Yearly Archives: 2012

Patch Adams is one of my most favorite movies.  When Adams is a psychiatric patient, he finds that healing people heals himself.  After being discharged from the psychiatric hospital, he becomes a medical student and heals patients with humor.  This movie is based on a real story.

It is always good to see a thing from different perspectives.  As I often mention, I am half designer, half engineer.  I can see a product from different perspectives.  As I wrote in a previous post, I like teaching, but I was a bad student when I was in Japan.  I can see students from a teacher’s perspective and from a bad student’s perspective.  But the most difficult thing to see from different perspectives is myself.

As I often write, it is so easy to get discouraged in my current situation.  When I see my friend who is discouraged, for whatever reason, I project myself into her/him.  This is the moment when I see myself from a different perspective.  I tell my friend what I want to be told, and find that encouraging my friends encourages myself.

Many of my friends know I love coffee, and many of them know that I use a manual coffee grinder.  They know its quality.  It is also enjoyable; I like the feeling, the sound, and of course, the aroma.  Many people have been impressed, and no one has complained about it, until today.

Today someone told me to use an electric coffee “grinder” because it is “efficient”.  But she missed two important points.  First of all, what she calls is electric coffee “grinder” is actually coffee chopper.  Grinding and chopping are physically different.  Second of all, she does not understand the meaning of “efficiency”.  What she means by “efficient” only means quick, and she dose not care about quality.  While efficiency can be defined as the quality of the outcome divided  the time and/or effort to produce the outcome, she only cares about the speed.  The quality of outcome by an electric coffee chopper is poor, and using it is not enjoyable at all.  I was so surprised to see a person who does not understand it.

Although she is an extreme example, many other people misunderstand the meaning of efficiency; they do not distinguish the difference between efficiency and speed.  Pursuing speed without considering efficiency is like designing a mechanical component without tolerance.  It is like people; life without having tolerance is miserable.

One day I hung out with my Canadian friends and had rich cheesecake.  One of them asked me “what is ‘rich’ in Japanese?”  What I came across was something you hear in Iron Chef judge’s comment, but people do not speak like that in casual conversation. Then I thought how I would explain traditional Japanese food that has a rich taste, but I could not find any example.  Conclusion: no traditional Japanese food has a rich taste, thus Japanese do not have a casual expression that describes rich taste.  Since a language develops in a culture, this is quite natural.

Now I work between Japanese engineers and Canadian workers.  I have known that translation between two languages is, ultimately, impossible, and found that it is quite difficult to explain it to people who have not been exposed to foreign cultures.  Merely staying or even living in a foreign country dose not count unless they talk with locals in “their language” whether it is their native language or not.

As I wrote in a previous post, I like teaching and have experiences in teaching in different settings.  It is relatively easy to teach to people if they are willing to learn.  If not, the first step before teaching is to make them understand that they need to learn. Now, I work with Japanese engineers who do not need to learn Canadian culture or English-speaking culture and in fact are not interested in it.  My struggle continues.

One of today’s top news is Toyota’s recall.  While the focus in Canada is its scale and impact, Japanese internet news tell the inside.  Toyota, like many other car companies today, uses common parts among different types of vehicles.  This is a double-edged sword; it reduces development cost and time, and if the part is ill-designed, it affects all types of vehicles that use the parts, 2.77 millions in this case.

Let me talk about this from a different perspective; how do they manage car development in that way?  Generally speaking, engineers do not communicate.  When I worked for a famous Japanese company to develop endoscopic systems, the parts commonly used among different products are limited to very basic, off-the-shelf parts such as switches.  The system to save digital endoscopic images was a good example. A team developed an image processing unit; it converts analog images to digital images to process it, and then converts it to analog images to output.  Another team developed an image saving unit; it receives analog images from an image processing unit and converts it to digital images to save.  If those development teams communicated, it wouldn’t have had to convert images three times which lowers the quality of image.  If I understand correctly, in Toyota and other car companies, development teams communicate, or they have a system to share information among development teams. It may sound easy, but from my experiences in engineering jobs, I can tell that it is not as easy as it sounds for big organizations.

Now I imagine how they have established the system.  Did anyone take initiative to communicate among development teams?  Or did anyone establish a system to share information among different teams whether or not they are willing to communicate?  In either case, I imagine, it was a paradigm shift.  I want to assume they have a constructive corporate culture.

A few years ago in Japan, talking about unique characteristics of a prefecture was a fad. Although some arguments were suspicious, each prefecture definitely has different characteristics.  For example, people in the Northern part of Japan are generally humble; when they need help, they don’t say so, even when the earthquake and tsunami hit the Northern part of Japan 20 months ago.  They are very different from some of the Sandy survivors.

Today is only a day 2 of my new life in Orillia and it is still too early to talk about characteristics of this city, but I have a feeling that people here are different from those in Hamilton.  But, first of all, what characterizes a city?  History?  Main industry? Weather?

Some days ago, I wrote about corporate culture, and there may be similarities; new people are influenced by other people who have been there since a long time ago, whether it is positive or negative.  One of the differences is probably that corporate culture can be changed positively by a strong leader.  Unlike local communities, people who work for a corporation chose to work there, more or less, for a common goal.  A strong leader can, literally, lead people to the goal.