Amazon Leadership Principles - #1 Customer Obsession , etc

Why Amazon - I would enjoy working at Amazon or any other group that works to excel engaged with smart colleagues in pursuit of new customers and helping improve existing relationships by helping resolve persistent enterprise problems like... infrastructure to help quickly resolve all customer complaints.

My personality matches Amazons, enabling me to plugin to your existing customer obsessed culture with high quality standards in actions, performance, processes, speed and thought.

Using rigorous product management methodologies, I have helped create new revenue across diverse domains in aviation, energy, logistics, manufacturing and telecommunications while maintaining quality, reliability and safety.

A Masters in Systems and Industrial engineering specializing in control theory enable me to see the "end-to-end" design across the enterprise that often requires fixing faulty customer feedback loops that in turn increase future opportunities.

I have maintained bias for action by championing, inventing or simplifying enterprise infrastructures that focus and align with customer requirements and expectations; delivering results with new “move the needle” revenue streams within aviation finding methods to quickly resolve AOG-Airplane On Ground, No Fault Found and other systemic degradation.

With a little bit of ML/DL/Data science applied to the pipeline "move the needle activities were accomplished by automating and streamlining internal service and product designs delivering new efficiencies via software - where my degree in Software Engineering enabled me to guide implementations with software architects and software engineering technical staff. Automation provides consistently reliable and high quality customer services. Streamlining reduces overall system complexity yielding efficient workflows and enabling quick customer responses, that can surpass customer expectations and open new opportunities.

Who am I -

I succeed by working backwards from customer expectations to optimize customer
services support infrastructures. I am energized by receiving and transferring knowledge to teams. Especially enjoy teaching or sharing knowledge. Enjoy brainstorming, collaborating and combining ideas from customers within a "iterative why" and "what don't you like about XYZ iterations". A complete solution package can then be protected by patents.

* I am comfortable meeting with new people in team environments, keeping track of details, engaging all stakeholders, customers, development, integration, test and delivery across all communication channels with metrics. Recently, I have been utilizing ELK stack to deliver status, metrics and details across organizational elements.

* School was easy as I have partial photographic memory; graduating early from high school I worked half-time / full-time at Alcoa industrial setting performing EPA and Product Quality Control testings; supervised by senior chemists.

* Received offers from everywhere; sadly naivete had me choosing a local school rather than accepting out-of-state offers from all the Ivy League schools.

* Considered smart within high caliber teams in Bell Labs, Boeing Research, DARPA reviews and other similar environments. I have high standards with good Emotional Intelligence / Extroverted/ Intuitive/ Perceptive skills.

* I am academically and professionally trained to seek and validate customer requirements. I learned Systems Engineering / Requirements Discovery / Project Management from Dr. Bahill, University of Arizona INCOSE fellow.
* My first professional assignments were in expert system knowledge management roles. These roles required me to talk with Chief Engineers, Directors and VP's in internal and external engagements. Successfully transferring this skill set across many domains including aerospace, energy, industrial systems, logistics, manufacturing, marine systems, pharma, telecom and weather forecasting. Weather often disrupts scheduled plans. In marine systems, ships can't drive around storms easily; like aviation fuel-propulsion performance and delivery time are primary performance and cost saving drivers.

Why Product Management -

I have been successful in life cycle product management of new or existing products or services. I am academically and professionally trained to seek and validate customer requirements. My initial professional assignments were in expert system knowledge management roles. These roles required me to continuously query to derive customer requirements, assess gaps in current product by asking about pain points or new features with Chief Engineers, Directors and VP's in internal and external engagements. Successfully transferring this skill set across many domains including aerospace, energy, industrial systems, logistics, manufacturing, marine systems, pharma, telecom and weather forecasting. Weather often disrupts scheduled plans. In aviation and marine systems, aircraft and ships can't drive around storms easily; Fuel-propulsion performance and delivery time are primary performance and cost saving drivers.

Product Case Development Framework:

--> What constraints, time or resources are associated with this request ?
--> What is the goal state - more users, profit, customer satisfaction ?
--> What is the scope - marketplace - tech,
--> Is this an existing product, a new one?
--> Do you have market research available ?

