Don't Stop Talking

January 12, 2011

 

Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.  This blog is part of Microwave Journal's guest blog series.

To comment or ask Sherry a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

 

I can’t remember at which airport I was when I read this USA Today headline: “The Year We Stopped Talking.”

And without reading anything more, I knew the article had to be about social media, texting and the many wonderful wireless gadgets that have become necessary to our survival in the 21^st century. We have certainly moved away from voice as the primary means of exchanging information and replaced it with text messaging. While I accept that we have become a world of ‘thumb’ and ‘touch screen’ typists, I can’t agree that we don’t need to communicate by voice as well, whether via skype, cell, or even the old fashion way...face to face.

Yes!  Face to face. This personal interaction is important for our industry. I recently attended APMC in Japan last month and experienced first-hand the value of one-on-one direct interaction. Not only did I engage in meaningful conversation with AWR customers from Panasonic to Murata but also with other partners, colleagues and coworkers on topics such as coupled thermal/electric co-simulation of MMICs, as well as PCB layout integration through ODB++ .

I also bumped into friends at R&S and Anritsu. The first traveled from Germany and the latter from California. We all agreed that getting personal time with our coworkers was critical to ensure we are communicating clearly and working toward our corporate goals. And just as important, exchanging experiences, information and stories with respect to “emerging” technologies and trends seem much more effective in person. For example, connecting companies such as R&S, Anritsu, Mesuro and HFE with AWR in the emerging field of non-linear behavior modeling ensures we all stayed plugged into the latest and greatest developments.

Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, also agrees on this topic and reminds us that technology can be turned off. "We've come to confuse continual connectivity with making real connections," Turkle says. "We're 'always on' to everyone. When you actually look more closely, in some ways we've lost the time for the conversations that count."

To further make my point, consider these statistics: according to a semi-annual wireless survey released in October by CTIA-The Wireless Association, 93% of Americans now use a wireless device or cellphone — and not just for voice calls.  From June 2009 to June 2010, subscribers sent 1.8 trillion text messages (up 33% from the previous year) and 56.3 billion multimedia messages (up 187% from the year before).

But short of sharing insights and getting answers to questions, face to face time allows other personal connections to happen and free-form dialogue to emerge. How else would I learn some of you out there enjoy reading my blog! So thank you MWJ for asking me back as a blogger during APMC and our face to face dinner meeting.

Here’s to more face time within the RF & Microwave community in 2011 and not less.

The New Company Culture—Play vs. Pay

June 12, 2010

 

Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Sherry a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

 

Well, another IMS has come and gone, and once again we survived the chaos of getting ready and then pulled off a fantastic show. While wandering the show floor and perusing other exhibitors’ booths, I couldn't help but notice a clear divide between booth personnel who looked happy and excited and those who looked a bit disconnected, and yes, even bored. Then after I returned to the office I coincidentally viewed two interesting videos, one on YouTube and one on 60 Minutes –thank you Mom & Dad for making me watch this over the years- that gave me one possible answer.

The first clip on YouTube was from Innovation Daily: RSA Animate — Drive: Dan Pink and the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.  A very clever animated cartoon presentation that was indeed surprising, it discussed irrefutable evidence that workers are motivated not, as you would think, by more money or pay, but instead by the sheer pleasure of creating or working on something meaningful that receives positive feedback. The typical motivation scheme within organizations is to reward performance with a monetary incentive. Tests have found that once cognitive skill/ conceptual creative thinking comes into play, a larger reward led to poorer performance!  Studies have found that if you pay people enough so that money is not an issue, three factors lead to better performance and personal satisfaction: autonomy or desire to be self-directed, mastery—the urge to get better at stuff, and sense of purpose.

So why are there people in the world who have jobs and get paid, but do the same thing during their limited discretionary time for free? Examples: Linux, Apache, Wikipedia. More and more corporations are operating with a transcendent purpose, and that makes coming to work better for employees, and also attracts more talented workers. Conversely, when profit motive separates from incentive motive, bad things happen. Not only bad ethics, but bad products and services, uninspiring place to work, people don’t do great things. Companies that are flourishing today are animated by a sense of purpose.

