Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E27 Stephen Hinch | Lessons from HP & Disruptive Innovations
Join Aaron Moncur as he interviews Stephen Hinch about his remarkable career in innovation, discussing how companies can foster breakthrough technologies, overcome corporate innovation barriers, and create a culture that supports creative thinking.
Main Topics:
- From Engineering to Leadership: Steve's Career Journey
- Turning Innovative Ideas into Profitable Realities
- Creating a Culture of Innovation
- Challenges of Corporate Innovation
- The Role of Persistence in Technological Breakthroughs
- AI's Current Potential in Engineering
About the guest: Stephen W. Hinch is a seasoned innovation and high-tech management expert with a career spanning R&D, marketing, and executive leadership at companies like Hewlett-Packard, Agilent Technologies, and TeamLogic IT. An engineer with degrees from Harvey Mudd College and Claremont Graduate University, Steve played a key role in advancing surface mount and fiber optic technologies, earning honors like the IPC President’s Award.
He is also a prolific author, with his 2025 book Winning Through Innovation offering practical, team-focused strategies for driving innovation based on real-world leadership experience. Known for blending theory with hands-on practice, Steve now works as a consultant, guiding senior leaders through the challenges of innovation in today’s digital landscape.
Links:
Aaron Moncur, host
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
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If that innovative idea doesn't pan out and you lose some money on it, your career is permanently damaged, and a lot of managers in the corporate world don't feel like they want to take that risk, particularly since typically there's no penalty for not taking it. You
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast. I am so excited today to be speaking with Steve Hinch, a seasoned high tech executive, award winning author and innovation consultant with senior leadership roles at Hewlett Packard, Agilent Technologies and team logic it. Steve brings decades of experience driving both incremental and disruptive innovation. His latest book, winning through innovation distills lessons from a career spent on the front lines of R and D, marketing and general management. Thank you so much for being with us today. Steve,
Stephen Hinch:thanks, Aaron, I appreciate it.
Aaron Moncur:So what made you decide to get into the field of technology and engineering and innovation?
Stephen Hinch:Actually probably one of the few people I know that figured out early on I wanted to be an engineer, and up until I went into high school, I had always thought I was going to be a paleontologist. Oh, interesting. But when I went into high school, the counselor said, you know, we don't have a course on paleontology for you, but we do have a course on electronics that's open to freshmen, and so let's sign you up for that. And I took that. I loved it. I loved it so much that they allowed me to take that course for four years. All four years, Oh, wow. And after the first year, I probably knew more than the teacher, and so I helped being basically a teacher's assistant for all of the younger students that were coming in just learning about electronics. So I knew I wanted to be in electronics engineering, pretty much from the first day of high school. And so it was fairly easy to pick a college that was consistent with that objective. And so I went to Harvey Mudd College in Southern California. Stayed there for both bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering. One of the things about Harvey Mudd College is they offer a degree in engineering. It's not a degree in electrical engineering or civil engineering or mechanical engineering. It's electrical and it's engineering. And so theoretically, I could be as good an engineer designing bridges as I could be designing circuits, but I did sort of focus as best I could on courses in the electronics area. And it was I was fortunate enough to get a job at Hewlett Packard just after I graduated, and stayed with hp, and then they spun off into a separate company called Agilent Technologies in the year 1999 and so I had a 35 year career there, before I decided to take the entrepreneurial bug and started a small company here in Santa Rosa.
Aaron Moncur:And what's the company that you're doing in Santa Rosa now. So
Stephen Hinch:the company is actually a national company called Team logic. It they provide IT support for small businesses, businesses that don't have their own it technicians. And so I bought the franchise in Santa Rosa that was not open. I opened the franchise in Santa Rosa, ran that franchise for about six years, made it one of the top three in the in the company, and then I sold that And ever since, the corporate offices, which are located down in Southern California, have been hiring me as a consultant to do all sorts of project related work, because unlike the rest of the people that are running the corporate office, I actually ran a franchise. I know what it's like to be an owner, and they're sort of the, I would say, the consultants that sort of help you, but they've never actually run a franchise themselves, so I bring a perspective to the corporate offices that they wouldn't otherwise have and and that's kept me busy for for several more years.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I'm sure that's massively valuable to them, to have someone with your perspective. Well, you spend a long time in in r, d, and a lot of. Engineers who listen to this show are in r, d or manufacturing process engineering, but they spent time in that, in the trenches, you know, coming up with the new technology, figuring the things out that just don't exist yet. What Not many of our listeners have deep experience in is the other side of that equation, which is like the marketing and the sales aspect, but you also eventually moved into a marketing role. Can you talk a little bit about how that changed your perspective or your understanding of innovation and the engineering process.
