The other day, I received a review copy of Start From Zero: Build Your Own Business, Experience True Freedom by Dane Maxwell.
A further subtitle could be become a millionaire while working only 2-3 hours a day.
Or, become a millionaire by joining his site.
Three basic components of his book include—writing effective ad/marketing copy, make the calls, buy his system. (Not to be cynical. All God’s children need to earn an income somehow.)
Much of the first half or so include ideas I first picked up in the 1980s from Napoleon Hill, Denis Waitley, and Brian Tracy. Then he, a little later, added ideas on neuroplasticity—the finding that you can change and grow your brain through reading and experiences.
His outline of ideas are:
The Three Rocks
What you don’t need
What you do need
4 Brains
7 Skills
15 Examples (people who have done the work and succeeded)
4 Growth Levels
If you are younger and just beginning, this book offers many tried and proven tips. Read it and take a few ideas and put them into practice.
If you are older and have been studying building businesses, most likely you’ll find little new—unless you find motivation from examples from life.
I picked up at least one new idea—questions to ask while doing some market research. Sort of looking for those delicious morel mushrooms in the spring that pop up unexpectedly, ideas are there for the finding.
In the book, he mentions that as people grow in business, the move from reading 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss to Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio. This book is sort of a 4 Hour Work Week. Once you get moving, you’ll grow more by reading Principles and other such books.
Here is one for all the politicians who think you can snap your fingers or wrinkle your nose and start producing overnight. This is a fascinating, first-person story about a software developer (Radek Pietruszewski) who became infatuated with 3D printing, learned CAD and CNC, joined a Hacker Space, and then saw how to meet a need during this crisis.
The Podcast is a weekly conversation between Radek and his boss Michael Sliwinski who is developer, founder, and CEO of Nozbe (affiliate link–the personal productivity app I use). They are both Polish. Radek recently moved to Warsaw to be closer to the hacker space. Michael now lives in Spain. You can also find them at @MSliwinski and @radexp. I’ve listened to them since episode 1. This is episode 206.
Oh, they speak English better than some Americans I know, a fact that also fascinates me.
Radek has started a job in manufacturing… pro bono manufacturing of face shields for hospitals in Poland.
No, really. Over the last few weeks, Radek has been applying what he’d learned about CAD, laser cutting, and lean manufacturing at the Warsaw Hackerspace to set up a face shield production line.
In three weeks, they produced over 30 000 face shields.
They had just discussed a book on Lean. The story reveals challenges and problem solving of starting a manufacturing process to make face masks for hospital people who were in desperate need. Those of us who have worked in manufacturing recognize the problems and should respect how this team of beginners creatively solved all the problems along the way.
One interesting nugget was that they were quickly told not to go to hospital administrators. They would only be a bottleneck. So, the group actually found lower level workers and delivered boxes of masks to their houses for them to take to work and distribute.
Makes me wonder about how I’ve killed time during the pandemic.
Turns out that I’ve been following developments of US leaders of Smart Manufacturing (yes, a thing, so capitalized) for going on to 10 years. I’ll put a number of links to previous posts that begin in 2011.
The beginnings were a group led by Jim Davis of UCLA, Jim Wetzel from General Mills, John Bernardin from Rockwell Automation, and a few others called the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition (SMLC). They were developing ideas to fund and promote Smart Manufacturing when eventually the US Federal government began funding test beds and institutes through the Department of Energy.
By then Germany had combined with the Fraunhofer Institute and leading technology suppliers such as Siemens and Festo to use the concept of cyberphysical systems as the basis for Industrie 4.0—an initiative supporting the German machine building industry. The idea had spread to China, and several European countries. The US suddenly was playing catch-up.
At that point the SMLC dissolved and members reconstituted under the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII) now called CESMII—The Smart Manufacturing Institute. I wrote an update to this last January after a lunch I had with old friend John Dyck at the end of December 2019. John had left his roles at Rockwell Automation and MESA International to lead this new initiative.
CESMII has been busy developing its own academic partnership with the North Carolina State University. The partners have launched the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Center (SMIC) at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. The objective of the SMIC is to link manufacturers, industrial technology vendors, systems integrators and equipment providers with academia, demonstrating and driving research and innovation that scales to all of US manufacturing.
At NC State, pilot plants for biomanufacturing, papermaking, nonwovens textiles, and advanced manufacturing are using Smart Manufacturing tools from CESMII and its nationwide partners.
The SMIC at NC State is a visible proof point of CESMII’s well documented network-of-networks strategy to make Smart Manufacturing readily available and accessible throughout the nation. The SMIC facilities now become available for industry to try innovative Smart Manufacturing solutions and drive their use of Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Energy Productivity, Asset Performance Management and so forth.
In its first 45 days this winter, the NC State SMIC successfully demonstrated the integration of a dozen vendor solutions (including: Siemens, Honeywell, Allen Bradley (Rockwell Automation), National Instruments, ABB, DeltaV (Emerson Process Technologies), Andritz and Sartorius) using the CESMII SM Innovation Platform. Avid Solutions of Raleigh, NC, is the strategic Systems Integration partner for this initiative.