Interesting. Hmm. Could that be why some folks at IMS were busy, excited, smiling and engaged with others while some were disengaged, mopey even, and unhappy looking?  Is it the difference between a job/paycheck and a job/passion?

Then, a couple days later, I watched 60 Minutes, which did a segment on the online shoe company, Zappos. (Believe it or not, I have yet to purchase shoes on this site…for those who know me, I like shoes :-) so this doesn’t compute.)  I digress.  Anyway, the theme of the segment was that Zappos is an unusual company with an unusual business model—they are constantly trying to find ways to improve on employee happiness, fully believing that employee happiness leads to customer happiness and investor/shareholder happiness.

Tony Hsieh, Zappos' CEO, has even written a book: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. Zappos believes that focusing on company culture will enable them to provide great service, which will lead to financial success down the road. Clearly, Zappos has bought into, and successfully implemented, the same concepts outlined in Dan Pink’s presentation: a company culture focused on employee happiness results in a company that has passion and purpose, and that will ultimately lead to profits.

 

 

Both of these video segments, coupled with my own exhausting but highly enjoyable experience at IMS, led me to conclude there is indeed a lot to be said for job happiness.  And once again for those who know me or have read my blogs in the past, I’ve found a company and job that delivers happiness to me and hopefully I deliver some of it back!  Now, let me log in to www.zappos.com to celebrate!

Seeds of Change

May 25, 2010

 

Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Sherry a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

 

AWR’s current ad, “Ideas Grow Faster in the Right Environment” graces the front of our 2010 AWR Magazine (6mb PDF) this month. There are many interpretations stemming from this visual (pun intended) that can be explored. But for now and for the purpose of this blog, the sprout portrays AWR’s corporate culture: innovation, spawning new ideas, the right environment for creativity, growth into new markets, seeds of change…

Rather than recreate that cover story here, I invite you to download the magazine online and read it for yourself. Instead, in this blog I’m going to sprout out in another direction.  .. academia and university outreach. 

AWR recently gave root to a new growth opportunity for our software in the academic community. At the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) Annual Conference in Florida this past March, I announced in my ECEDHA Perspectives interview AWR’s Graduate Gift Initiative, which provides qualified* 2010 graduates a free, fully-functional, one-year term license of  Microwave Office and Visual System Simulator (VSS) software suites - inclusive of AXIEM 3D planar EM software. The goal of the initiative is to give graduating electrical engineering students a career head start by providing hands-on exposure to AWR's high-frequency design software.

This initiative is a follow on to our Preferred University Program, which works with universities worldwide to provide students with access to RF/microwave software tools. These programs have been launched  in direct response to industry and academia expressing the need for students to have hands-on experience with these tools prior to graduating and entering the job market.

And, most recently, AWR has announced the donation of free licenses of our software as the prize award to the winners of the IMS/MTT 2010 Power Amplifier Student Design Contest.

What better way to sow seeds of change and spawn the growth of new ideas, new engineers, new technologies, etc. than to enrich the academic environment by providing the software engineering students need to learn and grow from the classroom and into their first job? Our students of today are the future of the industry—we need to empower them with the best and latest tools so they are prepared to flourish.

What About Bunny?

March 11, 2010

 

Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Sherry a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

 

Yeah, what about Bunny? Early in February, I attended DesignCon 2010, and, aside from having a number of really great meetings with customers, partners, and media, I was curious if there would be a return of Bunny. As all of you who attended DesignCon 2009 will remember, Bunny was the talk of the show (for better or worse is a personal judgement call).

No Bunny at DesignCon this year, but following Altium’s lead at taking a risk by trying something new, AWR exhibited for the first time this year as a partner within the Anritsu booth. DesignCon 2010 proved to be a successful venture. We exhibited our AWR Connected™ solutions with Anritsu, and our unique joint solution for signal integrity that combines Anritsu¹s VectorStar test equipment with AWR's Microwave Offic® high-frequency design software. The value of this combination is that Microwave Office adds functionality above and beyond what can be done with the hardware itself – in particular adding to S-parameter measurements the ability to visualize eye diagrams and time domain simulation results- and this is especially useful in signal integrity applications. AWR Connected™ for Anritsu makes the MS4640A the first microwave instrument in the world to physically integrate a full suite of design software within its firmware. You can see AWR’s DesignCon 2010 video interview as well as a demo of this solution on AWR.TV.

