Embedded - 509: Swarmed by Engineers

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Steve Hinch wrote a book about engineering, innovation, and business. He shares decades of wisdom gleaned from his career at Hewlett-Packard and Agilent as an engineer, manager, marketing director, and general manager.  Steve’s book is Winning through Innovation: Lessons from the Front Lines of Business. While mostly retired, Steve is an executive consultant, see his website to get in touch: Stephen W. Hinch.   We also touched on some of Steve’s nature and hiking volumes as well.  While Elecia is reading My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir | Project Gutenberg, Steve suggested works by Edward Abbey might be of interest.  Elecia and Steve both received copies of Bill Packard’s The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company while at HP. Transcript                         Mouser Electronics has a dedicated Empowering Innovation Together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is reshaping engineering—from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance. You’ll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you’re ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysio White, here with Christopher White. Our guest this week is Steve Hinch. And we're going to be talking about writing a book, being at HP for quite a while, maybe some hiking, maybe some Harvey Mudd stuff. We'll see. It'll be fun. Hi, Steve. Welcome. Thanks, thanks, Chris, Alicia. Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at the Harvey Mudd alumni table? Jeez. Sure. So I'm Steve Hinch.

I have spent my whole career in high tech. I graduated, as you know, from Harvey Mudd College with bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering. And I joined Hewlett Packard right out of college. I worked at HP and its spinoff company, Agilent Technologies for a total of about 35 years, first in manufacturing engineering, then I led a research and development department. Near the midpoint of my career, I moved into marketing as the division marketing manager for a $300 million a year business, and then took on the role of general manager for an entire business. But then I realized I wanted to be a CEO of a whole

company. And that was never going to happen at Agilent. So I took an early retirement package so I can start my own company. But I didn't want to start a company totally from scratch. So I decided to go the route of buying a franchise of a national company. And so I opened the Santa Rosa franchise of Team Logic IT, a company that provides IT support for businesses throughout the nation. That gave me the chance to be the CEO of my own company, but take advantage of proven business processes that were already developed by that franchise network. Now, I sold that business after six years, and I've served as a consultant to the high tech industry ever since. And you've written a book? And I've written books. Yes, we'll talk about that at some point. All right. We are going to do

lightning round, and we'll ask you short questions, and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't say, like, are you sure? And in what year did that happen? Are you ready? I think so. Which Harvey Muddorm was your favorite? Well, I lived in West Dorm all four years, which makes me sort of weird. We were all sort of weird wherever we were. Which HP division did you start with? It was called Santa Rosa division at the time. It's had a number of changes in names since then, and it's now KeySight Technology. I actually retired before it became KeySight Technology, but I've lived in Santa Rosa the whole time. Which Agilent Division did you leave from?

So I was the general manager of my own division called Digital Communications, Digital Communications Test Division. That division doesn't exist anymore, but it did at the time I retired. Was that the big network high-speed test gear and things like that? It was a smaller portion of that. It was actually broken out as a separate division primarily for high-speed fiber-optic telecommunication test instruments. I'm sure we use some of that in various places I would say. Favorite plant of Sonoma County. Favorite plant of Sonoma County.

I like the California poppies. Do you have a secret hike or just place to visit in nature up in the Sonoma County? It's called the Cortima Trail along the Sonoma Coast from a place called Shell Beach up to Goat Rock. Do you prefer to complete one project or start a dozen? Well, I prefer to complete one, but that's much easier to do if I start several. Interesting way to look at that. Yes. Favorite fictional robot? Data from Star Trek Next Generation. Do you have a tip everyone should know?

Yeah, here's a tip that I always tell to new managers to keep in mind. No job is ever too hard for the person that doesn't have to do it. That's so true. I've fallen into that, and I've been a victim of it, too. Yeah. Before we get back today's discussion, I want to share a new resource for anyone curious about the rise of AI in engineering. Mouser Electronics has a dedicated empowering innovation together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is re-shaping engineering, from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance.

You'll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you're ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to mauser.com slash empowering dash innovation. Now, let's get back to the show. Okay, enough with the lightning round. We met when you were leading a team to do interviews at HP for summer internships and new hires. Yep. And I was shortly out of college at that time. And when I first got to HP, they gave me a book called The HP Way by Bill Packard.

Yep. Do you know the book? Do you remember much of it? I have that book right on my bookshelf right behind me, and along with one other book called Bill and Dave that was written by somebody else. But yeah, those books, in fact, my experience at HP has really shaped my career. And I have to say, when I started at HP, it was still run by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Not for too many years, but they really showed me what it takes.

to run a company well. And even after they retired, they were still the majority owners. So they still saw to it that it was run the way that they would have done when they were still leading it. And, you know, it was really not until they divested their majority ownership near the time of their death that things really changed. And, you know, it split into HP and Agilent. And that was really when HP, you know, they hired this new CEO. the lady that will not be named, that caused it to go downhill. Unfortunately, by then, I was with Agilent Technologies, so I missed the brunt of that disaster. But I have always tried to bring the management philosophy that I learned from Bill and Dave to my job,

which has not always endeared me to my superiors. A lot of their philosophy was about enabling people to do their work and making sure that they were well-carriage. for it. I don't know many HP folks who faced burnout as badly as I did after I left. That's certainly true. I mean, it was a challenge. You know, when I first joined HP, it had such a high reputation that I felt I was not able to live up to the standards that everybody had. So that was certainly a stress for me until I discovered that everybody wasn't necessarily as good as they thought they were, and I was as good as a lot of them. How did their management style shape your own management style?