--> If its a new product do you already have an MVP ?

--> Did the market research indicate existing customers, other marketplace competitors ?
--> If it is an existing product, who are the customers? - who are the stake holders?

--> How mature is the product - recently introduced or farther down a timeline - is there competition ?

--> If new product - activate brainstorm individually or in a group setting ...

--> One possible product is a "clear air turbulence" or "wind shear" detector that helps pilots drive around disturbances or alerts pilots during takeoff or landings about sudden sharp delta V in wind speed near the ground and at what angle. Different segments based on (1) aircraft size or (2) passenger or cargo, (3) weight distributions, (4) aircraft age, .

Strengths: Good listening with engineering background helps me to understand technical and org basis for existing systems. Due to ownership issues most teams can’t let go of existing designs even when those designs generate constant errors that irritate internal and external customers. Combination of good engineering and software skills enables me to suggest methods to reduce or fix error states.

Weaknesses: When overtired may make solutions overly complicated. In recent years, I know by the next day that there may be better solution avenues. Peer review processes can help generate simpler solutions.

1. Customer Obsession.

Leaders start with the customer and work backward. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
Summary Response --> Customers require high quality products and services, as quick as possible, consistently delivered with courtesy and professionalism at lowest possible prices on demand and their schedule.
STAR
Give Me An Example Of A Time You Used Customer Feedback To Drive Improvement Or Innovation. What Was The Situation And What Action Did You Take?

Q: Give Me An Example Of Your Most Difficult Customer Interaction
Situation:
==> Chief MX 787 Engineer yelling at me for 10 minutes; 3 days after 787 grounding event.
Tasking:
Finding possible root cause of battery rare event; all planes grounded.
--> Assigned to 1 of 10 rooms, listening to Kevin Gosling, 787 EIP Manager along with the 787 NOC customer support groups in context, data review and theories.
--> Acquiring authorization to access data and sending to Memex teams in BR&T and Commercial Aviation Services / Internal Subsidiary.
-->BR&T and functional design engineers flown in from all over country.
Q: And How You Worked Through It.
I listened to his complaints and said Ok I will get our team to work faster
I had known him for 2 years prior and all previous interactions were professional.
--> What Was The Outcome?
He hadn’t had sleep for several days and also had a fever, his management sent him home.  My team suffered the same fate until we decided to assign a center point and send other team members to home base to work on solution. I was center point for a week then switched with another fellow. Then iterated across other team members.
--> FAA report details outcome with blame equally shared across FAA, Boeing and Vendors.
However:
Certification of new battery design. 787 return to service; stock moved off the floor reaching above 400 until next Entry Into Service 737 Max pushed it below 100 again. I guess Boeing didn't learn the lesson to put safety, quality, reliability in front of schedule. Schedule pressure and optimism doesn't necessarily mean anything unless a rigorous process of verifying and validating design in operational environments against real life failure modes proves the design actually works.
It was rare event since that time only 3 other incidents have occurred on other Boeing plane models. Actual cause believed to be manufacture errors based on x-ray imaging of defective batteries indicated high density charge creases in electrolyte filled bags that initiated thermal runaway events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_problems

=================================================

2nd Challenging Technical Situation:

AT&T Bell Labs / AT&T derived 50% of revenues from Fortune 100

Fedex was one of those customer - assigned to develop NOC Help Desk Expert System working with their NOC technical leaders that had built out the USA network and poised to expand internationally.

Lower priority task but intellectually challenging; potentially worth $0.5B in sales revenue because FEDEX had more than 500 large capacity telecom PBX and an equal number of digital routers.

Higher priority assignment to develop, build and deploy internal AT&T business requests to expedite service provisioning.

AT&T Service Configuration Team Situation:

Attach new customers to network was a 30 day SLA. Network config required 8 engineering teams and their databases to consistently translate requirements into internal configuration enabling end-to-end from local customer office back to assigned regional and national management offices.

Task 1: Learn domain quickly; 6 months due date to customer deployment.

Task 2: Build advisory expert system to suggest corrections to forms that were incorrectly filled out.