Also at this show, for those of you with keen vision, you would have noticed a yet-to- be-released link to Cadence Allegro.This new capability enables Allegro/APD users to export their layout (or portion thereof) into Microwave Office. And last but not least, AWR’s industry expert on EM, Dr. John Dunn, presented a three-hour tutorial entitled The Use of Computer Clusters and Spectral and Domain Decomposition in 3D FEM Analysis. The year prior, John presented a tutorial called Understanding Grounding Concepts in EM Simulators that was a big hit with the audience and has since been turned into an extremely popular white paper and a 6-part EM tutorial on AWR TV. Stay tuned for more on the 3D FEM analysis tutorial!

“What about Bunny” was the take-away line from DesignCon 2009 for me. This year it was certainly all… “What about AWR!”

Is Your Business Socially Useless?

February 3, 2010

 

Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Sherry a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

 

Dane Collins, our CEO, recently sent me a link to a thought-provoking blog by Umair Haque on the Harvard Business Review website. The headline boldly asks, "Is Your Business Useless?"

Before I read the first word, I knew I'd likely smile as I read through it.  Having spent nearly my entire career in high-frequency (HF) EDA, I was already willing to admit that this industry isn't overtly socially friendly.  I mean, we are largely a group of engineers whose typical stereotype is introverted, so stepping out into the spotlight to draw attention to ourselves, and, on top of that, to make a point of being "socially useful".... this was going to be good.

Nonetheless,  I read it.  Interesting points:

• Socially useless business has a cost - just in the last five years -  $12 trillion in bailout packages for socially useless banks alone 
• Socially useless business is what has created a global economy on life support 
• Socially useless business is what has created a jobless "recovery" and is why we don't have a better education, healthcare, finance, energy, transportation, or media industry

Okay Mr. Haque, how do you really feel? 

He continues, "How is it that socially useless business is to blame for this adverse affect on our society? Socially useless business is the status quo — and the status quo says: 'You don't matter. Our bottom line is the only thing that matters.' "

This is a tough dose of his reality to swallow, but does it have merit in HF EDA--or high-tech in general for that matter?  If we look at recent technology products that have succeeded, Apple's iPhone/iPod, Nintendo Wii, and Google Search all come to my mind.  Somewhere in here, these technologies and tools tapped into the value of being socially useful to the population at large.  By using these appliances, we find ourselves more productive in life or enjoying our free time more, or even using them as ways to be more social?

I doubt this is a winning strategy in and of itself (build a better mousetrap) but the way a product or service can connect with a user or consumer and make the experience personal or emotional is timeless.  Maybe today the "socially useless" tagline makes the HBR post seem more hip or current but the emotional appeal has worked for many years to build brand loyalty, from Walt Disney to Coke and Pepsi and hundreds more examples I'm not listing here.

In my own experiences within the world of EDA, I have to say that AWR is one of the few places I've worked that encourages its employees to have a sense of self and personality that isn’t constrained by the corporate logo but actually defines the brand.   Starting the blog on MWJ site was a step into the e-social fabric for me and for AWR... and an experiment that I believe has been a success for the company by enabling us to connect more with our customers and with the larger community of users out there, and to open up a dialogue to figure out how our company and its tools can improve society (our society of users).

AWR has always been customer focused. It’s the reason Joe Pekarek founded the company in the first place. Since the economy began shrinking nearly two years ago now, everyone at AWR has stepped up their commitment to the corporate mission of improving the productivity of our HF customer base --if there's one thing we understand, its that in order for AWR to be successful, our customers have to be successful.  AWR's philosophy is the polar opposite of the socially useless business. Our culture is focused on ensuring that customers know they DO matter, and that we fully understand that our bottom line depends on their success. 

Haque says that socially useless business is built on shoddy, poor economics, and like most things too good to be true, it rarely lasts for long. Socially useless businesses are living on borrowed time. The new order is "constructive capitalism." Constructive Capitalists are better businesses. They've learned how to create value that's socially useful. They are doing things that matter to people, communities, and society. 

So, the question big business and small start-ups alike should be asking themselves these days is, "How useless is my business?"