It had to do with, you know, we talk about that there's this myth that was even at the time that I was there, that HP was a forever company. You know, you join the company, and as long as you're not completely scrubs, screwing things up and doing things illegally or whatever, that you had a job for life. That was never really true. Even when I started, Bill and Dave had done layoffs at least a couple of times as far back to the 1960s, but it was only in the sales organizations. So those of us in the division never really noticed that.

And so Bill and Dave ran the company so that it was profitable, but it was also a company that employees wanted to work for because they knew they were going to be supported. And as long as they were delivering results, they were going to have a job. And that certainly changed after Bill and Dave left. But that's a problem with a lot of companies as well. So, you know, it's not unique to HP. No, no, it's not unique to HP. In fact, it seems like none of them are unique to that.

Like, at HP, when I was there, which wasn't that long. I thought you were going to say it wasn't that long ago. Oh, it was forever ago. But I had training, I had good mentoring, I had specific mentors. I was encouraged to continue my education and given time and money to do so. I was allowed to talk to different people in the company and switch over from giant servers to wet biology. It was a for-life company. And are there any for-life companies now, or is it all just profit margins and burning people out?

Yeah, that's a really good question that the whole world is struggling with right now. And here's what I see the problem is. In the U.S., Supreme Court decisions, as far back as I think the 1970s, have ruled that a public company's responsibility is to manage the business in the best interest. of its investors. And so if the C-suite is making decisions that are not in the best interest of investors, they are not doing what's in the best interest of the company, according to the Supreme Court. So if laying off employees is seen to deliver better results for investors, that's what management does. But there are two problems with that.

First, the legal definition of investors is limited to shareholders who, invest money in the company. But according to industry research, the average shareholder only holds stock in a company for, I think, less than six months. And that means the shareholder only cares about company results for the next quarter or two. They don't care whether the company mortgages their long-term future to deliver those short-term results, because they won't be around by then to worry about it. Second, companies should realize that employees are investors in the company, too. They may not invest money, but they invest their time. And employees have far more interest in the long-term status of the company because they will be around, hopefully, for longer than the typical

shareholder. And companies don't recognize that, so they don't really treat employees the same way they treat investors who have put money into the company. And I don't have a good way to change that. I know that there are a few companies that take the approach of including employees as shareholders, as owners of the company. But I haven't seen enough results from those companies to know how well that works. But that's what I see the big problem is, is too many companies have too limited of view of who the, quote, investors in their company really are. That's a very different perspective and useful to think about why is a company behaving this way

and who they view their shareholders are. It helps to frame that to figure out the actions. Yeah, it's really something that, you know, the leaders of the company do it this way because it's the old story of you do what you're measured on and they're being measured on short-term results until that gets changed. And that's one of the big differences with, you know, a company like HP back when Bill and Dave, ran it is they didn't have to worry about short-term results. Right.

And another example, Michael Dell took Dell private for that same reason. It had been a public company. He took it private because he didn't want to have to worry about just the next quarter of results. He wanted to make it a more focused on the longer term future. And he couldn't do that as a publicly held company. Now, I think they've gone back to be in a publicly held company. Now, I haven't followed that.

But that was a couple of, I was really impressed with Michael Dell when he did that back, what, a couple of decades ago, I think. You said you were a general manager of a division. And I'm not sure if folks understand that that basically is CEO of a small company. Or maybe mid-sized company. How many people did you have in your division? So that's, it changed because I took over just as the recessions were coming on board. So I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but I was hired on as the general manager of this business. and the day that my boss hired me, he told me, Steve, your first job is to lay off half of your marketing department.

Oh. Oh. I was like, can't you do that for me before I get there? Yeah, right. Can't I be the good guy? And, you know, what I was able to do, you know, I talked with my team. I was responsible for marketing, R&D manufacturing, and the only thing I was not, specifically responsible for was the sales team. The sales teams were

managed totally separately. So I had the whole rest of what a division runs. And we were able, because we had good people that we were going to have to lay off. We were able to find jobs elsewhere in Agilent Technologies for about half the people that we otherwise would have had layoff. But that still you know, we had to lay off like 20 people. Sort of maybe a better question than how many people did I have, which was, I'm not sure I can

exactly answer that. It was about a $50 million a year company when I took it over, and in three years, my team and I grew it to about $100 million a year in business. That is probably a better answer, yes. Okay. Marketing and sales. And I'm sorry, because I know you did come after engineering through marketing, but I can't imagine you haven't heard this before, that HP would market sushi as cold dead fish. Oh, yeah. Can you explain why people say that and how offensive it is? Is it offensive? Well, it was probably true back in the HP days.