Task 3: Based on systems engineering groups providing rules; convert initial 300 rules to code within 6 weeks; followed by integration; initial test and system test. Based on an MVP, I was told that I had just enough time to type in code, an obscure LISP variant called OPS83 (derived from OPS5).

https://github.com/sharplispers/ops5/blob/master/demo/reactor.ops

Action 1:

After first 50 rules I wrote a Domain Specific Language translator to accept systems engineering documents as input and output the necessary OPS83 syntax; reducing rules development time from 6 months to 10 minutes.

Action 2:

Applied similar DSL translator to FEDEX task reducing anticipated development task from 6 months to 10 minutes. Added backtracking capabilities because FEDEX requirements permitted going back to previous steps once certain mis-configurations were resolved.

Action 3:

Enabled hypermedia links associated with system state context. At the time this was novel in 1988 time frame; HTML not developed until 19991. Hypermedia included images, video, audio and hyper-text links.

Results:

R1: Automated AT&T Service Provisioning - business value $100 M / year in 1989.

R2: Successfully adopted by FEDEX NOC team, enabling their experts to expand the system to additional off-shore marketplaces; enabled $500 M sale of AT&T networking equipment, acknowledge by VP Business Marketing Group.

R3: Help Desk Expert System generalized to other companies; sold at $1 million per customer. Utilized at Microsoft as basis for user help system.

R4: Subsequent rules projects were aided by translator reduction time, valued at 2 FTE per project per year.

2. Ownership: Leaders are owners. They think long term and don't sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say "that's not my job." Leaders optimize customer requirements working within their organization owning big picture solutions delivering results to the marketplace.

==> In aviation, low aircraft availability metrics, unscheduled maintenance activities and weather delays reduce probability that logistic plans are completed; reduces customer benefits and reduces optimal revenue plans.

Situation:

Dr. Allen Adler, an SVP asks me to help commercialize early AI commonly called a Memex, authored by IBM Research group spun off right soon after 9/11 events; over time the group won out over IBM Watson in competitive assessments.

Task 1: First project requires reviews of all enterprise financial actions.

Actions: Review all rules of all enterprise actions within a 6 month window. Use infrastructure to find all broken rules.

Results: Identified undisclosed amount in savings. All credit cards for entire enterprise reissued.

Task 2: Second project requires scaling up results; applying to commercial aviation services.

Actions:

a) Create MVP that correlates all data sets from customer (emails, feedback and complaints), all designs (planes, systems, subsystems, components, parts, inventories, materials, tooling) across all time working directly with Chief Engineers (Program, Design, Manufacturing, Logistic Chain, Operational Support organizations, maintenance, reliability, safety) program management directors and their personnel.

b) Write generic query app that provides answers and resolves any specific customer complaint quickly (within 5 minutes).

c) Test in production environment, assign value to answers and time saved with biz financial focal personnel.

Result: Publicly acknowledge and post $100 M + ; see below case study article. •

=====================================

Tell Me About A Time When You Took On Something Significant Outside Your Area Of Responsibility.

Situation: -

Finding Flap Skew Enterprise Competition between Boeing and an analytics competitor.

Tasks -

Find events with validation buried in 30 Terabytes in 2 years of flight data across 300 aircraft.And determine failure type: sensor or system. Accumulation of system errors occurs across several flights

In this time frame neither Tableau nor ELK stack existed therefore validation of flap skew was difficult as differential errors aggregated across multiple flights was key. At that time internally available tool sets could only "see" one flight at a time.

Action: I found, built and delivered a Dept of Energy tool called ViSit to team that could hold gigabytes of data and delivered to lift system functional specialist lead Ron Klingel and Dave Kelse validation / analysis group.

My Assigned task was using Memex and other methods to find event occurrences.

Results: Why Was It Important? - Event type causes safety issues. Memex found all maintenance events - mentioning flap skew events, rigging issues or acceleration sensors, using the dates we found indications of flap skew events in the flight dynamics and also the precursors to those events contained within previous flights.

What Was The Outcome? We found 100x plus more than external competitor; rewarding Boeing as first place win in eyes of customer, retaining current analytics services and expanding into other areas.

