About the session
From Michael Faraday's time to the present day, the engineer's world has been both cyclic and discontinuous. In every one of the very many fields of engineering endeavour, much of the engineer's work follows a regular, seemingly metronomic, pattern. Often those cycles of activity produce predictable outcomes. Sometimes they yield startling insights. Always they present opportunities to learn, and to apply that learning to future cycles to bring about material, perhaps discontinuous, change. Seizing every one of those opportunities is crucial to enduring success. Indeed, in industry it may be argued that the rate at which a company learns and then does will become the last sustainable source of competitive advantage. This address is an exploration of cycle time. From the perspective of a career spent in the fast-changing global electronics industry, the speaker discusses the nature of cycle time and why it matters so much; what is happening to cycle time in the Information Age; what accelerates cycles, and what retards them; and how all of us can drive cycles of learning and doing, not be driven by them. He argues that choosing to reduce cycle time is one of the most effective, least-risk decisions that one can make. It is rarely, if ever, a wrong decision, and sometimes it is an extraordinarily high-yielding decision. It is a decision that professional duty requires one to make, cycle after cycle, time after time.
