
happened. Ideas really just need time to find
their way and grow on their ownright. Can you talk about what
that product was, that productline?
Stephen Hinch (16:46):
Yeah, so I was responsible for rd manager for
the high performanceoscilloscope business. And you
don't need to know a lot aboutan oscilloscope, but hopefully
your readers have at least usedoscilloscopes before. An
oscilloscope measures electricalsignals, and the ones that I was
(17:08):
responsible for had bandwidthsup to about 50 gigahertz at the
time. That was really, reallywide bandwidth. And there was
this new market called fiberoptic telecommunications that
had a need for measuringwaveforms, but they needed to
(17:29):
measure the waveforms of anoptical signal going down a
fiber optic cable, not anelectrical signal, but so the
oscilloscope would have been thegreat way to Do it, but
oscilloscopes measure electricalsignals and so people had
already put little opticalconverters on the front of
oscilloscopes, and were usingthat as sort of a crude way to
(17:50):
make the measurements, but itwasn't fully calibrated, and the
standards for the industry werejust starting to evolve. For
saying this is how good themeasurement needs to be. And we
had this brilliant idea of notonly putting that little optical
converter inside theoscilloscope, which would have
(18:11):
not done very much differentthan what they were already
doing, but to develop acompletely calibrated process to
make sure that when you'remaking the measurement, you know
that it was very accuratemeasurement. And that was
something that nobody had donebefore. You could sort of make
the measurements, but theyweren't very accurate at the
(18:33):
time. HP had only 25% marketshare, and our biggest
competitor was Tektronix, withabout 75% market share, and we
had to invent this new productin a way so that Tektronix did
not find out what we were doing.
Because if, if they did, theywould have gone off and invented
(18:56):
their own product, and sincethey were already the market
leader, they would havemaintained their market
leadership. So one, one of thethings I did is we invented a,
what I'll call a phantom productthat was a, not a very good
product at all, but we leaked itout to the world, and Tektronix
found out about it and said,Well, that's not anything to
(19:18):
worry about, and they completelyignored us until we launched our
product two years later. And ittook them several years to
respond, and by then, we hadcompletely swept the market
Aaron Moncur (19:30):
up. Oh, that's phenomenal. Wow, what a great
strategy.
Stephen Hinch (19:34):
It's not the kind of thing you'll read about in
other books on innovation, but Italk all about it, and that's
just one of the things that wedid that that made our product
successful, there talk
Aaron Moncur (19:46):
a little bit more about that. What? Why was the
decision made to leak a phantomproduct, the that would be seen
by your competitor as as notdangerous to them, not a threat,
versus just not saying. Anything
Stephen Hinch (20:01):
good, good point.
And so we did not primarilyinvent this phantom product. In
order to fool Tektronix, weneeded a way to go out and talk
to customers to find out whatthey really are doing and what
they really needed. Now, sincewe didn't have much market
share. They were all buyingproducts from Tektronix. They
(20:22):
did not want to talk to us aboutit, but by bringing out this,
this, but it's called a phantomproduct, if it was actually we
sold some, it gave us an excuseto go out and talk to customers
that otherwise would not havetalked to us, and we got to find
out what they really wanted. Andyeah, those customers said,
(20:42):
yeah, no, this is not reallyvery good, but it's maybe a
little better than you got rightnow. And so we didn't
deliberately try to leak thatinformation out to Tektronix.
That just sort of leaked outbecause the customers would go
back to tech. And yeah, we justsaw this new product from HP,
you have nothing to worry about.
(21:04):
So anyway, so that was, was, wasreally why we did it is, was not
primarily to fool tectronics.
Aaron Moncur (21:12):
That's hilarious that it had that unintended side
effect. How funny. Okay, howsmart Do you think people need
to be to develop disruptiveinnovation? Is this reserved
only for the cream of the crop,the top 1% of intelligence out
(21:32):
there?
Stephen Hinch (21:34):
If it were, we would have no innovations out
there. So, I mean, you have to,there's a couple of parts to
this. One is you have to havethe innovative idea. In my book,
I only touch on how to come upwith the innovative idea, sort
of peripherally, because there'snot a process that I can really
(21:58):
quote for saying here's how Icame up with this idea, what I
can do is map out an environmentthat allows people to nurture
those innovative ideas. But theactual idea of, you know, the
light bulb coming on over yourhead is not something that you
can really write. Might map outa prescriptive process for how
(22:21):
to do that.