Infrastructure is this - https://patents.google.com/patent/US6581049B1/ ; initial patent is in public domain. A summary view is that it is a materialized view of complex join across many sources of data; results in large sparse data topological graph. Or another way to look at is - as a compressed graph of all relations between associated contexts. Instead of maintaining millions of records where each record from each table is held individually, implement a co-occurrences.

Give An Example Of When You Saw A Peer Struggling And Decided To Step In And Help.

What Was The Situation And What Actions Did You Take?

During process control engineering test cycle, junior engineer

• What Was The Outcome?

3. Invent and Simplify.

Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by "not invented here." As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.
Finding systemic degradation patterns within complex systems can increase aircraft availability, reduce plan risk, increase reliability and safety. There are NIH trade secret high performance correlation systems that can find systemic degradation that could be utilized to reduce costs and increase efficiencies, results validated by P&W, USAF and Boeing Rotor-craft groups.
CAS - Commercial Aviation Services - solve all customer problems using all data sets - similar to this

4. Are Right, a Lot.

Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to dis-confirm their beliefs.
At Boeing's Enterprise Strategic Growth group in past assignments one tech failed task, earthquake prediction. With sufficient data there is a team that now reliably predicts 7 of 10 earthquakes up to a week ahead. The benefit of earthquake prediction is that critical assets can be moved out of harms way and emergency management assets and inventory can be deployed nearby to help. I did succeed in hurricane, tornado track and weather forecasting.
In other technical tasks I have succeeded in finding precursors to failure in complex systems utilizing robust time series analysis methods. This required working with high caliber technical staff including chief engineers, integration engineers and customer TPOC; eventually meeting heads of USAF, Navy and US Army Integrated Vehicle Health Management. The question of why I didn't succeed in Boeing on this problem is that despite best efforts with support of SVP / VP's, groups in charge of data repeatedly denied access. In the SBIR USAF contract working with chief and senior engineers, I was granted access to all data sources.
Complex system degradation mapped into failure modes are aircraft and their subsystems electrical, propulsion, generators, hydraulics, flap / lift systems, fuel systems, batteries, battery management systems, thermal systems, air flow, vibration, radar, RF - Uhf, Vhf, Hf.
Elsewhere I discuss the Memex; technically the Memex is an index of indexes that are co-associated with a complex systems including dynamics. The Memex provides the set of parameters utilized as inputs to a set of methods. Using large sets of inputs, the methods define a set of similarity metric spaces. The outputs are either a known classification label assigned by a human or a generalized unsupervised similarity metric useful for clustering.
The Memex is like a materialized view and a compressed graph with millions of matrices that define co-occurrence relationships between entities defined by the user. This could be implemented by an infinite column space denoting all words, numerical data and entities and distributed index of rows that contain the co-occurrence context. The co-occurrences are summed across all rows into a separate index that maintains complete data topology sets.
Many ML methods are counter productive in finding degradation due to systemic engineering / mathematics legacy thinking with regard to models. Thus I am at odds with current ML practices. I do continually review state-of-art methods in commercial and academic realms.
--> Elaborate -- reductionist, linear, gradients, statistics, recurrence, gaussian, gradient descent depends on smooth functions
• Tell Me About A Decision For Which Data And Analysis Weren’t Sufficient To Provide The Right Course And You Had To Rely On Your Judgment And Instincts.
• Give Me Two To Three Examples.
• ==> Internal Novel Proprietary Legacy “Set” Code vs C/C++ code generation
• ==> Hand-code LISP code or code generation
• ==> Starting to work with Paul Hoffman
• ==> Starting to work with Alan Wagner
• ==> Working with Dr. Bahill and continuing relationship over time
• They Don’t Have To Be Big Strategic Decisions – Could Be Big Or Small.
• Tell Me About A Time You Made A Difficult Decision And How You Knew It Was The Right Solution –
• ==> Set code vs C/C++ - the C/C++ code generation was portable
• ==> Leaving Aspen Tech / Boeing -- moved to new challenges and learning experiences

5. Learn and Be Curious.

Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.
==> Best learning occurs when meeting other people that share common interests.
Classical Systems Engineering studies provide the basis for studying systems in general using advanced mathematical techniques in optimization, scheduling, organizational theory, knowledge management, statistics, forecasting and control theory. For instance there is an equation that can simultaneously model electrical, structural / dynamics and thermal systems. Operations research Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problems can be solved using multi-parameter non-linear fast proximal gradients, dynamic programming, branch and bound with sub-trees resolved in parallel. MIP is used in logistics networks extensively to plan location and optimize flows between distribution centers.