Stephen Hinch:Yeah, that was really quite an experience for me, and it really changed my perspective. And I'll get more into that in a minute, but before I do let me just sort of highlight the three or four different aspects of my career. I started out as a production engineer at Hewlett Packard in their microwave test equipment area. So I was not inventing the new products. I was fixing problems on the products that had been invented by the R D engineers a couple of years earlier. But they were off inventing new products. They didn't want to fix products problems on the stuff they'd worked on before. So we production engineers were the ones that took care of that. I was in production engineering for about 10 years. Eventually moved into R D not as an R D engineer. I've never been really as an R D engineer. I moved in as a an R D project manager, and then moved up eventually to be an R and D manager of a whole division. And I always wanted to move even higher in management to run my own business and at HP, and it's spin off Agilent Technologies, you know, they form several different divisions. A division is sort of the smallest organization that's completely responsible for its own profit and loss. It's typically between 50 and $100 million $300 million a year business. And I wanted to do that, and I got coaching from my general manager at the time, saying, you know, Steve, you've been in manufacturing, you've been in r, d, if you run, want to run a business, you really need to learn about marketing. And so he was able to get me into probably the only marketing division responsibility, job responsibility, that I was qualified for, and that was being the division marketing manager for a $300 million a year business. I didn't have to actually figure out how to go sell products. I didn't have to actually write the all of the the collateral for selling the new products, I was bringing a higher perspective. And up until then, you know, I'd never served a day in marketing. And my only experience that this is probably going to date me, but you remember the cartoon Dilbert, and there was a one cartoon showing that Dilbert was being sent to marketing, and there was this big arch in front of marketing. It says, Welcome to marketing, to drink minimum. And that was my perspective of marketing, until I became the marketing manager. Just a big party, huh? Just a big party. And that was not it at all these people. You know, I was responsible for product marketing, for sales development, for Marcom, for product support. There were really sharp engineers there that I had really never given a lot of credit to before. Now, in my role as R and D manager, I had worked very closely with my counterpart in product marketing, so I sort of knew product marketing. They would be the ones that take the new product I was developing and launch it out into the world. So I knew that part of it, but all of the you know, how do you put together a marketing support program, all of the you know, the the Marcom collateral, I thought, I thought Marcom collateral was all of the stuff, the little freebies that you give away at a trade show and the mark on manager always wanted to strangle my neck, because that was a very small part of the job that a marketing organization does. But I learned a lot. And I have to say that when I first came in, there everybody in marketing thought, Who is this guy from R and D going to be running marketing? And I tried not to come in thinking I knew all the answers. I came in wanting to pull the best I could. And. Out of all of the people that were working for me, because I knew they knew their jobs better than I did, but I had the higher perspective, because I had worked with customers before, you know, selling, going out with the R and the marketing guy when we were launching our new products, I knew that part of the business, and I knew how to sort of pull it all together, but it was really an eye opening experience, and I would strongly recommend any engineer thinking about eventually wanting to move into higher level management, C suite management, or even opening their own company that serving time, not only in R D, but also in marketing, to learn the ropes of both of those sides of things is very important. Serving time in in manufacturing might not be as important, depending upon what kind of business that you're going into, software company, maybe not quite as much, but, but you're always going to want to know about r, d and marketing,
Aaron Moncur:if you had to distill at a very high level the essence of marketing, especially within the context of an engineering environment, down to just a few words or maybe a short sentence. How would you define marketing? So
Stephen Hinch:I'm not going to be good at distilling it down to a few words, but let me just say two points. Okay, there's a difference between marketing and sales, I never manage sales. Sales is those are the hunter killers that are going out closing deals. Marketing is their responsibility is to get the message out to the customers so the sales guys can close the deals.