Aaron Moncur (22:24):
What's the environment look like?
Stephen Hinch (22:26):
So there's different environment depending
upon whether you're doingdisruptive innovation or
incremental innovation. And letme just quickly summarize the
difference between the two.
Incremental innovation is whereyou make minor improvements to
your existing product line. Andexample, the automobile
(22:46):
industry, the gasoline poweredautomobile industry, have been
doing incremental innovationsfor years. You know, the cars
that they sell today sell to thesame customers as they sold 10
or 20 years ago, but they're notexactly the same cars. They've
got anti lock brakes, they'vegot crash protection, they've
got improved warranty periods,but they're still familiar to
(23:11):
the people that bought cars 10or 15 years ago, and they're
happy to trade in their old carsfor new cars that they see are
better. That's incrementalinnovation, disruptive
innovation. The prime example Iuse in my book is from the
middle of the 20th century, theearly part of the 20th century,
up until about 1949 almost allthe locomotives that the
(23:35):
railroad industry bought weresteam engines. Steam
locomotives. By the 1950s theywere all diesel powered
locomotives, and not a singlemanufacturer of steam
locomotives survived thattransition, because it was such
a disruption, they were tryingto make better steam locomotives
(23:57):
when the the industry wasalready saying steep locomotives
are passe diesels are muchbetter. They're more reliable,
less expensive to operate, butso sort of a long way to get to
the question you were asking,incremental innovation is
(24:18):
typically best done by thepeople who are managing that
product line. So the the themanagers that are managing the
automobile manufacturing, youknow, it's time to put a better
anti lock brake in, or improvesome other aspect of it, or put
a flat panel display on thefront panel. Those are all
(24:39):
incremental innovations. The thebusiness managers leading that
business are the ones best ableto do those kind of incremental
innovations. But for disruptiveinnovations, those managers are
trying to preserve the productline they already have that. Not
going to be the ones to switchfrom steam locomotives to diesel
(25:02):
locomotives. So you really needto manage that disruptive
innovation under an organizationthat's completely separate from
the current product line. Andthat doesn't need to be a giant
organization. In fact, itgenerally you staff that with
just a few key people, and thenas you prove the technology, and
(25:26):
as you start getting morecustomers, you can add more team
members and start doing moreproduct development. But you
want to start that disruptiveinnovation slowly and a small
part of the market first toprove that your your technology
is working and that there'sreally a market need for it. And
(25:47):
then as you capture that smallpart of the market, you can
expand into other parts of themarket and take over from those
people are still trying to sellsteam locomotives. That's a
great
Aaron Moncur (25:59):
analogy the steam to diesel locomotives. What have
you done to create a culturewhere everyone feels equally
empowered to participate in theinnovation process? The Product
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Stephen Hinch (26:57):
So I actually don't mind. I'm going to pull up
my book, because I've got sixthings to do to encourage people
to innovate, right? The firstthing that they need to be able
to do is the employees need tounderstand the company's
business strategy. That's theresponsibility of the company
(27:19):
leadership C suite to explainwhat this company is all about,
what we're trying to do, whatmarkets we're trying to go
after, where we're putting ourpriorities. Because if, if the
employees don't understand thatthey don't know where to go off
and innovate, or they may comeup with great ideas for
something that has nothing to dowith this company now that that
(27:43):
maybe means those, thoseemployees should go off start
their own company, but, but, butthe first thing that really
needs to happen is thatemployees need to understand
what this company is all aboutand and what the strategy is.
Number two is you got toemployees. Have got to
understand that innovation ismore than just ideas for new
(28:05):
products or services. I mean,not every innovation that you
come up with is going to be thenext Tesla or SpaceX or iPhone.