I have worked across many domains including neuroscience, materials science, organizational analysis, statistical process control, industrial control, optical systems, energy, photovoltaic, aviation (flight dynamics, control, failure mode effects analysis, structural analysis, dynamics (fixed-wing, rotor-craft, marine)), environmental analysis.
Many methods are horizontally transportable across domains; for instance QEEG (noted in this blog elsewhere) utilizes Fourier Transforms to analyze common frequencies distributions that are brains emit. Fourier / Wavelet transforms are common in frequency analysis applications.
Always learning...

6. Hire and Develop the Best.

Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.

--> Hiring the best and raising the bar has many advantages, if and only if the natural tendencies within individuals can be remedied by broadening their skill sets into areas beyond their current state to reward cooperative team behaviors, debate and disagree their viewpoints in a professional manner. Due to highly competitive processes found within compressed learning environments many highly technical skilled engineers are like those shown within the Big Bang group interactions - introverted, high IQ, low EQ and unable to communicate verbally with other team members leading to misunderstanding. Fortunately enterprises have variety of skill improvement courses to ameliorate those tendencies within teams.

--> For instance taking a Myers-Briggs test in group setting enables team members to see that others have distinctive patterns that are either similar or different from their own.

--> Public speaking classes can help people create the necessary skills and confidence to elaborate and then collaborate with other team members.

--> Agile processes can help introverts collaborate during team events.

--> All together improving these skill sets enable high IQ people to move together toward the enterprise wide common goals that produce high quality customer experiences.

7. Insist on the Highest Standards.

Leaders have relentlessly high standards; many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high-quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.
Enterprise optimization pursuit could be expressed objectively by a complex function of parameters and constraints within an operations research context. Since parameters and constraints lead to conflicts, leadership continually must re-express, emphasize and follow requisite safety, security and regulatory standards while pursuing and acting on a myriad of customer requirements including scheduling, marketplace dynamics and revenue goals. Demanding first time quality, avoiding rework and fixing as problems occur is possible if supported by organizational leadership and their interfaces.

• Tell Me About A Time When You Provided Coaching For A Team Member.
• ==> Danielle
• What Started The Coaching? -
• → Their requests for knowledge and feedback
• What Was The Outcome? -
• ==> Additional maturity, communication skills, positive / improved management view
• Tell Me About A Time When You Invested In An Employee's Development.
• ==> helped Jenn ; diversity and understanding
• ==> Asian Flu
• ==> Internal review
• ==> Agreeing that society generates conditions whereby others are not listening

• ==> Prevented a demotion
• What Did You Invest In And Why?
• ==> Communication, Status Reporting, Backbone under conflict
• What Was The Outcome?
• Can You Share An Example Where Investing In An Employee's Development Didn't Work Out? -
• ==> Just out of school with PhD Dissertation in Large Graph Analysis
• ==> He built systems to satisfy requirements
• ==> cut off – by Founder