Aaron Moncur:That's a good way of distilling it, getting the message out. I like that a lot. In your book, winning through innovation, you talk about turning ideas not just into a reality, but how to turn ideas into a profitable reality. And not everyone gets that second aspect of profitable reality right? Why do you think that some of the organizations struggle with that aspect,
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Stephen Hinch:Okay, so let me first say, not every innovative idea that you have is going to turn out profitable. And that's because you know when you start an innovative idea, especially a disruptive, innovative idea, where you're going to go off into a new market that you've never dealt with before, you don't necessarily know that market. You don't know for sure the technology that you're thinking of is going to work, and so those kind of disruptive innovations may fail over half the time, and that's okay. And I use the word fail carefully there, because they're not really failures. They are ways for you to learn more about how you can be successful in the future. The problem with a lot of companies, particularly larger companies, is they don't give the innovative ideas the opportunity to really prove themselves out. If you're not delivering results immediately, it's time to chop it. I just read a post today from the former CTO of Hewlett Packard,
Aaron Moncur:who
Stephen Hinch:he spent about$1.2 billion buying a company. It was actually palm that they bought, and he had a great idea for how to turn that into a it was a, you know, a struggling company at the time, and he, he, he has some ideas on how to turn it into company, or to a profitable company. But his. Is CEO did not want to wait within within I think it was like 60 days after they bought the company, the new CEO shut it down. He didn't give it a chance. And that's the big problem with why a lot of innovative ideas don't pan out. Is the C suite doesn't have the patience to prove it out, to wait and show that it's really going to work. And I had to struggle with that myself. The biggest innovation that I had at HP that actually brought in his this was like around the year 2000 when we launched it, and it is a product line still going strong today and has brought in several billion dollars of profit to the company. But I almost wasn't allowed to do that innovation, because it was a disruptive innovation that they didn't know how to structure the organization. But fortunately, the Vice President in charge of test and measurement at the time, said what we're going to do, Steve, is we're going to treat you like an in house startup company. We're not going to hold you responsible for monthly profits, monthly revenues until you launch the product. What we're going to do is we're going to measure you on are you meeting the deadlines, the commitments that you said you were going to in order to invent this new product. And it took me two years to launch that product. But if I had not had that kind of support from the vice president of the company, it would have never
Aaron Moncur:happened. Ideas really just need time to find their way and grow on their own right. Can you talk about what that product was, that product line?
Stephen Hinch:Yeah, so I was responsible for rd manager for the high performance oscilloscope business. And you don't need to know a lot about an oscilloscope, but hopefully your readers have at least used oscilloscopes before. An oscilloscope measures electrical signals, and the ones that I was responsible for had bandwidths up to about 50 gigahertz at the time. That was really, really wide bandwidth. And there was this new market called fiber optic telecommunications that had a need for measuring waveforms, but they needed to measure the waveforms of an optical signal going down a fiber optic cable, not an electrical signal, but so the oscilloscope would have been the great way to Do it, but oscilloscopes measure electrical signals and so people had already put little optical converters on the front of oscilloscopes, and were using that as sort of a crude way to make the measurements, but it wasn't fully calibrated, and the standards for the industry were just starting to evolve. For saying this is how good the measurement needs to be. And we had this brilliant idea of not only putting that little optical converter inside the oscilloscope, which would have not done very much different than what they were already doing, but to develop a completely calibrated process to make sure that when you're making the measurement, you know that it was very accurate measurement. And that was something that nobody had done before. You could sort of make the measurements, but they weren't very accurate at the time. HP had only 25% market share, and our biggest competitor was Tektronix, with about 75% market share, and we had to invent this new product in a way so that Tektronix did not find out what we were doing. Because if, if they did, they would have gone off and invented their own product, and since they were already the market leader, they would have maintained their market leadership. So one, one of the things I did is we invented a, what I'll call a phantom product that was a, not a very good product at all, but we leaked it out to the world, and Tektronix found out about it and said, Well, that's not anything to worry about, and they completely ignored us until we launched our product two years later. And it took them several years to respond, and by then, we had completely swept the market
Aaron Moncur:up. Oh, that's phenomenal. Wow, what a great strategy.
Stephen Hinch:It's not the kind of thing you'll read about in other books on innovation, but I talk all about it, and that's just one of the things that we did that that made our product successful, there talk
Aaron Moncur:a little bit more about that. What? Why was the decision made to leak a phantom product, the that would be seen by your competitor as as not dangerous to them, not a threat, versus just not saying. Anything
Stephen Hinch:good, good point. And so we did not primarily invent this phantom product. In order to fool Tektronix, we needed a way to go out and talk to customers to find out what they really are doing and what they really needed. Now, since we didn't have much market share. They were all buying products from Tektronix. They did not want to talk to us about it, but by bringing out this, this, but it's called a phantom product, if it was actually we sold some, it gave us an excuse to go out and talk to customers that otherwise would not have talked to us, and we got to find out what they really wanted. And yeah, those customers said, yeah, no, this is not really very good, but it's maybe a little better than you got right now. And so we didn't deliberately try to leak that information out to Tektronix. That just sort of leaked out because the customers would go back to tech. And yeah, we just saw this new product from HP, you have nothing to worry about. So anyway, so that was, was, was really why we did it is, was not primarily to fool tectronics.