And I actually, I don't actually use that term in my book, but I talk about the early days of HP when it was a test and measurement company. And the claim to fame that I think maybe Bill Hewlett even wrote about in his book was when they needed to figure out what new product to invent. They didn't go out and talk to customers. They went and talked to the engineer at the next bench because whatever that engineer needed was going to be probably the same as what their real customers were going to need. And I remember Bill Hewlett talking about that in presentations when I was there. And they were proud of that fact. And that only worked for as long as the kind of customers that they were selling to were the same kind of customers as,

they were, are the same kind of people that were at the next bench in their R&D labs. And when they started getting into computers and printers, and they were still trying to use that same next bench syndrome, which is why the first computers from HP, I don't know whether they were well before your time, HP 150 was supposedly a, the HP version of the Microsoft. DOS computer, but it didn't run the software that Microsoft ran, I'm sorry, IBM, I'm getting I'm sorry, IBM PCs. It didn't run, it could not run the same software as the IBM PC ran because HP thought they could make it better because that's what their next bench engineers said. And once they started going out and talking to real customers and finding out what was important. The computer and printer divisions eventually realized they got a lot, they got to get a lot better at marketing. And that doesn't mean talking to somebody at the next bench. That means actually

going out and talking to real customers and finding out what's important to them. And so that was a real change in philosophy. And I can't say, you know, the test and measurement side of HP is now Kiside technology. And I can't say, you know, the test and measurement side of HP is now keyside technology. And I can't say, that that same trend is as prevalent in the key site test and measurement side. I think they still talk to the next bench engineers more than customers, but that's something that at least on the computer side of things they got better at. I mean, it wasn't bad marketing if you're a test and measurement company and you're really selling to the engineers who tend to appreciate the dry, accurate market.

marketing instead of the whizzy flashing. That's a really good point. To be fair, I'm looking at the HP 150, and there was a version of it called the HP touchscreen max, which sounds very 2025 Apple, but. It was a terrible touchscreen, but it was the first personal computer that had a touchscreen, so that was their claim to fame. And their marketing department, their sort of approach was, why would you want to want to buy an IPMPC that doesn't have a touchscreen when we have one that does,

well, because it can't run any of the programs that I want to run. And that probably all led to HPUX. Yep, it did, actually. Yep. Oh, boy. I remember having to translate something from Linux to, actually, I don't even know if it was Linux yet. It was before Linux to HPUX. Probably it was not before Linux.

Well, I remember the first HP computer I learned to program, used a programming language called HPL, which was nobody ever used it except HP, and I think I'm probably the only one that still knows how to program on it, but there are no computers around that run it anyway, so that's lost knowledge. I mean, there's a balance between building things and buying them, and it seems like maybe they should have bought a few more things. That's true. And, oh, boy, I tell you all sorts of stories. This may have nothing to do with it, but let me tell you the story anyway, because I think it's interesting. This is back in the time when I was, you know, I was in manufacturing engineering and I was actually head of the corporate manufacturing engineering. We were deploying a new printed circuit technology across the whole company called Surface Mount Technology. And this was back in the days when there was a big push toward improving reliability by reducing the number of components that you.

you had in your computers. And so this one division that I was working with made a big claim that we reduced the number of components in our computer by 300 components. And I asked them, how did they do that? Well, we took the power supply that we used to build ourselves and we subcontracted that out. So now that's only one component, not 300. But it's still got the same 300 components inside of But that was the objective that they were given. And so they were given kudos for doing that. So many bad decisions are based on fulfilling the letter of your requirements and ignoring the spirit of them. I've always tried to make sure that my team didn't do stupid things like that.

I mean, I can't even say that was stupid because it was probably a good idea to sub-com. contract that power supply out to a company that really knew what they were doing and were designing hundreds of thousands of power supplies per month or building that many. But just look at what you're doing as opposed to, boy, this is a way to reduce the component count, which is not what you're doing. But it was still a good decision. I don't question the decision just the way they framed it. Yeah. One of the privileges that I got at working at HP was getting to move over to the HP Labs area.

Oh, yeah. And it was an established central research laboratory to lead the development of disruptive innovations. Sort of like Xerox Park or? Yep. Okay. Yeah. Or the Bell Labs. Right.

Bell Labs was the analogy that we always used at the time. What are the advantages and disadvantages of having an established research lab like that? Yeah. So that's it. In my book, I talk about four ways to drive disruptive innovations. And that central research laboratory is the first one I use, because it's been around for a long time. In the old days, Bell Labs and HP Labs were really focused on innovative breakthroughs. You know, Bell Labs invented, you know, the laser, the digital telephone systems and all sorts of neat stuff that didn't necessarily, I think they even, you know, they've done stuff with astronomy and, and,

quasars and stuff that don't have necessarily any immediate obvious application for what was then the Bell Telephone Company, but it was really disruptive innovations that you never know whether they will turn into something good or not. And HP Labs was never quite as far out as Bell Labs was, but they still did things. When I was working on the digital communications analyzer, which was basically an oscilloscope that you can use to look at fiber optic signals instead of electric signals. Bell, I'm sorry, HP Labs was the place that invented the photo detectors, the high-speed photo detectors that we used. And they invented several other parts of the high-speed technology that was necessary for these 50-gHz oscilloscopes.

Today, the problem is that upper management expects to get more out of those laboratories quicker than they did in the past. And so the laboratories these days focus more on what can we invent that will have a fairly immediate impact on our bottom line within the next year or two. And so... That's not inventing. That's just developing. You can't invent on schedule. What they do is they actually contract with universities to do more of the fundamental research work. And the problem with that is that the universities can't do the kind of research that you can immediately hand over to a company and turn into something productive.