There are going to be lots ofsmaller innovations that will be
just as valuable to the company,and those are the kind of
innovations that people lower inthe organization are more likely
to have the ability tocontribute to the next iPhone is
(28:31):
not going to be invented by somefirst level engineer down in the
trenches, but that first levelengineer, or even The people on
the production line that arebuilding products may say, you
know, this process is not themost efficient way. If we could
just change this, I could build10 more products an hour, and
(28:53):
that's the kind of insight thatthe C suite is not going to
know. They're going to need todepend on, on the people in the
trenches to bring that kind ofof insight into the
organization. Now, once thethose ideas come up, then you
got to give people time toexplore those innovative ideas
(29:14):
and test them out and and trythem. And you've got to provide
employees with resources to dothat. Now, when I was the
general manager of theoscilloscope business at HP, I
tried to make sure peopleunderstood that I felt
(29:35):
comfortable giving people about5% of their work time to explore
innovation in ways, you know,new ideas that may or may not
pan out, but, you know, take twohours a week to test things out,
and if it looked like somethingwas going to work out, then I
would figure out a way to staffa full project about it. But,
(29:58):
but those innovative ideas.
Giving people time to explorethose innovative ideas and some
resources, space or materials totest things out, is is really
important to encouraging thatthat culture of innovation.
Aaron Moncur (30:13):
Are you familiar with Flaming Hot Cheetos?
Stephen Hinch (30:18):
Tell me about them. This
Aaron Moncur (30:20):
sounds like a complete tangent, but I promise,
promise. It's not so you know,Cheetos, right? Like the snack
Cheetos, I can't rememberexactly when it was, but 15
years ago, whatever it was, afactory worker who was Hispanic
and and felt like the Cheetosdidn't resonate with with his
(30:43):
demographic, the Hispanicpopulation. Thought there needs
to be a spicy version ofCheetos. And he, he approached
manager, management about this,and they, they kind of poo pooed
the idea. Didn't think it wasrelevant, and so now we're not
going to spend anything on this.
Well, this this guy who's afactory worker, right, just like
(31:04):
a lowly factory worker, and hebelieved strongly enough in his
idea that he spent his own timeand resources testing and doing
user groups within his communityand trying different recipes and
putting the the spicy, theflamin hot on the Cheetos. And I
think it took him a while, ayear or two years, something
(31:26):
like that, but he eventuallycame up with a recipe that he
really liked, and his communityreally liked, and he he somehow
finagled his way into getting aprototype run of these flamin
Hot Cheetos and and they justcrushed it. They did so well,
yeah, and now these flamin hot,you know, Cheetos, Doritos,
Funyuns, they're they're allover the marketplace, but it was
(31:48):
just like you talked about,right? Very small group him and
a couple couple of closefriends. And in this case, his
organization did not give himthe resources, but he found them
on his own, just using personalresources, time, a little bit of
money, a lot of testing andexperimentation, and eventually
it blossomed into this huge,huge, multi billion dollar
success for the company.
Stephen Hinch (32:11):
I love that example, and it actually points
out two things that I was goingto bring up at some point in the
conversation anyway. One is itwas really poor of the C suite
to poo poo it when they shouldhave given him some time to
experiment. You know, notunlimited time and not unlimited
(32:32):
budget. But Okay, try it out,and let's see what happens. So
that's the first thing, is,that's a really good example of
why a lot of large companiesaren't successful at innovation.
They don't have the support thatthey need. The second point is,
he didn't stop, even though theysaid no. And that level of
(32:52):
persistence, that's impressive,and that's exactly what it takes
at time to really driveinnovations through. And so
don't give up just becausesomebody says, No,
Aaron Moncur (33:01):
I love the word persistence that you used. I
think that earlier I asked, Isinnovation reserved only for the
cream of the crop, the mostintelligent people out there?
And I happen to think thatsuccess and innovation is much
more about persistence than itis about brilliance. I think
(33:22):
nine times out of 10, maybe 99times out of 100 it's the
persistent person, not not justthe brilliant person that that
wins out there. I know I've seenthat over and over. I don't
consider myself to be the mostbrilliant engineer, not by a
long shot, actually, but onething I do think I'm good at is
(33:44):
being persistent. I can continueto attack a problem, and I've
definitely seen successes there,where perhaps others who weren't
as persistent would have failed.