Aaron Moncur:That's hilarious that it had that unintended side effect. How funny. Okay, how smart Do you think people need to be to develop disruptive innovation? Is this reserved only for the cream of the crop, the top 1% of intelligence out there?
Stephen Hinch:If it were, we would have no innovations out there. So, I mean, you have to, there's a couple of parts to this. One is you have to have the innovative idea. In my book, I only touch on how to come up with the innovative idea, sort of peripherally, because there's not a process that I can really quote for saying here's how I came up with this idea, what I can do is map out an environment that allows people to nurture those innovative ideas. But the actual idea of, you know, the light bulb coming on over your head is not something that you can really write. Might map out a prescriptive process for how to do that.
Aaron Moncur:What's the environment look like?
Stephen Hinch:So there's different environment depending upon whether you're doing disruptive innovation or incremental innovation. And let me just quickly summarize the difference between the two. Incremental innovation is where you make minor improvements to your existing product line. And example, the automobile industry, the gasoline powered automobile industry, have been doing incremental innovations for years. You know, the cars that they sell today sell to the same customers as they sold 10 or 20 years ago, but they're not exactly the same cars. They've got anti lock brakes, they've got crash protection, they've got improved warranty periods, but they're still familiar to the people that bought cars 10 or 15 years ago, and they're happy to trade in their old cars for new cars that they see are better. That's incremental innovation, disruptive innovation. The prime example I use in my book is from the middle of the 20th century, the early part of the 20th century, up until about 1949 almost all the locomotives that the railroad industry bought were steam engines. Steam locomotives. By the 1950s they were all diesel powered locomotives, and not a single manufacturer of steam locomotives survived that transition, because it was such a disruption, they were trying to make better steam locomotives when the the industry was already saying steep locomotives are passe diesels are much better. They're more reliable, less expensive to operate, but so sort of a long way to get to the question you were asking, incremental innovation is typically best done by the people who are managing that product line. So the the the managers that are managing the automobile manufacturing, you know, it's time to put a better anti lock brake in, or improve some other aspect of it, or put a flat panel display on the front panel. Those are all incremental innovations. The the business managers leading that business are the ones best able to do those kind of incremental innovations. But for disruptive innovations, those managers are trying to preserve the product line they already have that. Not going to be the ones to switch from steam locomotives to diesel locomotives. So you really need to manage that disruptive innovation under an organization that's completely separate from the current product line. And that doesn't need to be a giant organization. In fact, it generally you staff that with just a few key people, and then as you prove the technology, and as you start getting more customers, you can add more team members and start doing more product development. But you want to start that disruptive innovation slowly and a small part of the market first to prove that your your technology is working and that there's really a market need for it. And then as you capture that small part of the market, you can expand into other parts of the market and take over from those people are still trying to sell steam locomotives. That's a great
Aaron Moncur:analogy the steam to diesel locomotives. What have you done to create a culture where everyone feels equally empowered to participate in the innovation process? The Product Development expo or PDX is your chance to learn from subject matter experts, providing practical hands on training for dozens of different engineering topics, Gd and T advanced surface modeling, DFM, plating and finishing techniques, programming robots, adhesive, dispensing, prototyping, tips and Tricks and lots more. PDX happens October 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more at PD Expo. Dot engineer. That's P, D, E, x, p, O, dot engineer.