They can do stuff that breaks new ground but is years away from turning something into a profitable product for a company. And so there's this gap that has turned over the last probably 10 years, a gap that is how do you close what the universities do and turn that into something that companies can actually get value out of. and there's a bit of a gap. There's a fair amount of research that's been written about that gap, but nothing has really been done to close it yet. I took that question out of your book, which we've kind of danced around,

but you wrote a book recently called Winning Through Innovation. How do you define innovation and winning? Okay. So I have a, two-part definition of innovation. And I'm talking, now, we talk about innovation. Now, I'm talking specifically about innovation in the business world.

I'm not going to tell you how to innovate in the music industry or the art kind of stuff. It's business innovation. And my definition of innovation is it's the ability to see opportunity in places others do not and turn that vision into profitable reality. So there's two parts of it. The opportunity, which is the innovative idea, and then the ability to turn that into a profitable reality. Lots of people have innovative ideas that never go anywhere. And that's not going to help a company. If you can't turn that idea into something profitable, you're not going to be winning. So that's the winning part of it is, can you turn that innovative idea into something profitable for the company? It's true.

I've had several really good ideas lately. None of them, technology related, so they're all pretty silly. But there is a big black box to the profit. They're just ideas. Yeah. You know, I've written a whole book about it, and I have to admit, I don't tell you, I can't tell you how. how to come up with the innovative ideas because that's very unique to particular applications. But what I can do and what I do in the book is show you how to create an environment in your

company that allows innovation to flourish. Now, you're not ever going to be innovative or have innovative people if you're just telling to get the job done, don't worry about anything else, just produce what you need to this week or this month. So there's a whole culture that needs to change in order to create an environment that allows innovation to flourish not only coming up with the innovative ideas, but also what it takes to turn those innovative ideas into profitable reality. I'm thinking over my career the times when I've had ideas and taken them to bosses and good ideas and profitable ideas and bad ideas, it's the communication aspect of trying to, as an engineer, I don't always

know that this will ensure $50 million worth of profit. All I know is that it will help me get my job done a little faster. Yep. How do I get better at telling those around me that I need time to explore this idea? So it takes support from your management in order to do that, first of all. Let's talk about the different kinds of innovations. You know, different books talk about as many as 14 types of innovation. I've simplified it down to four types of innovation in the book. But focus for now just on two of them.

Incremental innovation and disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovation is where you're coming out with something brand new that brings something entirely different to the market that can blow away the existing leaders in that market. Incremental innovation is where you make small changes to products that make them better, but there's still the products that people are familiar with. Let me give you just a couple of quick examples of the two different types. incremental innovation. The automobile industry has been driven by incremental innovation for decades. Now, let's not talk about EVs. Let's just talk about gasoline powered.

You know, the cars that you buy today are better than the cars you bought 20 years ago because they've got improved anti-lock brakes and I crash opportunities or technologies and they have longer warranties than they used to. But they're still the same car. basically people are familiar with them. Here's an example of a disruptive innovation that I talked about in the book. The change in the locomotive industry

from steam-powered locomotives to diesel-powered locomotives was a disruptive change. And not a single manufacturer of steam locomotives survived that transition. So those are the two types of innovation that we can focus on for now. So the question is,

how do I instill an environment in my company that allows those to flourish? And let's talk about incremental innovation first. It'd be easier to allow that to flourish. Yes. When I was general manager, I always told my teams, I want you to take about two hours per week outside of your normal job. I mean, take, you know, you work in 40 hours a week. Take two of those hours, not necessarily.

together all two hours in one lump, but on average, two hours a week where you and maybe a small team of people that you're working with get together in an environment away from your desks and use that as time to talk about innovation. And it can be incremental ideas, how do I improve my process here, or how do I improve this product in some easy way? Or it can be, Here's a great idea for some brand new idea that is really disruptive, but you need to create an environment that allows people to do that in that two-hour window, which a lot of times the best discussions take place when people are gathered around a coffee pot at break time or they're sitting together at lunchtime talking about stuff and they're not getting interrupted by somebody that needs an immediate problem solved. or go off to a coffee shop somewhere and so you're not disrupted by immediacy and you can talk about innovative ideas in a conducive environment. So that's what I always encourage people to do. Now, they couldn't spend two hours every week, but they understood that I gave them the authority to do.

And a lot of managers won't do that. It's like you've got to get this production quantities out by Friday. Don't do anything except work on those. And that's not a way to encourage an invasive environment. You know, you can't take three days this week and just do nothing but innovation. But at least you've got to give them the authority and knowledge that it's, okay to spend some time and then bring those ideas to the managers for discussion. And you're not going to have all the answers. You're not going to know, will there be a $30 million or

your market for this? I don't know. But boss, can I at least spend a little bit of time finding out and doing some research? And if the boss says, we don't have time for this, that's not the way to encourage innovation. No. A lot of companies have maybe monthly or every couple of month hack days where, you know, okay, the whole company, whole engineering organization,

do whatever you want, and then we'll present the, you know, what you came up with next week or whatever, and sometimes they're competitive kind of things. Sometimes they're not. But do you think that's as effective as kind of putting in a culture of, you know, continuous, having some continuous times?

or not? It can be. I have to say that I don't have first-hand experience with companies that do hack days to know for sure. But the success, you don't want innovation to be just limited to, well, today's the hack day. I'm going to innovate, and then I'm not going to worry about innovation until the next hack day. That doesn't work very well. So that's one part is it needs to be part of the ongoing culture. And hack days can be part of that.