Stephen Hinch (33:53):
I love that. I think that's a great way to put
it, and I'll also stress thatpart of that persistence is
knowing how to get help fromothers, because, you know, the C
suite says no, but you know thisguy over here, and it sounds
like he did that. It was a smallgroup of people, and they tested
probably a variety of ofdifferent formulas before they
(34:16):
found some that really resonatedwith their demographic. But, but
trying to get that that, andit's small group of people, I
another thing I really stress isnever put a person on an
innovation project that doesn'twant to be there. If you're only
putting him there because he's amechanical engineer, they need a
(34:36):
mechanical engineer go help himout, and he doesn't want to do
it. That's a recipe for failure,but so good. Okay,
Aaron Moncur (34:45):
I think that's another really important,
important point that you make,that innovative projects are
best staffed by people who arepassionate about them. And I
think I'd love to hear your yourfeedback on this, but I think
the reason for that. Is thatinnovation requires a lot of
upfront time, and often moretime than the standard 40 hour
(35:09):
work week can afford. And soit's typically the teams who are
willing to put in extra timethat they're not necessarily
getting paid for, at least notup front. It's those teams, I
think it's really required for alot of innovative technologies.
It's just it requires more timethan than the the market at that
point can afford. So people haveto just spend extra time to get
(35:34):
it going, probably not 100% ofthe time. For a large
organization with lots ofresources, maybe not so much,
but for smaller organizations, II think that's true. What? What
are your feelings on that?
Stephen Hinch (35:45):
I completely agree with that, which is why,
you know, if you look at startupcompanies, they don't work 40
hour weeks. Yeah, they work 80hour weeks, and they're not
getting paid for 80 hours, butthey love what they're doing, or
they see that there's a reallygood future for it. And I don't
think most of those people willsay that they're in this because
(36:06):
they want to be millionairesdown the road, or they're going
to get multi millionaire stockoption kind of stuff. They do it
because they're reallyenthusiastic. They have this
great idea. They want to provethat it really will work, and
they're willing to put the timeinto it to make it successful.
Yeah,
Aaron Moncur (36:23):
yeah, that comes down to purpose, right? Do you
have a compelling purpose forwhy you're doing something? And
if you do, boy, that sure is amuch greater motivator than just
a paycheck, right? That's right,all right. Well, let's see. We
talked a little bit about howlarge organizations sometimes
(36:44):
can struggle with innovationbecause they aren't willing to
provide the time and resourcesfor a new, disruptive idea to
really take hold. How can acompany know if they've sort of
slipped into unknowingly TheCurse of the corporate business
model. What are some of thewarning signs?
Stephen Hinch (37:04):
Okay, so let's talk about what the curse of the
corporate business model is. Iclassify it as sort of three
things. And again, I'll pull upthe book somewhere. I've got it
here. So the first thing aboutthe curse of the corporate
business model is that in largecorporations, multinational
(37:24):
corporations, and we sort ofmentioned this, investors
measure the success of thecompany based on how well
they're doing to deliver thismonth's profits and growth and
disruptive innovations that takea year or two or more to pan out
aren't consistent with having todeliver results this month or
(37:47):
this quarter. Now there is a wayaround it. I'll get to that in a
minute, but that's the firstthing. The second thing is that
the managers in a largecorporation don't see the
rewards being worth the risk.
Now, what I mean there is thatin a small startup, if you
(38:10):
innovate successfully, and thatthe startup goes IPO or gets
bought out, you can become amultimillionaire. Doesn't happen
very often, but at least it can.
But in a corporation, if you'rea leader that drives innovation
(38:33):
successfully, you may get a few100 stock options. You may get a
promotion. But if thatinnovative idea doesn't pan out
and you lose some money on it,your career is permanently
damaged. And so a lot ofmanagers in the corporate world
don't feel like they want totake that risk, particularly
(38:55):
since typically there's nopenalty for not taking it in the
corporate world, you're notbeing measured by how much risk
you're taking. You're beingmeasured by Did you deliver this
month's results and and thethird part of the this curse of
the corporate business model isthat a lot of the managers that
are in large corporations areless prone to take risk anyway
(39:19):
than the people that are in thesmall startups, because, because
of all of what I said there, andif, if you were in as large
company, and you love takingrisks, and you're not getting
the opportunity to do so, you'regoing to leave that that
corporate environment and Gostart your own company. So, so
(39:42):
those are the curse of thecorporate business model and
why. You know, think of ofcompanies that are not
successful or haven't beensuccessful. Do you remember a
company called SmithCoronavirus? They used to make
typewriters back in the day?
