Gritty Companies
In the last week I started reading the bestselling Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. So it was quite a serendipitous surprise when I saw in my Twitter feed a link to this article coauthored by Duckworth from the forthcoming issue of Harvard Business Review. In the article, Duckworth pairs the lessons of her research on grit with the individuals, teams, organizations and leaders involved with developing world-class medical care in places like Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic here in Ohio.
If you’re not yet familiar with Duckworth’s work on grit, here she describes her essential findings from the TED stage.
Who Really Killed Geoffrey?
Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t simply the rise of online retail (with its limitless shelf space and anytime/anywhere access) and the decline of traditional, big-box retail chain stores. This is an interesting story about the hedge fund investors who drove Toys ‘R’ Us away from a workout plan during its trip through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and off the cliff towards liquidation. While it takes an understanding of commercial bankruptcy law to understand all the details and finer points, the overall game at play is simple enough: when a lender of money stands to make more money from you if you fail than if you succeed, then they’re not an “investor” in any rational sense of the word.
Trickshot to Save Earth
When I come across stories like this, it is a humbling reminder to be grateful for the armies of super-smart people doing innumerable number of super-smart things aimed at making all of our lives better and — in the case of protecting Earth from a killer asteroid — more likely to continue into the future.
What gets me most about this plan — there are several other design theories being investigated and advocated — is the sheer mathematical audacity of it. There’s a great scene in the first episode of the series From the Earth to the Moon that I mentioned last month where NASA’s original Flight Director, Dr. Chris Kraft, is shown describing the challenges of rendezvousing two objects in space:
“Rendezvous. Two spacecraft meeting up in orbit. You wanna have fun? Come over to my house. You stand in the back yard. I’ll stand in the front yard. You throw a tennis ball over my roof. I’ll try to hit it with a rock as it comes sailing over. That’s what we’re going to have to do. Two spacecraft flying at five miles a second hundreds of miles up with a communication system spread all over the world like so many trading stamps.”
Take that concept, multiply the variables of size, distance and time to ridiculous levels, and you have this asteroid deflection plan.
The Secret Life of Planes
I was just talking to two friends earlier today about how the use of drone photography in real estate marketing provides an interesting new perspective on the property. Seeing things from directly above, while high enough to appreciate scale but low enough to discern detail, opens up observations one wouldn’t be able to appreciate on the ground.
Photographer Mike Kelley puts that different perspective to work, but instead of using drones to sell houses, Kelley charters helicopters to enable him to capture the life cycles of commercial aircraft: from the Boeing Field (their official birthplace as finished airliners) to the Bradley International Terminal at LAX to the bone yards of the Mojave Desert.
Automotive Engineering, Lego Style
In the world of supercars, the Ferraris and Lamborghinis of the world may be the most well known, but the pinnacle of the form comes not from Italy, but Molsheim, France. The Bugatti Chiron is the height of automotive engineering and art … and the inspiration behind the greatest achievement of Lego engineering and design in history.
The Chiron on the left is the 261 mph / 1,500 hp version (price tag: just shy of $3M) version handbuilt in France. The Chiron on the right is made almost completely of Lego Technic pieces — over 1,000,000 pieces. What’s even more amazing is that it works. Check out the video of it on the move at the article linked in the headline.
For more Lego automotive engineering fun, check out this working Lego car assembly line, using the programmable robotics of Lego’s Mindstorms series. With the end of August upon us, teenagers all over the world are embarking on this year’s FIRST Lego League season, in which they must build a Lego Mindstorms robot and write the code to program it to accomplish Lego-sized missions. Having coached a FLL team last year, let me tell you: these kids do serious engineering and programming work.