But if they're the only part of that, that's probably not going to work very well. The other thing that I stress is that those employees really need to understand what this company is all about, what the priorities of the senior leadership are. And that way, they can be putting their thoughts into innovative ideas. that support the company's objectives. If the employees don't understand what the company is all about and what's important to the senior leadership, then any innovative ideas they come up with are if they're valuable, it's just going to be due to blind luck.

So there's a whole process that you need to put in place to make sure that employees understand what the company is about, have the time to think about innovation, and then get support from the senior leader, leadership when they have innovative ideas that they want to explore some more. So there's sort of that three-part process. That requires a lot of transparency. It does.

And it requires that the senior leadership team, and I use senior leadership teams broadly, not just the C-suite, but, you know, second, third-level managers as well. need to understand that not every idea that employees come up with are going to pan out. But you need to give them the opportunity to see whether they pan out. And, you know, some of those ideas are going to fail. You know, Thomas Edison failed 3,000 times before he came up with the incandescent light bulb, but that didn't stop him. And he learned something about each one of those 3,000 times.

and the leaders of the company need to understand that that's likely, that it's okay, and that they need to be used as learning experience to how to make the next innovative idea more likely to succeed. Okay, so two hours a week for innovation plus or minus. What about education? Education is very important because that's part of innovation. Let me give you an example that's very relevant right now. Artificial intelligence, AI, is the buzzword throughout all of industry, and a lot of people don't really know what that means, but they're trying to figure out how to take advantage of AI.

and education is a critical part of that. There are ways that you can take courses on AI. You can go to conferences where AI is a major topic. And that kind of learning is essential. You're not going to be good at AI just the same way as, you know, a major league baseball player wasn't great the first time you ever tried to hit a bat or a ball with a bat. But, you know, the more you're trying to. practice, the more you learn, the better you're going to become at it. And you've got to give

the employees in your company the opportunity to learn and practice. And getting education is part of that. And maybe that's outside of the two hours. I wouldn't include that in the two hours, but I would include it as part of me developing my workforce so that they are relevant for the needs of my company in the future. That's not going to just happen automatically. The employees aren't necessarily going to know how to do that on their own. The leaders need to shape that, spell out what the employees need to know. And what I used to do is I would say, you know, these are the kind of things that are going to be important for our division in the future. but, you know, I didn't go to the employees saying, you need to learn this.

What I said is, you come to me with your proposals for what you'd want to learn. And if it's reasonable, if it's something that we're going to need in the future, and if I can economically afford it, and I would, you know, I would try to fund one class per year for every employee that wanted to do something, I would support it. But it would be up to the employees to be deciding what they want to do. Because if I tell them, go learn about AI and they're not at all interested in AI, that's going to be a waste of my time and their time. But if they come to me and say, hey, I really want to learn about this type of AI that I don't know whether it will be useful for us or not, but I won't know until I learn it. Good.

That's the kind of thing I'd support because they're all fired up about learning it. I'm going to ask a question. It's going to get me in trouble. Um, I don't feel like industry as constituted right now is working this way. I don't, I don't feel like there's a lot of conscientious companies, you know, conscientious toward their employees, toward their, you know, their place in society, whatever. I feel like we, we've shifted away from, you know, even away from the 90s kind of startup culture to a new culture where, it's sort of Wild West and everyone's, you know, mercenary.

Are people receptive to this kind of coming back to this? Or do you find this an uphill struggle to convince people of companies and management? It's, so let me give you sort of a roundabout answer to that. It certainly is not something that resonates with everybody. Yeah. And if you frame it as you've got to spend money to train people and the senior leader saying, well, we're trying to make profit this month in this quarter, so we don't have time to do that. That's a disconnect there. But if you frame it as this is going to be important for the company's future, this is an investment in the company's future, it's going to pay off.

And if leadership understands it as an investment that will make the company better in the future, that will work and does work, it's certainly easier to do, technically easier to do in a company that's privately held, although privately held companies sometimes the CEO or the owner of the company feels like they need to run everything themselves. and that's a different problem. But I think that it can work. But it won't work without the support of the senior leadership. And you're right, that companies, not every company will support that. Of course, if they did, you wouldn't have a podcast because they would already know what to do. You mentioned four types of innovation, and we've talked about incremental versus disruptive, but in your book you also talk about product versus process. Right.

So product innovation, you know, that's either the next new product or improvements to the existing product. And process innovation is not only how you build that product, that's one process, but it's all of the other processes in your organization, your financial processes, your HR processes, your sales processes. And, you know, when I was a production engineer out supporting production lines at HP, occasionally somebody from the production line would come over to me and say, you know, if we could just change this thing in the process, I could produce twice as many product in the same period of time. And I was the engineer. that was in charge of writing the processes for that production line.

And so I could go in and change it. And I would have never thought to do that if I hadn't heard from that person that was actually struggling out on the production line every day. And so process improvements can actually have more impact on the successful company than product improvements because, you know, the latest car from BMW is going to, The sports car from BMW is going to hit the press, and people are going to be impressed with it. But if you make a change to the process of building BMW automobiles, that's going to improve every automobile that goes through it, not just the fancy sports car. And so a process improvement can have lots of benefit beyond just what a new product innovation would do.

