Beyond the Buzzwords
How to discern what matters in business and IT and find a sense in your trade. We combine practical academic theories with concrete business. If you are a bored seasoned professional or an enterprising engineering student, listen to this show. You will discover how technology and business can be combined to bring more value and sense to society. We illustrate how to avoid out-of-touch strategies that are based on, for example, transparency and pure agility. Today, work environments are often hard to work in due to unrealistic goals and organizational rigidity. This leads people to try to escape reality and to become unsure about what they want to achieve. Stop chasing unfeasible IT and engineering tactics! Now is your chance to adopt practical and grounded strategies that truly yield results. Listen to « Beyond the Buzzwords ». Instead of aiming for utopian strategies - which does more harm than good – it is time to look for a refreshing approach. This show presents the results of our applied research; guests are also invited to bring an external view to the same issues. It will open your eyes to ways to unleash your true potential in your profession. Tune in to their stories of work, perseverance, and human relationships; they will reveal how you can bring sense and develop pleasure in your profession. The host was Alain Wegmann, who recorded 12 episodes in the last year of his life. He began his career in the early 1980s. In 1984, he began working in Logitech; where, for over fifteen years, he worked in Switzerland, Taiwan and the US in engineering, manufacturing, and marketing dealing with industry giants such as Apple and IBM. In 1997, Alain shifted gears and entered academia. He returned to his alma mater, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where – as a professor - he taught and consulted for a quarter of a century. In academia, his quest was to teach skills and techniques for reconciling business and technology – typically IT. Alain gained intuition from his experience in industry. Then he developed – with his research group – a method called SEAM. He did this by exploring multiple disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, and even computer science 😉. He tested the applicability of the method through consulting projects. In this way, he brought a practical academic touch to concrete business issues. Alain combined his vast expertise in information technology (IT), engineering, manufacturing, and marketing to deliver informative and engaging discussions on his show. He used casual conversations to dissect complex topics. Alain simplified his knowledge in these multiple disciplines by presenting easy-to-digest information. Never settle for strategies that just look good on paper; make your processes concrete, achieve adequate precision, and capture the essential issues through the appropriate levels of abstraction. Usually, abstract reasoning is not concrete and precise reasoning cannot be abstract. This leads to paradoxes and ambiguities hence misunderstandings. Amazingly, we can work with all these qualities by recognizing these paradoxes and understanding how they are the consequences of our cultural myopia. By doing so, you can transform the paradoxes into an action plan. Some of the topics we cover are ‘service’ as a concept for reasoning about exchanges between organizations, and ‘appreciation’ as means to evaluating exchanges between organizations and their environment. As we are inspired by systems thinking and computer science, our approach speaks to engineers. We build bridges between disciplines such as strategic thinking, marketing, IT management, engineering management, and operation management. In short, we discuss service design. Join Alain and see the industry from a new perspective by re-interpreting your reality and by better understanding the laws of nature hidden in our businesses. Listen to Beyond the Buzzwords at beyond-the-buzzwords.com.
Episodes
Alain, our dearest friend and the host of this show, passed away a few days after recording the last episode of the season. In it, he honored Bruno Latour, a fellow academic and a leading figure in Social Sciences, until his own recent passing. In this episode, Alain paid tribute to Latour’s work and offered insights into the shared goals of their respective research. In his memory, we in turn share this episode with you, his publi...
Bruno Latour was a French anthropologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He was born in 1947 and died at the age of 75 in 2022 in Paris. Latour was considered an iconoclast as he challenged many of the buzzwords we use to guide our actions. He calls these buzzwords ‘factish’ gods which people worship. Latour believes that facts should be developed through a long social process in which objectivity is constructed through negotiations...
In this episode, Alain Wegmann interviews Lucien Etzlinger, Senior Consultant of customer-relationship management, with whom he collaborated for over ten years on developing the SEAM method. In this episode, Lucien explains how he discovered, during his career in the world of finance, the importance of relationship management. He describes how the SEAM patterns, called CASA (for curiosity, appreciation, service, and action), h...
Alain Wegmann asks Holly Cogliati-Bauereis, an English editor with whom he collaborates, to present a project for redefining her position in their department at their university. In this episode, through Holly’s project, Alain describes the use of the Seam method, focusing mainly on the Seam patterns called CASA. Her project was a simple sales process applied to a business/IT alignment problem. Their story illustrates that the esse...
Weeks into the Beyond the Buzzwords podcast, we're now down to the conclusion of the show's first season. What better way to celebrate this milestone than a good recap of the wisdom shared across the episodes? Alain Wegmann does just that and puts it all together.
In the first two episodes, he introduced a metaphor about living be...
In this episode, Alain Wegmann defines and discusses the concept of 'curiosity' in business and IT. He introduces the importance of curiosity in our lives as it drives personal and professional growth. Curiosity is essential to understanding our customers' and our partners' realities.
Alain also discusses the importance of serendipity, as it brin...
People need to start taking action to change their habits or else machines are going to take over their jobs. It is easier to change automation than it is to change people’s habits. In this episode, Alain Wegmann defines and discusses the concept of ‘taking action’ in business and IT. He discusses the importance of habits and the challenges related to changing them, as many are often involuntary. This challenge can be considered a ...
In this episode, Alain Wegmann defines and discusses the concept of ‘appreciation’ in business and IT. Organizations and individuals are living beings who are in relationships. When these living beings are in relationships they perceive as problematic, they can develop an appreciation. This appreciation enables them to analyze their problems and the resources that can be used to address them and to identify the possible solutions/i...
In business and IT, the notion of ‘services’ is extremely popular. In this episode, Alain Wegmann defines and discusses this concept of services. Organizations and individual are living beings. All living beings are in relations and maintain these relations through services. Understanding the exchanges of matter, energy, and information between these living beings is essential. Understanding these exchange...
Alain explores how Ernest Gmunder uses tree metaphors to explain the benefits of an hybrid operating model to the companies he advises. In this hybrid model, a company is considered as a “tree”. This is his way to go beyond the “agile” buzzword. Ernest recognises that the organisation behind a product line, the “branches” in the tree, needs agility to serve well its customers. But these branches need to be supported by a common "tr...
In this episode, Alain Wegmann defines and discusses the power and importance of analogies and of metaphors in our reasoning. They are central to our languages and for understanding complex concepts. By using metaphors, we can reason rationally and emotionally. Using analogies and metaphors is essential in service design and systems thinking.&n...
In this first episode of Beyond the Buzzwords, Alain Wegmann explains his approach to entrepreneurship and business and IT alignment. He illustrates how people can better work together by reasoning about themselves and about companies as if they were living beings. The concept of living beings is an amazingly powerful metaphor for analyzing exchanges between people and people’s motivations.
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