Thursday, July 24, 2008

Chirp chirp I just heard the cicadas chirping tonight while out on the patio blogging. Seems a little early. Old folk wisdom says that means 6 weeks until fall. 9:23:23 PM    comment []

Cool Links Here are a number of interesting blogs and Web sites I've run across recently: 15 Tips for Becoming as Patient as Job (Boy, do I need that one right about now!) Greg McMillan has been running a series on modeling that is fascinating. Here's one link. Bob Nardelli, late of Home Depot, now of Chrysler, as a customer advocate? How to Establish new habits The Only Guide to Happiness You'll Ever Need This one is so true. Print it and tack it up on your wall. 10 Ways History's Finest Kept Focused at Work I'm trying to incorporate these--especially the taking the afternoon off to walk (around a golf course) Relationship Providers Actually a marketing post. Should be pondered by all the marketers out there. This will probably appear in my talk at the ISA Marketing Summit in Cleveland in September. A great customer service story (that I sent to my son, the airline pilot) Finally, a new safety Web site from Siemens. I've followed two of the blogs for quite a while, now they are consolidated into a new site. Something I'll be watching. 9:20:14 PM    comment []

Siemens Exider Dome A couple of days mostly off the grid. Wednesday I was at the Siemens Automation Summit user conference at Navy Pier in downtown Chicago. What a beautiful setting as we had breakfast out on the terrace looking out over the Chicago skyline with clear blue skies and a blue/green Lake Michigan. The Siemens keynoters took great pains to explain the new organization at the corporate headquarters and to let the attendees know that automation still played an important role in Siemens. The main keynote was given by the winner of the first series of "The Apprentice" with Donald Trump--Chicago's own Bill Rancic. After winning the competition, he had the opportunity to work with and observe some of the top entrepreneurs in the United States. As he observed these people closely, Rancic determined that all entrepreneurs that he had met shared three traits: an incredible attention to quality (and details), incredible decision-making ability, and a "never quit" attitude. A great lesson for us all. There was a product announcement at the event--which included a tour of the ExiderDome. The announcement was a new version of Siemens' HMI/SCADA product WinCC. This version includes support for Microsoft Windows Vista. One of the major features of Vista is graphics, but Siemens has made its graphics adaptation backward compatible to Windows XP. I was told that the full-blown object-oriented architecture product will be coming in a future release. The good news is that the company has established an HMI Center of Competency in Richardson, Texas. Tim Davis (once Marketing VP at USDATA, which became part of Tecnomatix, which became part of UGS, which became part of Siemens) will be leading a team that will incorporate the best of the FactoryLink product into WinCC. It should be good. By the way, the ExiderDome is on a barge on Lake Michigan moored to Navy Pier. Vastly different setting than my first look at it in the desert of Monterrrey, Mexico. 9:09:01 PM    comment []