Stephen Hinch:So I actually don't mind. I'm going to pull up my book, because I've got six things to do to encourage people to innovate, right? The first thing that they need to be able to do is the employees need to understand the company's business strategy. That's the responsibility of the company leadership C suite to explain what this company is all about, what we're trying to do, what markets we're trying to go after, where we're putting our priorities. Because if, if the employees don't understand that they don't know where to go off and innovate, or they may come up with great ideas for something that has nothing to do with this company now that that maybe means those, those employees should go off start their own company, but, but, but the first thing that really needs to happen is that employees need to understand what this company is all about and and what the strategy is. Number two is you got to employees. Have got to understand that innovation is more than just ideas for new products or services. I mean, not every innovation that you come up with is going to be the next Tesla or SpaceX or iPhone. There are going to be lots of smaller innovations that will be just as valuable to the company, and those are the kind of innovations that people lower in the organization are more likely to have the ability to contribute to the next iPhone is not going to be invented by some first level engineer down in the trenches, but that first level engineer, or even The people on the production line that are building products may say, you know, this process is not the most efficient way. If we could just change this, I could build 10 more products an hour, and that's the kind of insight that the C suite is not going to know. They're going to need to depend on, on the people in the trenches to bring that kind of of insight into the organization. Now, once the those ideas come up, then you got to give people time to explore those innovative ideas and test them out and and try them. And you've got to provide employees with resources to do that. Now, when I was the general manager of the oscilloscope business at HP, I tried to make sure people understood that I felt comfortable giving people about 5% of their work time to explore innovation in ways, you know, new ideas that may or may not pan out, but, you know, take two hours a week to test things out, and if it looked like something was going to work out, then I would figure out a way to staff a full project about it. But, but those innovative ideas. Giving people time to explore those innovative ideas and some resources, space or materials to test things out, is is really important to encouraging that that culture of innovation.
Aaron Moncur:Are you familiar with Flaming Hot Cheetos?
Stephen Hinch:Tell me about them. This
Aaron Moncur:sounds like a complete tangent, but I promise, promise. It's not so you know, Cheetos, right? Like the snack Cheetos, I can't remember exactly when it was, but 15 years ago, whatever it was, a factory worker who was Hispanic and and felt like the Cheetos didn't resonate with with his demographic, the Hispanic population. Thought there needs to be a spicy version of Cheetos. And he, he approached manager, management about this, and they, they kind of poo pooed the idea. Didn't think it was relevant, and so now we're not going to spend anything on this. Well, this this guy who's a factory worker, right, just like a lowly factory worker, and he believed strongly enough in his idea that he spent his own time and resources testing and doing user groups within his community and trying different recipes and putting the the spicy, the flamin hot on the Cheetos. And I think it took him a while, a year or two years, something like that, but he eventually came up with a recipe that he really liked, and his community really liked, and he he somehow finagled his way into getting a prototype run of these flamin Hot Cheetos and and they just crushed it. They did so well, yeah, and now these flamin hot, you know, Cheetos, Doritos, Funyuns, they're they're all over the marketplace, but it was just like you talked about, right? Very small group him and a couple couple of close friends. And in this case, his organization did not give him the resources, but he found them on his own, just using personal resources, time, a little bit of money, a lot of testing and experimentation, and eventually it blossomed into this huge, huge, multi billion dollar success for the company.
Stephen Hinch:I love that example, and it actually points out two things that I was going to bring up at some point in the conversation anyway. One is it was really poor of the C suite to poo poo it when they should have given him some time to experiment. You know, not unlimited time and not unlimited budget. But Okay, try it out, and let's see what happens. So that's the first thing, is, that's a really good example of why a lot of large companies aren't successful at innovation. They don't have the support that they need. The second point is, he didn't stop, even though they said no. And that level of persistence, that's impressive, and that's exactly what it takes at time to really drive innovations through. And so don't give up just because somebody says, No,
Aaron Moncur:I love the word persistence that you used. I think that earlier I asked, Is innovation reserved only for the cream of the crop, the most intelligent people out there? And I happen to think that success and innovation is much more about persistence than it is about brilliance. I think nine times out of 10, maybe 99 times out of 100 it's the persistent person, not not just the brilliant person that that wins out there. I know I've seen that over and over. I don't consider myself to be the most brilliant engineer, not by a long shot, actually, but one thing I do think I'm good at is being persistent. I can continue to attack a problem, and I've definitely seen successes there, where perhaps others who weren't as persistent would have failed.
