What Color is your Silo? Redefining Yourself as AR, 3D Printing, AI and a New Internet Emerges !

Picture Credit: Up (2009) from Disney-Pixar

“Perception involves all the ways of becoming aware of things, people, happenings, or ideas. Judgment involves all the ways of coming to conclusions about what has been perceived. If people differ systematically in what they perceive and in how they reach conclusions, then it is only reasonable for them to differ correspondingly in their interests, reactions, values, motivations, and skills.”

Isabel Briggs Myers, and her mother, Katharine Briggs (1943)

The old career “bible” What Color is Your Parachute (audio sample here) has sold over ten million copies and has been continuously updated by author Richard N. Bolles and has the virtue of “helping you to zero in on your ideal job-and life-with its classic Flower Exercise.”

Picture Credit: Richard Bolles and one ‘flower’

Myers-Briggs is the Jungian-derived tools are built on the theory that “much seemingly random variation in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, being due to basic differences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment”.

• Extraversion or Introversion: refers to where and how one directs his or her attention and energy  — on people and things in the outer world, or alone in the inner world ^[1]
• Sensing or Intuition: refers to how one prefers to deal with information — by focusing on the basic information, or by interpreting and adding meaning
• Thinking or Feeling: refers to decision making — objectively, using logic and consistency, or subjectively, considering other people and special circumstances
• Judging or Perceiving: refers to how one interacts with the outer world — with a preference towards getting things decided, or for staying open to new information and options

Strong Interest Inventory has six “themes” which are “broad interest patterns that can be used to describe your work personality.”

The annual DealBook Conference is coming up on November 10th at Lincoln Center boasting that it is “Playing for the Long Term” and has a great speaker lineup though the conference will be heavy on post-election punditry as New York Times Careers itself advertises its search for an international director of its Data and Insight Group. K.J Dell’Antonia is a contributor to the NYT Well Family section and a time management guru, as Fast Company just profiled her. She shares some valuable lessons:

Be Clear On What Matters : Damon Brown explained that, “The first step is to understand that everything that has to get done will absolutely get done,” the author of The Bite-Sized Entrepreneur book series. “We get into trouble when we make everything in life a priority.”

Don’t Fill Time : Jeff Kavanaugh, senior partner at Infosys Consulting, and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, whose career has involved advising many busy executives. “They treat their time as an open-ended invitation to commitments, drawn in by their desire to please people or the fear of missing out, and downplay their capacity limit until the commitments—and the stress—stack up.”

Don’t Rush : And love being early. “I love knowing that we have time to stop for gas. I love looking at the car clock and not desperately calculating whether we can get there in six minutes and whether the clock is maybe a minute fast,” Dell’Antonia enthuses. “It just gives you this big open feeling of calm.” (IAI takes 7  minutes to get to Campion Rink for hockey from our home in Norwich Vermont!)

Be Where You Are : Jeff Heath runs Matrix Applied Technologies, which manufactures and sells equipment that’s installed on large oil and petrochemical storage tanks. This line of work has him traveling frequently and he simply advises, “Be present wherever you are.”

So, organizational effectiveness comes from managers seeking to understand their employees in an interactive, constructive process (literally and figuratively). And also, managers need to break the “Silo Mentality” (as urged by Brent Gleeson at Forbes and Megan Rozo of Internet Marketing Inc., in a phase used for over three decades): defined by the Business Dictionary as a mindset present when certain departments or sectors do not wish to share information with others in the same company. This type of mentality will reduce efficiency in the overall operation, reduce morale, and may contribute to the demise of a productive company culture.

Unless you shed your own Silo Mentality, you will not get to participate in the technology revolution underway: Additive Manufacturing, Human-directed Artificial Intelligence, and Augmented Reality (AR). As an example, Insider Science shows a wide range of new applications for AR in education and training.

Picture Credit: 1stmuse.com

As K.J suggests, “Learn to embrace a paradox: Time is precious and plentiful. To have as much time as you need for the things you want, you need to be ruthless about not filling time with things you don’t care about.”