Before word processing. Younever hear about them anymore,
but they were one of the primemanufacturers of typewriters,
(40:05):
palm you know, they didn'tswitch to the the smartphone as
the market evolved. And so yourquestion about, How do I I know
when a company is victim of thecurse of the corporate business
model is because they're goingdown the tube. They're not
(40:26):
continuing to grow. They're notgoing after those new markets
and and sort of, it's sort of bythe time you discover that it's
too late, usually to fix things,they're still trying to make a
better steam engine. They'restill trying to make a better
steam engine. Great point. Yes,
Aaron Moncur (40:45):
I love that analogy that just it illustrates
so clearly for me. I'm not sureI've heard it explained so
clearly before. So I was goingto stick with me.
Stephen Hinch (40:55):
I actually spoke with and there's a professor at
the University of Kennesaw thatwrote his whole master's thesis,
or PhD dissertation on thetransition from steam to diesel.
And so I picked his brain, andhe helped me with the chapter I
(41:17):
wrote on that, because I didn'tknow what I mean. I knew that
steam engines were no longeraround anymore, but I didn't
know all of the story behind it.
It's really an enlighteningstory. There were steps all
along the way for about 20 yearswhere any of those steam
locomotive manufacturers, ifthey'd just taken the right
step, they could have been stillthe leaders, but none of them
(41:39):
did that.
Aaron Moncur (41:42):
Do you know Clayton Christensen? Oh, yeah.
Okay, so his book, andChristensen, right? Yes, I can't
remember the exact title of thebook, The Innovators Dilemma, or
disruptors, something like that.
But he talked about somethingsimilar, where hard drive
companies, right were, weredisrupted by by solid state
drives, and yes, and how theycouldn't really catch that
Stephen Hinch (42:06):
was another good example. And I I figured he'd
already did that one. He hadalso used an example, I think,
in the same book about steamshovels being replaced by diesel
shovels. So I didn't want torehash those examples in my
book. And I thought, Well, whydidn't he talk about steam
locomotives? That seemed like aperfect example, but since he
(42:27):
hadn't talked about it, Ithought I would Terrific. Well,
Aaron Moncur (42:30):
I'm glad you did.
Let's talk about AI a littlebit. AI is just, you know, it's,
it's the the next huge thing andhas the potential to really
revolutionize not just the waythat we work, but the way that
we we live, and in some casesalready, is how, how should
engineering manufacturingtechnology companies be be
utilizing AI and and how aresome companies Maybe misusing
(42:55):
it?
Stephen Hinch (42:58):
So a couple of points here. First is there's a
lot of hype around AI that isprobably being promoted more by
people that want to make a lotof money off of it, as opposed
to by the fact that it's reallygoing to help in certain areas.
So you got to be careful aboutthat. But I do believe it really
(43:23):
has a place, but you've sort ofgot to learn to walk before you
can run, kind of thing you can'tuse AI yet to come up with the
next disruptive innovation. AIfrom what I can tell and what
I've seen and how I've talkedwith people that use it, it can
(43:47):
be very effective at some of thelower level kinds of analysis of
data, of being able to trackthings that are going on at sort
of a regular level, and thisstuff that if it does something
(44:08):
wrong, it's not going to driveyour company to bankruptcy. I,
you know, I still do a lot ofwork, consulting, work for Team
logic, it, and one of the keythings that that we do for our
customers is we're continuallymonitoring their IT networks,
(44:30):
and immediately detecting ifsomething is wrong, if you know
if a server goes down or ifThere's malware coming in. The
idea is that we're we're runningsoftware on their network that
tracks this and and canimmediately notify us that
(44:50):
there's a problem. Now, fiveyears ago, that meant that a
technician funding in front of ascreen was getting a notice. Has
said there's something going onwith the server. You better
check into it. Now. AI can lookat these kinds of things and
immediately say, Okay, here'swhat's going on. This is what I
(45:11):
need to do to fix it. And theydon't ever have to even involve
a technician for routine stuff.
