Quality during Design
Quality during Design is a podcast for product designers, engineers, and anyone else who cares about creating high-quality products. In each episode, we explore the principles of quality design, from user-centered thinking to iterative development. We introduce frameworks to make better design decisions and reduce costly re-designs. We explore ways to co-work with cross-functional teams. We also talk to experts in the field about their experiences and insights.
Join host Dianna Deeney in using quality thinking throughout the design process to create products others love, for less. Whether you're a seasoned designer or just starting out, looking to improve your existing designs or start from scratch, Quality during Design is the podcast for you.
Quality during Design
From Solo to Collaboration: Lessons from Nobel Laureate Shuji Nakamura and Dale Carnegie
What could Shuji Nakamura, the Nobel Prize-winning engineer behind the blue LED, teach you about teamwork and career growth? Discover how transitioning from an independent researcher to a collaborative leader can elevate your professional journey.
Join me, Dianna Deeney, as I share insights from a recent event co-hosted for the IEEE Philadelphia Professional Communication Society. We'll uncover valuable lessons from the books "Brilliant!" by Bob Johnstone and Dale Carnegie's classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People," both of which spotlight the transformative power of teamwork and communication.
Learn about Shuji Nakamura's career evolution and find out how his story parallels many of our own professional paths. I'll also dive into my personal shift from solitary work to embracing collaboration in quality engineering. By leveraging quality tools for better communication and idea sharing within cross-functional teams, you too can drive more successful engineering and design projects. This episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiring anecdotes to help you thrive in your professional life. Don’t miss out on knowing the baseline approach that can lead to collaboration success!
Visit the podcast blog for more links.
Give us a Rating & Review
**NEW COURSE**
FMEA in Practice: from Plan to Risk-Based Decision Making is enrolling students now. Visit the course page for more information and to sign up today! Click Here
**FREE RESOURCES**
Quality during Design engineering and new product development is actionable. It's also a mindset. Subscribe for consistency, inspiration, and ideas at www.qualityduringdesign.com.
About me
Dianna Deeney helps product designers work with their cross-functional team to reduce concept design time and increase product success, using quality and reliability methods.
She consults with businesses to incorporate quality within their product development processes. She also coaches individuals in using Quality during Design for their projects.
She founded Quality during Design through her company Deeney Enterprises, LLC. Her vision is a world of products that are easy to use, dependable, and safe – possible by using Quality during Design engineering and product development.
Are you someone who normally works independent of other people? Maybe you're assigned to a team but you normally do your work independently and then maybe bring it together with a team later. How often do you collaborate with others on your team when making decisions? Is it not that often, if you're assigned to a team and you're asked to work with a cross-functional team members, do you cringe and not look forward to that activity or not really know where to start? If this is you, then listen into this episode. We may be able to have a reframe of collaboration for you that will help you with your career.
Dianna:After this brief introduction, Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less. I'm your host, Dianna Deeney. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. I consult with businesses and coach individuals and how to apply quality during design to their processes. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityduringdesign. com.
Dianna:With this podcast, I am bumping up against my production schedule here. I'm recording on the day before I'm going to release this episode, because just yesterday I was co-hosting an event for the IEEE Philadelphia Professional Communication Society. It was a engineering book review of two different books and there was some highlights that came out of that that I wanted to share on the podcast with you, and there was some highlights that came out of that that I wanted to share on the podcast with you. I collaborated with someone else, another member of the society, stephen Geico, and we read two different books and then discussed some common topics that were with the two books. The first book that we read is called Brilliant, shuji Nakamura and the Revolution in Lighting Technology, written by Bob Johnstone. The other book that we read that we correlated with that one was how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. The how to Win Friends and Influence People book was published in the 1930s but there's still a lot of editions of it that have been popular. It's still one of the highest rated self help books on the Kindle business leadership category, so it remains a highly rated book even though it's old. We wanted to see if it's still related to today's situations. I really enjoyed working with Stephen on this project because we had some very interesting discussions just in the setup and I think our overall book review was really interesting. We come from different times in our careers. Stephen is early in his career and I'm a little bit later mid-career and we have different backgrounds and that kind of led to some really interesting intersections of our experiences and how they related to the books. In any case, stephen highlighted a point about the book Brilliant that I really liked.