8. Think Big. -

Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

Optimizing customer requirements often gets translated into increased efficiencies. End-to-end distribution transport network flow plans continually meet with reality. Adaptive networks plan parallel paths that can be activated when network flow disruptions occur.
Long mile time reductions could be achieved by:
1) avoiding route disruptions caused by traffic or inclement weather,
a. build private runways or gating areas to alleviate gate and landing contention
b. "see" aviation clear air turbulence route around it
c. operationally watch critical routes / re-route as necessary
Middle mile solutions could be resolved by alternative transportation vehicles designed to:
1) Load and unload in parallel from all sides and top of vehicles.
2) Utilize Commercial CH-47 that could skip over the traffic jams and carry 20,000 lbs cargo loads.
3) Utilize large cargo C-130J planes to drop large packages onto private or leased land.
Last Mile:
1) Utilize large balloons above clouds collecting solar energy to re-charge drones to guide / glide packages to customers.
2) Have local flex services pick up drones and drop back at distribution centers,
3) Where sufficient charging enables save drone charge to return to balloon.
4) In some future, beamed RF power from satellite systems will be collected near cell sites and drones can rendezvous with power facilities in local neighborhood.
Additional revenue can be gained by utilizing alternative analysis methods that exist, although not widely known, to fix before failure occurs that simultaneously increases availability, reliability, quality and efficiency. In turn, these methods can be resold to other groups seeking same attributes. What works for aviation also works for other vehicles, data centers, manufacturing, etc
Additional benefits accrue since methods guide new designs, processes and systems, as replacements to original designs. The original 737 was patented more than 20 years ago and is now in public domain. There is no reason why an enterprise can't capitalize on existing infrastructure and local knowledge base to replicate or improve upon public domain designs.
Stumbled upon these methods while working on independent contract, after continuously being disappointed by current state of time series / ML. Patented previous methods while at Boeing; as a Boeing contractor prohibition against sharing methods new methods due to liabilities associated with 3rd party IP.

9. Bias for Action.

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

Bias For Action:

• Give Me An Example Of A Calculated Risk That You Have Taken Where Speed Was Critical.

• ==> Rule Translator - getting two projects finished in parallel with high quality outcome

• What Was The Situation And How Did You Handle It?

• What Steps Did You Take To Mitigate The Risk? What Was The Outcome?

• Describe A Situation Where You Made An Important Business Decision Without Consulting Your Manager.

--> Left of X - Assignment to defeat IED's in operational environments.

• What Was The Situation

(Mgr on Vacation)

And How Did It Turn Out?

Internal review with colleagues after Mgmt return indicated out-of-box, creative thinking patterns.

10. Frugality.

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.

--> Wearing same shoes for 3 years during graduate school days saving money earned from Graduate School Research Assistant to buy technical books.

==> Open Accounting - profit sharing at Industrial Systems lead Founders to allow everyone to check revenues and spend against potential quarterly profits. When we started to ask for something new - we knew that it would be a "have to have - supported by more than one person" and not just a "nice to have"; and then we would be rewarded with larger profit share. It also helped us to work in collaborative teams to meet customer requirements in an expedited fashion that then rewarded us in new coins in our pockets.

11. Earn Trust.

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team's body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.
• ==> Structural Degradation – MBSE – Expert Models - CI’s
• What Assumptions Did You Have To Question?
• ==> MBSE, Statistics, Platform Experts
• How Did You Evaluate If The Change Improved The Process?
• ==> Validated with Platform Experts
• ==> Who then recommended continuance with internal and external customers
• Knowing What You Know Now, Would You Do Anything Differently? -==> Create a CRAD with external customers to propagate knowledge, because customers are generating requirements; customers continue with tradition

• Give Me An Example Of How You Have Changed The Direction Or View Of A Specific Function/Department And Helped Them Embrace A New Way Of Thinking. -
• I started relationship then transferred to tech to internal vendor transfer
• Why Was A Change Needed?
• ==> Inefficient use of time and money;
• ==> Later I was sent to examine org and technical interfaces
• ==> Subsidiary failed to provide value in UK and in ST vs Oblong ; Streaming IF
• ==> Subsidiary CTO gating progress.
• What Was The Outcome?
• ==> Quicker response upon requests; ultimately many projects failed after Subsidiary pulled away, adopted internal competitive stance
• ==> My team was asked to move on to other project priorities.

12. Dive Deep.

Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.