And I actually use an example of in Amazon in the book. where, you know, they came out with the Kindle Reader, and that product, in the first three years, they estimated Amazon doesn't publish it, but the industry analysts estimated that the Kindle Reader accounted for about $700 million worth of business for Amazon, which sounds great and was great. But Amazon almost without people knowing it, made changes to their process that allowed third, parties to come in and sell their products through, through Amazon. So Amazon didn't have to stock everything. And that, in the same three years, that change accounted for like almost 10 times as much as the Kindle reader. But that was a process change that nobody paid attention

to. And so that was another good example of where the processes, changes to processes can have much more value than new products, but you really need both. You can't just have processes and you don't have products to go through them. And that goes all the way down to the developer level. If you end up with a debugger that loads your code in one-tenth the time, that is worth it because it helps you do your job a lot faster. That debugger cost me $1,000. I'm not going to authorize that expense. That's so worth it. Yeah, that's right. Right. That's a great example. If only so that you don't get lost in doing something else

while you're trying to wait for your downloader. Anyway. Yep. I have a couple of listener questions. Are you ready? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead. This one's from Bill.

Many people have struggled with the shift from being an individual contributor to being a manager. And as a manager of a small team, Bill still needs to make technical contributions. He'd be interested in hearing how to navigate the move from the perspective of a manager of a manager. So I see to manager, how do... See, HP actually sent me to a class. I remember calling it manipulation for idiots, but I think it was like win-win negotiation

or something. No wonder they send it to you. You put it. End of conversation. No, no. Oh, boy. Yeah, so barring a class that Bill can go to and the support like I got at HP, how do you recommend folks go individual contributor to manager?

Yeah. So there's a couple of points there. When I first became a manager after being an engineer for about four years, and I was managing a team of engineers. And I was really struggling with it because, you know, I had gone to a bunch of management classes and I'd taken some stuff at Harvey Mudd. And I'd learned how to run a team in, we have an engineering clinic there. that I was a leader of a small team.

But I was still finding that there are a lot of challenges as a manager of a real business that I'd never learned how to do in my classwork. And so finally, after like four or five months, I went to my manager and explained all the challenges that I was having here. And he said, Steve, you need to understand this. You're going to learn a lot about management in classes, but you're not going to learn everything you need to know. So what you need to do is supplement that class learning with going to talk to more experienced managers that have already dealt with problems that you're dealing with now,

and they'll coach you what they did to solve the problems and give you insight from a real practical perspective of what you need to do, to become a better manager. So for me, that was real insight because I was sort of embarrassed to go talk to senior managers or more experienced managers because I was afraid that they would think I was incompetent. But they were all incompetent when they first became managers too. And they understood the challenges I was going through.

And they gave me a lot of insight. And I became a much better manager after I learned that there are people out there that have already gone through the experiences that I'm going through now. Now, I can talk to them, get advice, and that will help me get through these challenges better. Now, the other thing that I will say is, and I'm not sure whether Bill, this was particular for Bill, but a couple of times I have had jobs where I was a manager of people, but I was also an engineer expecting to, they expected me to do engineering work as well as managed people. That is the hardest job in the world to do because, you know, managers need to work with people and coach them and guide them so that they're successful. And if you're also trying to solve problems yourself, you don't have time to do that. So I would caution people against taking on a job where you're expected to manage like four or five people, but you're also expected to spend half your time doing engineering work.

that's going to be really hard for you to do one or the other and avoid those other jobs. I'm over here sobbing. I've done that twice. Twice? Three times? I don't know. Too many times. You're right. It was not fun.

Well, I mean, engineering and technical work requires a heads-down thinking about it approach. Being interrupted is hard. A manager needs to be interruptible for the most part because they're dealing with problems. I hear I'm thinking about code and, oh, I have a marketing meeting that I have to go talk, you know, complete context shift to go talk to senior management about priority, whatever. It's just, it's completely different way of thinking or, yeah. Let me give you another example from my career. I was, this was, I think I was still a first level manager, maybe a second level manager. I can't remember now of R&D engineers.

And I would come into the morning. you know, park my car and start walking into my office across the parking lot. And before I could get halfway across, like three or four times a week, I would be jumped on by engineers saying, I got this problem. Steve, you need to help me figure it out. And I couldn't even get to my desk before I was sworn by engineers. And I finally had to tell these guys, please let me get to my desk and give me a half an hour, to get organized before you come over and start jumping on me with your problems. After that half hour, I am yours. That's my job is to help you through. But I need to get organized first,

and I need to get a chance to sort of figure out what else I have to do in the day, what my boss expects me to do during the day as well. And the other thing that I ask them to do is when you come to me with problems, don't just come to me with problems. Come to me with your ideas for solutions as well. You know the problem better than I do. And so you might have two or three different ideas. You're not sure which one is the best. But come to me with those ideas and let's bounce them around as opposed to you coming to me with just the problem and expecting me, Steve, to figure out the answer to it. So that helped. People actually started doing that after I gave them that coaching. I mean, it's a matter of triage. Just having everybody through

everything as you walk in the door, you need to figure out which problems need to be solved immediately and which ones actually will get solved if you tell them to just go think about it a little bit more. Exactly. Yep. That's right. There were very few problems that you needed to solve in the next five minutes. That wasn't always the case.