And if it's something that isnot routine, then the AI process
can escalate it so that that'sthe kind of stuff that the real
technician needs to work on. ButAI can eliminate what used to be
a real time sink. I used to havethree first level technicians
(45:36):
sitting in front of screens allthe time just watching all of my
clients networks to figure outwhat needed to be fixed or if
something was haywire was goingon, and now a lot of that can be
done automatically. So that's agood way of using AI in a way
that is effective in now. Now Ican't say that I know how a
(46:00):
company like HP, in their R Denvironment is using AI. I mean,
you know AI is good at writingsoftware, but it's not great at
writing software code withoutbugs in it. So you can generally
use AI to give yourself a firstdraft of code to do something,
(46:25):
but then you've got to have a anengineer look through it and
make sure that it's it is reallydoing everything that you think
it is, without a bunch of ofgaps or, you know, things left
open, where hackers can breakin, that kind of thing. So AI is
still good at the lower levelstuff, and maybe in future
(46:46):
years, it'll be better at movingup in the food chain to hire in
the environment. But I don'tthink it's there yet.
Aaron Moncur (46:58):
Yeah, agreed. I use it a lot, because I do a lot
of marketing and sales andwriting and communication, and
it's great for that, but it'snot going to develop a new CAD
model for the machine that we'retrying to design right now, not
Stephen Hinch (47:10):
yet. That's right, yep. And my son is the
chief technology officer of a alittle bit more than a startup
now in in the AI area, they'reproviding, he lives in in
England, and they're providing aAI technology for the European
(47:35):
banking industry, which is, youknow, you gotta be careful there
Up in the banking industry, andhe says, we're very careful
about what we do use AI for. Infact, the European Union refuses
to let him use any kind of AIwhere the large language models
(47:56):
are stored in the United States.
Oh, interesting, because theydon't trust that the protection,
security protection is there. Sohe's had to set up his own large
language model in Amazon WebServices that that allows him to
provide services that he wouldnot otherwise be able to
(48:17):
provide.
Aaron Moncur (48:21):
Well, let's see, Steve, let's let's do just a
couple more questions here, andthen we'll wrap things up for
engineers who want to move intoleadership, what are some things
that they should start doing nowto build a innovation focused
career? So
Stephen Hinch (48:37):
it's easy for engineers just focus on whatever
code they're being asked towrite right now, or whatever
circuit design they're supposedto do. And, you know, just keep
their head down and and do whatthey're being asked to do. If
you want to move higher into theorganization, into leadership
roles, you've got to thinkbeyond that. You've got to
(49:00):
understand what is this businessthat I'm in? Try to understand
how the leaders of that businessare thinking and where they set
their priorities and and sort ofunderstand why are they doing it
this way? And have discussionswith them. You got to be a
(49:20):
little careful about that,because not every manager is
comfortable with that kind ofthing. He's going to feel like,
why are you questioning me aboutthe decision I made? But a lot
of them, they'll love to see anengineer, first level, kind of
individual contributor who isshowing more interest in what
(49:43):
the business is all about,because they know that those are
the kind of people that willhave the innovative ideas that
can drive that that thatbusiness even further, so that
that's really importantunderstand the business. And
then, as I did, understand notjust R and D. Strategy, but
learn about what is it like tobe in marketing. It doesn't mean
(50:04):
you have to move into marketing.
You can work closely with the Rand D, the marketing
counterparts that are launchingthe products that you're
inventing, but But learn moreabout the whole business than
just the part that you're in. Ithink those are a couple of key
points that engineers justgetting into their career should
(50:26):
understand.