Stephen Hinch:I love that. I think that's a great way to put it, and I'll also stress that part of that persistence is knowing how to get help from others, because, you know, the C suite says no, but you know this guy over here, and it sounds like he did that. It was a small group of people, and they tested probably a variety of of different formulas before they found some that really resonated with their demographic. But, but trying to get that that, and it's small group of people, I another thing I really stress is never put a person on an innovation project that doesn't want to be there. If you're only putting him there because he's a mechanical engineer, they need a mechanical engineer go help him out, and he doesn't want to do it. That's a recipe for failure, but so good. Okay,
Aaron Moncur:I think that's another really important, important point that you make, that innovative projects are best staffed by people who are passionate about them. And I think I'd love to hear your your feedback on this, but I think the reason for that. Is that innovation requires a lot of upfront time, and often more time than the standard 40 hour work week can afford. And so it's typically the teams who are willing to put in extra time that they're not necessarily getting paid for, at least not up front. It's those teams, I think it's really required for a lot of innovative technologies. It's just it requires more time than than the the market at that point can afford. So people have to just spend extra time to get it going, probably not 100% of the time. For a large organization with lots of resources, maybe not so much, but for smaller organizations, I I think that's true. What? What are your feelings on that?
Stephen Hinch:I completely agree with that, which is why, you know, if you look at startup companies, they don't work 40 hour weeks. Yeah, they work 80 hour weeks, and they're not getting paid for 80 hours, but they love what they're doing, or they see that there's a really good future for it. And I don't think most of those people will say that they're in this because they want to be millionaires down the road, or they're going to get multi millionaire stock option kind of stuff. They do it because they're really enthusiastic. They have this great idea. They want to prove that it really will work, and they're willing to put the time into it to make it successful. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, that comes down to purpose, right? Do you have a compelling purpose for why you're doing something? And if you do, boy, that sure is a much greater motivator than just a paycheck, right? That's right, all right. Well, let's see. We talked a little bit about how large organizations sometimes can struggle with innovation because they aren't willing to provide the time and resources for a new, disruptive idea to really take hold. How can a company know if they've sort of slipped into unknowingly The Curse of the corporate business model. What are some of the warning signs?
Stephen Hinch:Okay, so let's talk about what the curse of the corporate business model is. I classify it as sort of three things. And again, I'll pull up the book somewhere. I've got it here. So the first thing about the curse of the corporate business model is that in large corporations, multinational corporations, and we sort of mentioned this, investors measure the success of the company based on how well they're doing to deliver this month's profits and growth and disruptive innovations that take a year or two or more to pan out aren't consistent with having to deliver results this month or this quarter. Now there is a way around it. I'll get to that in a minute, but that's the first thing. The second thing is that the managers in a large corporation don't see the rewards being worth the risk. Now, what I mean there is that in a small startup, if you innovate successfully, and that the startup goes IPO or gets bought out, you can become a multimillionaire. Doesn't happen very often, but at least it can. But in a corporation, if you're a leader that drives innovation successfully, you may get a few 100 stock options. You may get a promotion. But if that innovative idea doesn't pan out and you lose some money on it, your career is permanently damaged. And so a lot of managers in the corporate world don't feel like they want to take that risk, particularly since typically there's no penalty for not taking it in the corporate world, you're not being measured by how much risk you're taking. You're being measured by Did you deliver this month's results and and the third part of the this curse of the corporate business model is that a lot of the managers that are in large corporations are less prone to take risk anyway than the people that are in the small startups, because, because of all of what I said there, and if, if you were in as large company, and you love taking risks, and you're not getting the opportunity to do so, you're going to leave that that corporate environment and Go start your own company. So, so those are the curse of the corporate business model and why. You know, think of of companies that are not successful or haven't been successful. Do you remember a company called Smith Coronavirus? They used to make typewriters back in the day? Before word processing. You never hear about them anymore, but they were one of the prime manufacturers of typewriters, palm you know, they didn't switch to the the smartphone as the market evolved. And so your question about, How do I I know when a company is victim of the curse of the corporate business model is because they're going down the tube. They're not continuing to grow. They're not going after those new markets and and sort of, it's sort of by the time you discover that it's too late, usually to fix things, they're still trying to make a better steam engine. They're still trying to make a better steam engine. Great point. Yes,
Aaron Moncur:I love that analogy that just it illustrates so clearly for me. I'm not sure I've heard it explained so clearly before. So I was going to stick with me.
Stephen Hinch:I actually spoke with and there's a professor at the University of Kennesaw that wrote his whole master's thesis, or PhD dissertation on the transition from steam to diesel. And so I picked his brain, and he helped me with the chapter I wrote on that, because I didn't know what I mean. I knew that steam engines were no longer around anymore, but I didn't know all of the story behind it. It's really an enlightening story. There were steps all along the way for about 20 years where any of those steam locomotive manufacturers, if they'd just taken the right step, they could have been still the leaders, but none of them did that.