Dianna:Brilliant is the story of the development of the blue LED, but it really isn't just that. It's really the journey of Shuji Nakamura from an engineer to a researcher to a leader, teacher, collaborator and eventually an entrepreneur. The book followed Shuji's career trajectory and it showed as he progressed. He collaborated with others more. When he started his career, he was a very independent worker doing research independently in his lab, sometimes against the request of his management not to do that kind of research, to stop that research and work on something else as his research yielded success that could be used in industry to manufacture product. He then became a leader of a team within industry and then he then later left industry to work in academics, to be a teacher, where he collaborated as someone in academic research with other people in industries and, like I said, eventually becoming an entrepreneur to develop some other products. Shuji Nakamura was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Physics in 2014 for his contributions to LED development.
Dianna:What does this have to do with the problem that I presented at the beginning of this episode? The problem I presented was that a lot of us are independent workers, especially if we're engineers. I can see this in myself, too, earlier on in my career. I'm kind of at my desk, I'm working things out, I'm doing calculations and as I've grown into my engineering career and then expanding into quality engineering, I noticed that I am collaborating more often with others With quality during design. I promote using a lot of quality tools in order for us to be able to communicate and talk with our cross-functional team and develop ideas about design concepts before we start engineering design. These quality tools are used in process development projects and Six Sigma projects. They're common for us to be able to use as frameworks to talk with people, to gather information and to gather data.
Dianna:Underlying all of that is a general approach, which is for us to be genuinely interested in other people when we choose to collaborate with other people or when we're asked to collaborate with other people as part of a team, in order for us to be the most successful and the most productive with the time that we have with those other people. We do need to approach those activities that we do with them with genuine interest. We want to be interested in what they have to offer, the ideas that they have to share. This involves our own mindset and it can also extend into the way that we recognize other people recognizing either a success like a good job, or, as Stephen had pointed out in our book review discussion, recognizing when somebody's having a rough day and giving them a little bit of grace to be able to recover or to move past that rough part, or to acknowledge that hey, that was a really tough discussion but you handled it well. And even that comes back to being genuinely interested in other people, not alienating them because they have a different point of view, but trying to join them on their side of their point of view to better understand where they're coming from. This is the major theme that runs throughout how to Win Friends and Influence People and it tied in with the kind of stories and career trajectory that we saw with Shuji in writing technical papers and presentations, collaborating with other people, recognizing other people and even getting buy-ins on ideas when you hear other people talking about team activities and the importance of making it a safe space for people to share. This is the underlying approach that they're talking about, with people being genuinely interested in what others have to say, and that creates that atmosphere or an environment where people are more willing to share their ideas. When we want to collaborate with others, when we're asked to collaborate with others, we need to set ourselves up for success by the way that we approach the activities that we do with these other people. The way that we approach other people, we need to try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view. If we do that, we're going to be more successful with our talks and our discussions.
Dianna:Here's a quote from how to Win Friends and Influence People. If, as a result of reading this book, you get only one thing an increased affinity to think always of the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as your own, if you get only that one thing from this book, it may easily prove to be one of the stepping stones of your career. So what's today's insight to action? Consider where you are now in your career. How is your trajectory? Does it follow Shuji Nakamura's, where you're more independent worker in the beginning of your career and you've learned to collaborate more with others. Have you always been a collaborator and how can you help others to take this approach, to be genuinely interested in other people?
Dianna:Since the book how to Win Friends and Influence People has been around for a while, you may have already read it. If you didn't like it, if you didn't really get that much out of it, then I recommend reading a newer book with a similar message how to Know a Person, by David Brooks. The same general message applies, but it's taken from different stories and different points of view. It may give you that insight to help you with your next step in your career collaborations. If you are in product design and you like these kind of topics, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter. Go to qualityduringdesign. com and you'll see a form where you can enter your email and subscribe. This has been a production of Deeney Enterprises. Thanks for listening!