All the Rage: 3D Printing Finding Thousands of Applications

Photo Credit: Makebot Industries Replicator 3DPrinter

Wikipedia takes us back over two decades but not as far as early Mesopotamia to investigate the history of printing: “In 1993, a new 3D printing technology, ZPrinting (with “z” representing the depth axis), was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[2][3] As in many other rapid prototyping processes, the part to be printed is built up from many thin cross sections of the 3D model. In ZPrinters, an inkjet-like printing head moves across a bed of powder, selectively depositing a liquid binding material in the shape of the section. A fresh layer of powder is spread across the top of the model, and the process is repeated. When the model is complete, unbound powder is automatically removed.^[4] Parts can be built on a ZPrinter at a rate of approximately 1 vertical inch per hour.” Marina Hatsopoulos (daughter of former Thermo Electron CFO John) founded Z Corporation in 1994 and it was sold in 2005 and then its MIT license transferred to 3D Systems in January 2012.

So, what is “additive manufacturing or “AM”, you ask? Oh, it’s the industrial version of 3D printing (see a video here) which has been around since. ISO/ASTM52900-15 defines seven categories of AM processes within its ISO framework: Binder Jetting, Directed Energy Deposition, Material Extrusion, Material Jetting, Powder Bed Fusion, Sheet Lamination and Vat Photopolymerization. There are four categories of 3D printer. Firstly we have printers that extrude a molten or otherwise semi-liquid material. Secondly, there are printers that solidify a photocurable resin. Thirdly, there are printers that bind or fuse the granules of a powder. And lastly, there are printers that stick together cut sheets of paper, plastic or metal.3D Printing.com explains:

It all starts with making a virtual design of the object you want to create. This virtual design is for instance a CAD (Computer Aided Design) file. This CAD file is created using a 3D modeling application or with a 3D scanner (to copy an existing object). A 3D scanner can make a 3D digital copy of an object. The creation of a 3D printed object is achieved using additive processes. In an additive process an object is created by laying down successive layers of material until the object is created. Each of these layers can be seen as a thinly sliced horizontal cross-section of the eventual object.

The approaches employed and devices available (just $200?) are varied and the applications span the manufacturing, household devices, aerospace, auto parts and personalized medical devices. However, the Financial Times recently warned that safety concerns about 3D printed components had slowed adoption of additive manufacturing.

Picture Credit: Federal Drug Administration (FDA)

Safety is a paramount concern in implantable devices as numerous problems have emerged over time with implanted prosthetics such as artificial hips, stents and other devices (a good backgrounder from JAMA here). Yet medical devices produced by 3D printing now include orthopedic and cranial implants, surgical instruments, dental restorations such as crowns, and external prosthetics. The FDA acknowledges that, “the flexibility of 3D printing allows designers to make changes easily without the need to set up additional equipment or tools. It also enables manufacturers to create devices matched to a patient’s anatomy (patient-specific devices) or devices with very complex internal structures.”. As of December 2015, the FDA had cleared more than 85 3D printed medical devices. Due to its versatility, 3D printing has medical applications in:

• Medical devices regulated by FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH),
• Biologics regulated by FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and
• Drugs regulated by FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research

Usefully, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established a 3D Print Exchange to share creation tools and share coding for additive manufacturing models for medicine, implants and bio-medicine as explained in this video.

The FDA has partnered with a number of companies in a forum called “America Makes” which is the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute. Established in 2012 and based in Youngstown, Ohio, America Makes is the flagship Institute for Manufacturing USA, the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation, infrastructure of up to 45 Institutes to follow and is driven by the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM). In addition, there are some excellent graduate level programs such as StartMIT which provide a 20 day workshop for exposing inventors to entrepreneurialism (an excellent video here).

AM and 3D printing are in a takeoff mode now as you can see, dear reader, so IAI will continue to track the development of these industries as we investigate innovation !