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Posted September 3, 2010
We may have been the last people in the toy industry to get a fax machine. I couldn’t see what the use of it would be, but was told that once I had one I would never be able to live without it again. (Thank you, Steve.) That was the first time we adopted a new technology and our eyes were opened a little. Slowly, like a glacier, we began to create toys with some electronics, arguably more sophisticated than before. The change had begun. For years we knew about servos (a.k.a. servo motors which may be precisely controlled in speed and degree of movement using a microprocessor) but didn’t know how or why we should use them. Instead, we gutted a hundred Billy the Bass to scavenge their terrific motor mechanisms. On the advice of another industry friend, we took the plunge and started to use servos and the basic stamp prototyping electronics system. With the ability to create such precise programming, were were suddenly able to make more sophisticated mechanisms that did remarkable things that would have been impossible before. Our work was transformed by the new tools we had learned to use. Others learned from us to do the same. We became widely known as the "Masters of Mechanisms." Other technologies over the years have had significant effects on our capabilities and efficiency, enabling us to do more, faster, better, cheaper. Now we are always looking for the next technology that we might adopt that could transform our business, amplify our capabilities, allow us to come up with better ideas, build better prototypes, create more sophisticated products, or run our business better. Onward and upward, the best is yet to come. Embrace change, embrace new technologies. Look for ways that you might transform what you do and how you do it. To survive and thrive in a fast paced world of business, we have no choice but constant, relentless, and at times monumental change. |
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Posted September 2, 2010 The tools we use determine the results we can achieve. If your only tool is a hammer, then everything you produce will be made with nails, which is fine if you are building houses, but not so good if you are in the automobile business or even the toy invention business.
Our tools give us capabilities and limitations. Years ago we acquired several technologies that revolutionized our business and what we were capable of creating. As a cavemen at heart, a troglodyte really, in the early days we (metaphorically speaking) carved everything we made out of plastic with an exacto knife. Not literally of course, but we made primitive concepts with primitive tools. We used existing motorized gearboxes torn from existing toys and we used existing electronics scavenged from whatever we could find ( Yak Baks mostly). I spent countless hours in thrift shops hunting for old toys for reference and to be ‘parted out’ to make new toys. Then one day we decided to hire an electronics 'expert' so that we could begin to create products with electronic features of our own design, rather than be limited to using parts designed by others. I can’t say we were always early technology adopters, but hey, we’re getting better every day - or trying to. |
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Posted September 1, 2010 I am recently back from a two-week vacation. Two weeks IN A ROW! I Can’t remember when I last did that. Perhaps only one other time in the last 26 years or so of business. I think that is crazy, never taking the time off that I am entitled to and hardly ever taking even two weeks off in a row. How many weeks a year do you get off and how many do you actually take? How many weeks in a row do you take off? How many emails or other work-related tasks do you do each day when you are on vacation? As someone explained to me once, a two-week vacation is not just twice as much, but more like four times as much restful time than one week alone. During a vacation it takes me several days to fully wind down from work mode and at a few days at the end to gear up for work again. If you take a week off, that leaves only a couple true, deep relaxation days in the middle where you are 100% on vacation, at best. But if you take two weeks, that is an entire seven more days of real R & R. That is 350% more ‘real’ vacation time than one would experience taking only one week at a time. Go ahead, do the math. I am convinced that taking vacation time enriches one's work and one's life. If one’s life is healthy, one’s work prospers. Take the time to smell the freakin’ flowers, eh? Go out and Play. Just like kids do. And enjoy. |
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Posted August 31, 2010 "Live to ride, ride to live" - the Harley Davidson motto. It's nice if you are part of a motorcycle gang, but it doesn’t work if you have a regular job, a business to run, a family, or kids. Live to work, or work to live? Which is it? Ever get confused on that score? I know I have done so. I often used to subscribe to the former, that is, I lived to work. I derived great joy and satisfaction and meaning in my life through work. Then one day a good industry friend explained that he didn’t live to work. Instead, he worked so that he could afford his life. I thought he had his priorities wrong. That was just a corporate drone’s approach to life and work. Now I am not so sure. Maybe I just worked too much and devoted too little time to the other dimensions of life. If I have done so, I don’t intend to continue doing so. With that said, I do still like to work. There are Ants and Grasshoppers, according to Aesop, and I am an Ant. I love inventing. I get a rush from creating new toys and discovering new technologies that delight and amaze. I enjoy the challenge of what we do, and I love the team that I have the pleasure to work with each day. I am constantly amazed at what they do. |
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Posted August 30, 2010 My good friends from Hillsborough, NC claimed to have a monster, that they called the Catamount (a name often used to for wild cats). It was a hairy man of the forest that lived in the extensive woods near their home. They could hear it yelping at certain times of the year and moving quickly through the forest, frightening their menagerie of cats and dogs. In fact, the grandfather of a mutual friend told a story from his youth - he was on Orange Grove Road by those very same woods, when he was jumped and thrashed with a tree branch to within an inch of his life by a short, hairy man-like creature. Decades later his grandson, my friend, and an airforce officer, claimed to have seen that same creature one night along the very same road - its large, luminous blue eyes shining in the moonlight. He turned back to confirm what he had seen, and while it had retreated into the shadows of the trees away from the road, it stopped and squatted, man-like, meeting my friend's gaze. Both grandsons of grandfathers who had met once, long ago? Who knows. But reports of manlike creatures are so many, and so vivid, and by so many credible witnesses that they are hard to explain away or discount. Something may yet live out there, somewhere. So what is it that we love so much about monsters? |
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