I remember when I was a, you know, after I had left Agilent and. was the owner of this IT support business here in Santa Rosa. And one of my customers was a company that dispatched air ambulance helicopters throughout the Northwest, the states in the Northwest. And I remember once getting a phone call from them at 2 o'clock in the morning saying, our computers are down, we've got helicopters in the air, and we can't talk to them. That's not the kind of problem. I can say, well, I'll get right on that first thing Monday morning.

Yeah. But that's the rare exception. One of the things, to reply to Bill myself, Camille Fornier's Manager's Path is a great book. I wish I'd had it when I started the Manager's Path at HP because I was not ready. I was too young. I just didn't. I not only didn't have the social skills, I just didn't have enough breadth. and I wish I had known that

because it made me stay away from managing for a long time and when I finally was a manager again I was great I understood what I needed to do and I and thanks to HP I had the skills to do it although I was like two jobs passed when I left Agilent do you do you find that there is like a checkpoint or a number of years or how do you tell when somebody's ready for management?

And how do you tell if somebody's never going to be ready for management? Yeah. Well, I wish I had figured that out before I hired a few people. But I'm getting and have gotten better at it. So I can't say that I know exactly how many years somebody should work as an engineer before. they become a manager. It really has to do with, when do they understand the difference in a role between a manager and engineer? And I've always found that the best engineers rarely make the best managers because they still want to do engineering and tell their engineers how to do engineering

as opposed to being a coach to help their team become more skilled themselves. But, you know, so in my case, I had been engineer four years before I became a manager. That was sort of the minimum. And at least I was probably similar to you. I was a manager for five years before I said, I've had enough of this. I'm going crazy. and I went back to be an engineer for a year before I went back into management. But part of it depends on what kind of support you get from your leadership team.

And in my case, I was getting no support from my leadership team. And I was having to try to figure out how to solve complicated problems that there were no easy solutions for. And I was not getting the kind of help. So it really, you need to understand what this. job of a manager is before you know whether you're ready to move into it and you also have to recognize that you know you're not going to be the perfect manager from day one and it may take you a year or two before you feel comfortable in the role and you've got to take advantage of all the resources you can your boss other managers um you know taking courses on management uh

to build the skills that you need to have in order to eventually become strong in that area? Okay, so Scott had a different question, and it's kind of complicated. I'm not quite sure where I'm going to start with this. I guess he wrote it out well. What is the interplay and differences between CTO, engineering manager, product owner, and team lead? And while you're thinking about that, in specific, how do you balance strategic, strategic business objectives, paperwork and process, individual project success, and hurting the cats to get the project to actually happen.

The whole book? So, yeah, that really does sound like a whole book, doesn't it? Wow, yeah. Do you have opinions on how a healthy organization should work with CTO, engineering manager, product owner, and team lead? Are those even the roles you would say are in the engineering organization? Well, that was the first thing I was going to mention is. I'm not sure I agree with this, but there is a trend in companies like Microsoft and Apple to reduce the number of layers of management in the organization.

So when you talk about CTO, engineering manager, product owner, and what was team lead, there's sort of a push in the industry to reduce those number of people that are not direct contributors. I'm not sure that's always the right way to do it, but let's sort of talk about the two extremes first. The team lead is responsible for the day-to-day running of the – it'll be different depending upon whether you're in R&D or marketing or – What's two engineering? It's most of our listeners are in the – Yeah, the R&D – so the R&D team lead. typically the team is going to have a specific project that they're responsible for delivering over a specific time period. And the team lead needs to be driving the weekly success toward

achieving those objectives. I wouldn't necessarily say a team lead needs to be working with each of the individual engineers every day. But they probably need to be checking in once a week at least, and more often if the engineer is coming to them with questions, but the team leads responsibility is to drive the near-term success of that project. The CTO at the other extreme is looking at the next three to five years, where does this company need to be headed, what do we need to set as priorities, and mapping out a strategy, for the R&D strategy for that next three to five years. And what organization do we need to put in place in order to be able to deliver

those, that vision? What skills do we need to have that we don't have today in order to make that team successful? And so those are the sort of the two extremes and sort of the CTO also has got a send that message out to the entire organization so that the team knows where the company is headed and not necessarily down to the nitty-gritty detail, but at least the overall vision of what the R&D strategy is for the next three to five years. And there are probably going to be one or two levels of management between, depending on the size

the company, maybe even more, between the CTO and the individual contributors, the engineers. And so the first level, you know, that team lead is sort of what I would see is the first level project manager. What I think you've called engineering manager, maybe what I see is the second level manager who has several projects that they're responsible for. And their job is, second level manager really is their job is to serve as a buffer between higher management and the people that are actually doing the work, to get the people that are doing the work, the budget and the resources that they need, and to satisfy

the upper management that the team is delivering. are going to be delivering on results that are important to the company. So that second level manager, and sometimes there will be a third level manager as well, is their job is really to serve as the buffer between the pressures on both sides from up above and from down below to get the resources that they need. The product owner, typically in my experience, product owner has been somebody in marketing that is defining specifically what the customer requirements need to be. And in the old days, the product owner at HP never worked that closely with R&D,

or maybe a better way to say that is R&D never really listened too much to the product owner in marketing. But that's something that I really changed in the organization that I was working on. I had a product marketing manager, who was basically a product owner, that he and I worked very closely together on setting strategy. And I think that that needs to happen. You know, it didn't necessarily need to happen when HP was only building products for engineers, just like the engineers that were designing them. But these days where your customers aren't necessarily anything like the engineers

that are in your organization, you need to have a team that can work with, work together to understand what the true customer needs are and deliver products that really meet those needs. In your answer, I heard a couple of timelines. The team lead is more in the next week and next month timeline, and the CTO is three to five years out. And this depends on how big the company is. A small company, your CTO might be one year out. But that's different. And I thought that was something to call out because as you look at how big your team is and how many levels there are, it is sort of a time-based thing. The engineer needs to get things done today, tomorrow, this week.