Aaron Moncur:Do you know Clayton Christensen? Oh, yeah. Okay, so his book, and Christensen, right? Yes, I can't remember the exact title of the book, The Innovators Dilemma, or disruptors, something like that. But he talked about something similar, where hard drive companies, right were, were disrupted by by solid state drives, and yes, and how they couldn't really catch that
Stephen Hinch:was another good example. And I I figured he'd already did that one. He had also used an example, I think, in the same book about steam shovels being replaced by diesel shovels. So I didn't want to rehash those examples in my book. And I thought, Well, why didn't he talk about steam locomotives? That seemed like a perfect example, but since he hadn't talked about it, I thought I would Terrific. Well,
Aaron Moncur:I'm glad you did. Let's talk about AI a little bit. AI is just, you know, it's, it's the the next huge thing and has the potential to really revolutionize not just the way that we work, but the way that we we live, and in some cases already, is how, how should engineering manufacturing technology companies be be utilizing AI and and how are some companies Maybe misusing it?
Stephen Hinch:So a couple of points here. First is there's a lot of hype around AI that is probably being promoted more by people that want to make a lot of money off of it, as opposed to by the fact that it's really going to help in certain areas. So you got to be careful about that. But I do believe it really has a place, but you've sort of got to learn to walk before you can run, kind of thing you can't use AI yet to come up with the next disruptive innovation. AI from what I can tell and what I've seen and how I've talked with people that use it, it can be very effective at some of the lower level kinds of analysis of data, of being able to track things that are going on at sort of a regular level, and this stuff that if it does something wrong, it's not going to drive your company to bankruptcy. I, you know, I still do a lot of work, consulting, work for Team logic, it, and one of the key things that that we do for our customers is we're continually monitoring their IT networks, and immediately detecting if something is wrong, if you know if a server goes down or if There's malware coming in. The idea is that we're we're running software on their network that tracks this and and can immediately notify us that there's a problem. Now, five years ago, that meant that a technician funding in front of a screen was getting a notice. Has said there's something going on with the server. You better check into it. Now. AI can look at these kinds of things and immediately say, Okay, here's what's going on. This is what I need to do to fix it. And they don't ever have to even involve a technician for routine stuff. And if it's something that is not routine, then the AI process can escalate it so that that's the kind of stuff that the real technician needs to work on. But AI can eliminate what used to be a real time sink. I used to have three first level technicians sitting in front of screens all the time just watching all of my clients networks to figure out what needed to be fixed or if something was haywire was going on, and now a lot of that can be done automatically. So that's a good way of using AI in a way that is effective in now. Now I can't say that I know how a company like HP, in their R D environment is using AI. I mean, you know AI is good at writing software, but it's not great at writing software code without bugs in it. So you can generally use AI to give yourself a first draft of code to do something, but then you've got to have a an engineer look through it and make sure that it's it is really doing everything that you think it is, without a bunch of of gaps or, you know, things left open, where hackers can break in, that kind of thing. So AI is still good at the lower level stuff, and maybe in future years, it'll be better at moving up in the food chain to hire in the environment. But I don't think it's there yet.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, agreed. I use it a lot, because I do a lot of marketing and sales and writing and communication, and it's great for that, but it's not going to develop a new CAD model for the machine that we're trying to design right now, not
Stephen Hinch:yet. That's right, yep. And my son is the chief technology officer of a a little bit more than a startup now in in the AI area, they're providing, he lives in in England, and they're providing a AI technology for the European banking industry, which is, you know, you gotta be careful there Up in the banking industry, and he says, we're very careful about what we do use AI for. In fact, the European Union refuses to let him use any kind of AI where the large language models are stored in the United States. Oh, interesting, because they don't trust that the protection, security protection is there. So he's had to set up his own large language model in Amazon Web Services that that allows him to provide services that he would not otherwise be able to provide.