A video demonstrating the interoperability of 3rd-party Smart Manufacturing solutions leveraging core CESMII technologies is linked below. This is an excellent presentation, especially the first part where the basics of the platform and ecosystem are discussed. I highly recommend checking it out.
The SMIC Director, Professor Yuan-Shin Lee of NC State, comments, “NC State is a ‘Think and Do’ nationally recognized university for research and innovation. With this CESMII partnership, the NC State SMIC will be able to build and sustain a skilled and innovative Smart Manufacturing workforce with expertise in the requisite technology and best practices, and the ability to develop, continuously update, and deploy customizable, interdisciplinary educational training resources and programs. With this partnership, the NC State SMIC will develop a world-class Smart Manufacturing demonstration facility through partnerships with industry and regional and national laboratories for sustainable workforce development and educational training. We are very excited about this new opportunity. “
CESMII COO, Howard Goldberg, added, “We’re just as excited as the NC State team to make this announcement. NC State is a valued Education & Workforce Development partner for CESMII and will offer CESMII-sanctioned Smart Manufacturing training and education offerings through the SMIC. Additionally, the CESMII technology infrastructure connected to the NC State manufacturing assets will demonstrate the openness and interoperability essential to scaling innovation through Smart Manufacturing solutions beyond a limited pilot phase. We look forward to ending the days of ‘Pilot Purgatory’ which have held industry back for decades by creating and testing solutions at a SMIC and moving them to production environments through the large-scale use of our platform technologies.”
Some analysts believe manufacturing generates more data than any other sector. Maybe, maybe not. But we do have the ability to rapidly generate a lot of data. Storage gets to be an interesting part of a manufacturing IT equation. This midsize storage solution from Hitachi Vantara could be just what you need at the plant level.
In brief:
4:1 Data De-Duplication Delivers a Guaranteed 75% Improvement in Storage Capacity
New Ops Center Software Features AI-Driven Management Tools to Simplify Storage Provisioning For AI, ML and Containerized Apps
New EverFlex from Hitachi Vantara Provides More Choice to Help Customers Move to Pay-Per-Use Consumption Models
Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., introduced Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E990, the company’s new storage platform for midsize enterprise customers.
Feature summary. The E990 combines high performance and low latency with industry-leading data de-duplication guarantees storage cost reductions. Hitachi Ops Center’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven management software can simplify storage provisioning for AI, machine learning (ML) and containerized applications. The E990 with Hitachi Ops Center provides an NVMe all-flash option for Hitachi Vantara’s family of solutions for midsize enterprises including Hitachi’s signature 100% data availability guarantee for businesses of all sizes.
The company also unveiled EverFlex, a program that provides simple, elastic and comprehensive acquisition choices for the E990 and the entire Hitachi Vantara portfolio. EverFlex adds consumption-based pricing models that range from basic utility pricing, to custom outcome-based services, to Storage-as-a-Service.
Availability
Hitachi VSP E990, Hitachi Ops Center and EverFlex are available globally from Hitachi Vantara and its network of partners.
I recently heard a presentation (no names to protect the guilty) where once again there was the adjective “unprecedented” followed by “we have never experienced more uncertainty”.
My guess is that these people were under 35 years old.
The privilege of being old, I guess, is perspective. Things are different, yet the same. In 1973 I was in the recreation vehicle business and we experienced the “Arab oil embargo”. Long lines waiting for what gasoline might be left at the gas station. Fights broke out in the queue. People were unnerved. Travel was an adventure. The economy tanked. Our plant shut down for six months.
Shortly thereafter was massive inflation. I was pulled off my usual work to revalue the inventory and figure out advantages of LIFO or FIFO valuation among other things—oh, we didn’t have anything on a computer. It was paper and my trusty Singer calculator. I was also trying to plan purchases of components with 24-36 week lead times which meant predicting sales and production months out. (Hint: I guessed wrong.)
That doesn’t even go back to my great-grandparents and the Spanish Flu of 1918 or my grandfather and father in the Great Depression and then World War II. In the Depression, people were not merely inconvenienced, they rightly wondered where their next meal would come from.
The common thread? The creativity and resilience of human beings. For example, Grandpa turned a plant that manufactured refrigerators into one manufacturing machine gun bolts to do his part for the war effort.
All over the world, people worked to restore and even to grow and thrive after catastrophes. At least now we have some political leaders and many business and technology leaders working to prevent worst case scenarios. The scientific efforts to understand the virus and develop medicines and vaccines are massive. Manufacturing turnaround, not as easy as politicians make it seem, from making one thing to making necessary supplies has been great. People on the ground making crucial treatment and preventive decisions hour-by-hour have saved myriad lives as well as adding knowledge to the effort.
The human spirit is a marvelous thing. Things are serious, but if we all help prevent the spread of the disease, and help each other out, and support productive efforts, then we’ll come out on the other side stronger than ever.
Those aren’t stories you’ll see on Fox or CNN or MSNBC or wherever. But important work is proceeding.
There is no time for all the unproductive politicking. Shake off the scarcity attitude. Take on a resolute attitude—not merely optimistic, but a “we can survive and go on to thrive” attitude. Truly this is a time for entrepreneurial leaders to take charge.