Aaron Moncur (50:29):
I really like your point about understanding the
business because, you know,businesses aren't don't exist to
do engineering or to domanufacturing or even to do
innovation, businesses exist tomake a profit, and that's the
only way the business can remainin business and employ all the
wonderful engineers and otherswho work there in and so for
(50:54):
engineers to understand thebusiness, it really just allows
them to contribute in a muchmore meaningful way to the
purpose of the business. I knowthat we've had engineers on our
team in the past that had beenjust wonderful, wonderful human
beings. I've loved working withthem, but ultimately they they
(51:14):
couldn't do the work effectivelyenough for the company to be
profitable on their time. And,you know, those engineers, they
don't, they don't last longterm. That's right. So
understanding the business what,what the business needs, and how
your your direct contributions,can support and facilitate those
(51:37):
business outcomes is just it'shuge, and
Stephen Hinch (51:40):
that's especially important in today's climate,
where things are changingrapidly. And the knowledge that
you have today and theunderstanding of how to do
things today may not besufficient for three or four or
five years down the road, youknow, the more AI comes in, or
maybe there'll be some other newHot Topic three years from now
(52:00):
that you need to stay aware ofhow business is evolving and
what it takes to stay relevantas markets are evolving as well.
Yeah.
Aaron Moncur (52:17):
Well, Steve, last question I have for you, what is
one thing that you've done orseen to accelerate the speed of
engineering,
Stephen Hinch (52:27):
the thing that I've done is in a leadership
role, not as an engineer. In aleadership role, my job is
creating an environment thatmakes the engineers feel like
they are supported and that theyhave the authority to do what
they think is right. That maynot be what I think I would have
(52:51):
done if I was in their shoe, butI give them the flexibility to
do things the way they think isright. And that doesn't mean
it'll work out all the time.
Sometimes it'll it'll not workout, but that'll be a learning
experience for both of us, andit'll make them better engineers
in the future, if they arefeeling like they have the
flexibility to do things the waythey want to, as opposed to only
(53:12):
doing things the way I'm tellingthem to do, any
Aaron Moncur (53:18):
tactical recommendations that you can
share, or specific practicesthat you've implemented to
create that environment whereengineers feel safe to safe and
empowered to do the rightthings.
Stephen Hinch (53:35):
So again, it sort of my role as the manager is not
to be the best engineer mymanager, my job is to give them
that environment. And so a lotof my job is to work with higher
management to keep those highermanagers out of the way so that
my engineers can do what theyneed to do. And so I'll a lot i
(53:58):
in the book, I give an examplewhere I needed to give my
engineers time to inventsomething new before top
management shut us down. And soI spent close to a year where
pretty much all my job wasputting together financial
forecasts and order forecaststhat said this is what we're
(54:20):
going to do, and this is why youshould need to keep us open long
enough for those engineers. Sothe engineers were happy I was
not telling them what to do, butI was keeping the higher
management off of their theirnecks, and so that buffer
between higher management andthe engineers doing the work is
a key thing that a good managershould be able to
Aaron Moncur (54:42):
do. That's a great example. I bet not many people
would think of something likethat, just the fact that that's
a necessary and critical part ofthe business. But great example.
Thank you for sharing that.
Well, Steve, this has beendelightful. How can people get
in touch with you?
Stephen Hinch (54:58):
So I've got a website. It's. Is www, dot
Steven, S, T, E, P, H, E N,hyphen, W, hyphen, Hinch, h, i
n, C, h.com, and the publishingcompany also has a website,
atenara.com a T, E N, E R, a.comeither of those two websites are
(55:23):
easy ways to get a hold of me. Ialso have a a LinkedIn page. You
can search me on LinkedIn andand communicate with me that
way. And I'm happy to haveconversations and answer any
kind of questions, give any kindof coaching advice that people
may have
Aaron Moncur (55:41):
awesome, awesome.
Well, we will include thoselinks in the show notes. And
Steve, thank you so much forspending some time with us
today. What a fun conversationthis has been. You just have a
plethora of experience andwisdom, and thank you for
contributing to this body ofknowledge and the being an
engineer podcast and and sharingall of that experience wisdom
Stephen Hinch (56:01):
with us. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Aaron Moncur (56:04):
I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and
engineering. If you liked whatyou heard today, please share
the episode to learn how yourteam can leverage our team with
expertise developing advancedmanufacturing processes,
automated machines and customfixtures, complemented with
product design and R D services.
Visit us at Team pipeline.us. Tojoin a vibrant community of
(56:28):
engineers online. Visit thewave. Dot, engineer, thank you
for listening. You.
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