Aaron Moncur:Well, let's see, Steve, let's let's do just a couple more questions here, and then we'll wrap things up for engineers who want to move into leadership, what are some things that they should start doing now to build a innovation focused career? So
Stephen Hinch:it's easy for engineers just focus on whatever code they're being asked to write right now, or whatever circuit design they're supposed to do. And, you know, just keep their head down and and do what they're being asked to do. If you want to move higher into the organization, into leadership roles, you've got to think beyond that. You've got to understand what is this business that I'm in? Try to understand how the leaders of that business are thinking and where they set their priorities and and sort of understand why are they doing it this way? And have discussions with them. You got to be a little careful about that, because not every manager is comfortable with that kind of thing. He's going to feel like, why are you questioning me about the decision I made? But a lot of them, they'll love to see an engineer, first level, kind of individual contributor who is showing more interest in what the business is all about, because they know that those are the kind of people that will have the innovative ideas that can drive that that that business even further, so that that's really important understand the business. And then, as I did, understand not just R and D. Strategy, but learn about what is it like to be in marketing. It doesn't mean you have to move into marketing. You can work closely with the R and D, the marketing counterparts that are launching the products that you're inventing, but But learn more about the whole business than just the part that you're in. I think those are a couple of key points that engineers just getting into their career should understand.
Aaron Moncur:I really like your point about understanding the business because, you know, businesses aren't don't exist to do engineering or to do manufacturing or even to do innovation, businesses exist to make a profit, and that's the only way the business can remain in business and employ all the wonderful engineers and others who work there in and so for engineers to understand the business, it really just allows them to contribute in a much more meaningful way to the purpose of the business. I know that we've had engineers on our team in the past that had been just wonderful, wonderful human beings. I've loved working with them, but ultimately they they couldn't do the work effectively enough for the company to be profitable on their time. And, you know, those engineers, they don't, they don't last long term. That's right. So understanding the business what, what the business needs, and how your your direct contributions, can support and facilitate those business outcomes is just it's huge, and
Stephen Hinch:that's especially important in today's climate, where things are changing rapidly. And the knowledge that you have today and the understanding of how to do things today may not be sufficient for three or four or five years down the road, you know, the more AI comes in, or maybe there'll be some other new Hot Topic three years from now that you need to stay aware of how business is evolving and what it takes to stay relevant as markets are evolving as well. Yeah.
Aaron Moncur:Well, Steve, last question I have for you, what is one thing that you've done or seen to accelerate the speed of engineering,
Stephen Hinch:the thing that I've done is in a leadership role, not as an engineer. In a leadership role, my job is creating an environment that makes the engineers feel like they are supported and that they have the authority to do what they think is right. That may not be what I think I would have done if I was in their shoe, but I give them the flexibility to do things the way they think is right. And that doesn't mean it'll work out all the time. Sometimes it'll it'll not work out, but that'll be a learning experience for both of us, and it'll make them better engineers in the future, if they are feeling like they have the flexibility to do things the way they want to, as opposed to only doing things the way I'm telling them to do, any
Aaron Moncur:tactical recommendations that you can share, or specific practices that you've implemented to create that environment where engineers feel safe to safe and empowered to do the right things.
Stephen Hinch:So again, it sort of my role as the manager is not to be the best engineer my manager, my job is to give them that environment. And so a lot of my job is to work with higher management to keep those higher managers out of the way so that my engineers can do what they need to do. And so I'll a lot i in the book, I give an example where I needed to give my engineers time to invent something new before top management shut us down. And so I spent close to a year where pretty much all my job was putting together financial forecasts and order forecasts that said this is what we're going to do, and this is why you should need to keep us open long enough for those engineers. So the engineers were happy I was not telling them what to do, but I was keeping the higher management off of their their necks, and so that buffer between higher management and the engineers doing the work is a key thing that a good manager should be able to
Aaron Moncur:do. That's a great example. I bet not many people would think of something like that, just the fact that that's a necessary and critical part of the business. But great example. Thank you for sharing that. Well, Steve, this has been delightful. How can people get in touch with you?
Stephen Hinch:So I've got a website. It's. Is www, dot Steven, S, T, E, P, H, E N, hyphen, W, hyphen, Hinch, h, i n, C, h.com, and the publishing company also has a website, atenara.com a T, E N, E R, a.com either of those two websites are easy ways to get a hold of me. I also have a a LinkedIn page. You can search me on LinkedIn and and communicate with me that way. And I'm happy to have conversations and answer any kind of questions, give any kind of coaching advice that people may have
Aaron Moncur:awesome, awesome. Well, we will include those links in the show notes. And Steve, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. What a fun conversation this has been. You just have a plethora of experience and wisdom, and thank you for contributing to this body of knowledge and the being an engineer podcast and and sharing all of that experience wisdom
Stephen Hinch:with us. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team with expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You.