And a lot of engineering problems aren't easily solved that way. But on average, a team lead can figure out what will probably get done by the next month. and then their manager, and setting aside the people management part, that's a separate issue, the coaching, the mentoring, that all needs to happen too. But if you're looking at the roles, for me, it is about how far out are you looking and how much strategy are you applying to filling the gaps you can see. I think that's a really good way to frame the difference. The window of time that you look at and the urgency of what you need to deliver is probably considerably different. And, you know, the team lead, I may have made it sound like they need to be focused on just this week or this month. It's really they've got a specific project that they need to deliver on that that project might take a year or two.

And they're not going to focus on all two years of it right now. They're going to focus on what they need to be delivering over the next couple of months in order to stay on track for what that two-year window is. So it's a different frame of month or two that you're looking at as the project progresses. But as you say, the CTO is somebody that he or she is not going to necessarily focus on how well that individual team is doing this week or this month. There's engineering management team between the two of them that can make sure that the deliverables for the project you're working on right now

are being met. The CTO needs to defame the longer-term future and make sure that we understand where the markets are likely to head. We make sure that we've sold our story to the, C-suite so that we get the funding and the budget and the resources that we need to deliver on this vision. And then in between our layer or two of engineering managers that need to deliver on a time period that's in between those two. And so yes, Scott, if your CTO is taking over your code and writing the code, someone is behaving badly. And I mean,

If you're in a startup that only has five people, maybe that's okay. You don't have that luxury. There's a lot of title inflation in small startups. There's a lot of title inflation. That's right. I'm a director. I have one report.

But you'll never get to the point where you have that if you don't have that vision of, this is what, you know, I can't run the business when it gets to be $20 million a year, the same way I'm doing it when it's a million dollars a year. And that's, I see too many owners of small companies that don't know how to make that transition. Before we let you go, I want to ask about your other books. Okay. I've been reading John Muir's, my first summer in the Sierra, which has been really fun. Oh, yeah.

Do you have favorite books in that category, the naturalist guides and the Explanors? exploring the world? Yes, and it may be controversial. My favorite author, outdoor-related author, is author by the name of Edward Abbey. His most famous book is a book called Desert Solitaire that he wrote back in 1968. He's long since passed away.

And I always have to caution that he's my favorite author, but he is nowhere near my favorite person. If you look at his actual life, he's not somebody I would want to associate with, but he wrote well about the outdoor world, particularly not always in the desert, but he was a desert rat, so he wrote a lot about that. and that really inspired me. I'm nowhere near as good as writer he is, but hopefully I'm a better person than he was. But so he's my favorite author in the outdoor world that is sort of my second career. And could you mention your other books?

Well, yeah. So actually, my very first book was for the high tech industry. It was called The Handbook of Surface Mount Technone. written in 1988, and it was this surface map technology was a brand new technology back then. And mine was the sort of the definitive book on that new technology for a number of years. I've written chapters in other high-tech books, but I've also written, depending on how you count them, three books on the outdoors. The first book I wrote about the outdoors was called Guide to State Parks of the Sonoma Coast and Russian River.

It was a hiking guide to several state parks in northern California. I've written a guidebook for outdoor navigation called Outdoor Navigation with GPS that talks about how to use map compass and GPS in the outdoors. And so, and then the last book that I've written there is called the Slick Rock Desert about the canyon country of southern Utah and my explorations of that area. And the only reason I wrote those books is I needed an excuse to get out to the outdoors more because, you know, in high tech, I'm sitting behind a desk all day. And so I told my wife one day that I was going to write a book about the outdoors. And I'll see you in a week. I'm headed off to Utah to do some research for the book.

And so that was, once I wrote that book, I needed to write another one to have another excuse to get outdoors. And so that's what I've, the whole reason I've done those books is just to have an excuse to get outside. You know you don't need an excuse, right? It helps. Steve, thank you for speaking with us. Do you have any thoughts who'd like to leave us with? Well, I think we've covered a lot of ground, and I hope that this has been useful for your listeners,

and they're always welcome to reach out to me if you've got questions about what it takes to be a successful manager or anything about innovation. I'm happy to answer questions. You know, I'm not going to do days worth of consulting for free, but I'm happy to answer telephone calls and talk about things. I'm partially retired now, so it's not like I need gigantic about income. Our guest has been Steve Hinch, author and executive consultant.

You can find winning through innovation, lessons from the front lines of business, wherever you normally buy books. Thanks, Steve. It's great to talk to you. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Lisa. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Mouser for their sponsorship.

Thank you to our Patreon listener Slack group for questions. And, of course, thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show atembedded.fm or hit the contact link on Embedded FM. Now a quote to leave you with. This is Steve's dedication in winning through innovation. To managers everywhere who must balance the needs of investors, executives, customers, and employees without mortgaging the future in the quest for short-term results.