Tell Me About A Time You Were Trying To Understand A Problem On Your Team And You Had To Go Down Several Layers To Figure It Out.
==> ML and other groups discuss separating signals from noise
Who Did You Talk With And What Information Proved Most Valuable?
==> Experts in that domain across the enterprise; and a specific enterprise expert individual
How Did You Use That Information To Help Solve The Problem?
==> Expert agreed that the noise was sometimes also the signal

Tell Me About A Problem You Had To Solve That Required In-Depth Thought And Analysis?
==> Signal analysis failures
How Did You Know You Were Focusing On The Right Things?
==> performance metrics improved

13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
Have A Backbone/Disagree And Commit
• Give Me An Example Of When You Took An Unpopular Stance In A Meeting With Peers And Your Leader And You Were The Outlier.

==> # 1 Requirement is performance 50K Moving Objects
• ==> Leadership and Technical Team Leads supported Vendor Solution - Java

--> Architecture was MVC + Message Q - Each Event translated into 4 Threads, Event Clipped if out of view by an observer / client ; the clip view should have been in api request and not sent; 50K x 4 x 200K threads on client side with OS selecting next thread, client side starvation
• ==> I proposed used Erlang w/ Mnesia as a distributed database

==> With Ensemble (The C/OCAML version) and JGroups ( http://www.jgroups.org/ )

--> Derived from Horus https://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/Projects/Horus/HOT/hot.html

• What Was It, Why Did You Feel Strongly About It, And What Did You Do?
• When Do You Decide To Go Along With The Group Decision Even If You Disagree?

• ==> #1 Requirement was performance 50K moving objects per second with more than 1000 attributes

==> Based on organizational inertia - Vendor won out -> arch based on MVC and Message Threads

==> Customer in 2021 still unhappy about performance
• Give Me An Example Of A Time You Chose To Acquiesce To The Group Even When You Disagreed.
• ==> Erlang was one of two suggestion; because Erlang has an internal scheduler and true LWP; view clips caught on server side reducing message traffic on client side thread load; Mnesia used to store current attribute states, client api could be a notification that update occurred, client side could set up persistence subscription with those attributes ; server could send only data if one or more attributes in set notification when needed.
• Would You Make The Same Decision Now? Yes
• ==> New Data and Resources now available to support Erlang solution
• requirements; customers continue with tradition

• Give Me An Example Of How You Have Changed The Direction Or View Of A Specific Function/Department And Helped Them Embrace A New Way Of Thinking. -
• I started relationship then transferred to Subsidiary technology transfer
• Why Was A Change Needed?
• ==> Inefficient use of time and money;
• ==> I was sent to examine org and technical interfaces
• ==> Boeing internal vendor failed to provide value in UK and in ST vs Oblong ; Streaming IF
• ==> Boeing internal vendor gating progress.
• What Was The Outcome?
• ==> Quicker response upon requests; ultimately many projects failed after Subsidiary pulled away, adopted internal competitive stance
• ==> My team was asked to move on to other project priorities.
• Give An Example Of A Tough Or Critical Piece Of Feedback You Received.
==> Being told more details about how I was making a specific individual outside my org sleepless in Seattle.
• What Was It And What Did You Do About It?
==> 787 Chief MX engineer yelled at me; shortly thereafter that schedule pressure led me to pressure that specific person that was on critical path across several organizations; that had me publicly apologizing
• Give Me An Example Of An Idea You Had That Was Strongly Opposed.
Vendor design that worked in demos; that wouldn't work in production setting.
• Why Was There So Much Resistance?
Organizational inertia, with lead engineers and their management
• How Did You Handle The Negative Feedback?
I wrote a summary whitepaper of design details that would lead to technical performance failures; suggested alternative path. Moved to another group.

14. Deliver Results.

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

USAF No Fault Found Solution - $1-10 B annual savings

Other Boeing XYs of M. in contracts or savings.
Boeing CAS $100M / mo, publicly acknowledged by solving all Airplane on Ground Events in 5 mins or less, by finding sales opportunities on surplus inventory or whatever complaint is contained within the email

AH-64, CH-47, USAF Fixed Wing - Increased Safety and Reliability and new contract opportunity
Automate AT&T Provisioning - $100 M / annually
ISI - 300 Control Loops / Ethylene Cracker - 1 billion pounds / year of plastic for one of 450 clients

https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2003/05/16/195962/global-watch-buna-sow-leuna-olefinverbund-open-for-new-challenges/

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