Posts by Ethan Plotkin
Natural Energy of Operations | Letter From The CEO
November 16, 2022
It’s that time of year again: annual operating planning. Hooray! Jokes aside, successful planning relies on how well everyone understands the leadership team’s vision and their role in making the magic happen. The general approach is to develop an executive vision, followed by departmental plans. For 2023, most OEMs will continue dealing with booming demand…
Notes from the Road (We’re Back, Baby!)
June 3, 2022
Like most people, I haven’t been traveling much since early 2020, but over these past couple of years of pandemic-imposed video calls, I’ve become amazed at how quickly and naturally we’ve formed trusting relationships with people we’ve never met in real life (IRL). If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video call…
Winning the Battle but Losing the War
February 18, 2022
People may not know that Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of the Russian coalition was preceded by his capture of Moscow in 1812. Although that victory seemed decisive for him at the time, the cost of holding a captured city in the face of broken supply lines was crippling. As a result, his forces were…
Do your legacy products spark joy?
July 19, 2021
“We have too much stuff,” my wife said six months into the pandemic. We’d done purges before, but they never lasted. Soon afterward, she’d say, “We STILL have too much stuff!” And she was right. This time, we decided to search the internet for advice and discovered Marie Kondo. “KonMari” is a Japanese organizational consultant…
Helping you keep your New Year’s resolution
March 8, 2021
I used to be a cigarette smoker. Each New Year I resolved to stop smoking, and I’d stash my “last” half-pack of cigarettes deep inside a dark drawer. Months later, when I felt I needed just one cigarette, I’d retrieve the pack and start smoking again. For a long time, I tried nicotine-replacement therapies: patches,…
Now’s the Time for Electronics OEMs to Shape Their Futures
May 12, 2020
In view of the COVID-19 disruption and anticipated aftermath in the embedded electronics industry, computer board OEMs face an existential challenge right now: How do they best allocate their resources to satisfy the competing objectives of 1) sustaining existing designs while simultaneously 2) inspiring and capturing the market for new designs? If OEMs spend too…
5 Actions Teams Must Implement Into Their COVID Response Right Now
May 12, 2020
COVID-19 has changed the industry landscape in ways we are still trying to understand, and companies must respond—or be left in the dust. Although change is never easy, often the hardest part is deciding to reevaluate what we think we know. The alternative is to wait out the pandemic health crisis and hope that things…
A Letter from the CEO – Blinded by the Top Line
November 1, 2019
Perhaps you’ve heard the phase, “You get what you measure.” This is the reason we set up performance reports that reflect the things we want to achieve. After all, if we’re not measuring it, how can we demonstrate whether or not we’re succeeding? It’s also true that, “You don’t always measure what you get.” This…
Don’t Let Your Old Designs Drag You Down
March 25, 2019
Business leaders don’t like process exceptions, because they’re inefficient and require a lot of special intervention to resolve. They also don’t like to discontinue old product designs that still have a few customers, because these orders help them make their sales targets and avoid customer issues. That makes sense, right? Maybe not as much sense…
Delay is the True Cost of an Ad Hoc Sustainment Strategy
October 26, 2018
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “true cost” of things. Our leadership team has been working on a particularly large order for more than a year. Since we restarted the production line for this discontinued COTS board several years back, this is the third ad hoc order we’ve accepted. In each of these…