Most observers instantly declared both fabulous, though a few found fault with some iPad details. You’d have to be on an extended trip to another planet to miss the news of Apple’s iPad, the long-anticipated tablet computer that may do to book, magazine and newspaper publishing what iTunes did to the music business.

The buzz on Seth’s new book is nearly as intense in the blogging/marketing world he inhabits, but the news may have missed some in the industrial world.

Seth Godin is a prolific writer with ten books and one of the longest-running, most-read and most influential blogs of all time. Many are already declaring his book Linchpin the most important book Godin has written, that it will be life changing for those who read it and world changing for the works that ensue.

This post is not a book review, or a review of Apple’s latest cool technology. It’s an alert. It’s a sign of new possibilities in the midst of all our angst over economies and policies and things that may blow up with little or no warning and we’re standing too close.

This week Steve Jobs and Apple demonstrated once again that we can still invent cool tools that are fun to use, and in the process transform whole industries. And this week Seth Godin introduced us to a Manifesto of Fabulous: a guide, a map and an energizer for how each one of us, individually and collectively can make our own fabulous things.

You can find a hint of what was to come in his new book in this brief post from his blog dated November 8, 2009. It’s titled simply "Fabulous"

This is so cool: because we only look at things we want to look at, only talk about things worth talking about, the amount of fabulous in the world continues to rise exponentially.

Even though we're at the tail end of the great recession, think about all the cool stuff in your life. Not just stuff you can buy, but experiences, works of art, innovations of all kinds... the bar has been raised for what you need to do to be noticed, and the market is responding.

Not only do I notice more fabulous, but it sure seems as though the creators of it are more engaged, dedicated and yes, joyful, than I can remember. If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do work that matters, this is it. You can't say, "but I need to make a fortune instead," because that's not happening right now. So you might as well join the people who can say, "I love doing this."

Fabulous Industrial Machines
There’s a lot of talk of our transformation from an Industrial Age to a Digital Age. In this post-industrial era, some suppose there’s little change or innovation to be found when it comes to engineering industrial equipment. Yet for those who bother to look there’s a wealth of innovation—of fabulous people designing and building fabulous equipment:

• I’ve seen fabulous digital weighing technologies designed specifically for process control. These Smart Force Transducers are developed and manufactured in Niederlenz, Switzerland, and they are just one example of how digital instruments are applied in industrial equipment.
• In an article on how innovation turbo-charges industrial companies I profiled Jim Foley in Pitman, NJ, who headed the team that developed a new material flow aid for gravimetric feeders.
• Ted Gentile, International Sales Manager at Jeffrey Rader Corporation, wrote how innovative biomass feed systems are gaining global acceptance in helping industries tap into this alternative fuel source.
• Mike Hamby, Vice President Sales & Service – NAFTA, at Gundlach Equipment Corporation wrote how a fanatical adherence to maintenance-friendly design principles takes much of the labor, cost and pain out of maintaining their roll crushers and cage mills in the field.

In every one of these examples you’ll find people who reached beyond the common to achieve results that set a new standard in industrial equipment. And in every example, there are users around the globe, who when they encounter one of these machines in the field, are saying, "fabulous." Those who buy and read Linchpin may find themselves among those riding at the top of the growing wave of fabulous that Godin sees coming.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

Harvard Business Review contributing editor Bronwyn Fryer posted this interview "How Do Innovators Think? " with Professors Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen. In the Q&A interview the professors discuss the results of a six-year study in which they surveyed 3,000 creative executives and conducted an additional 500 individual interviews to discover how "Innovators' DNA" works.

The study identified five "discovery skills" that distinguish innovative leaders from all the rest:

• Associating: "a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas."
• Questioning: "an ability to ask 'what if', 'why', and 'why not' questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture."
• Observation: "the ability to closely observe details, particularly the details of people's behavior."
• Experimentation: innovators "are always trying on new experiences and exploring new worlds."
• Networking: innovative leaders "are really good at networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn"

I think one of the profound discoveries the professors made was that more people possess these skills than we recognize. Professor Dyer said, "We think there are far more discovery driven people in companies than anyone realizes. We've found that 15% of executives are deeply innovative, meaning they've invented a new product or started an innovative venture. But the problem is that even the most creative people are often careful about asking questions for fear of looking stupid, or because they know the organization won't value it."

We Need to Celebrate Invention and Innovation
One of the unanticipated satisfactions I discovered in moving from political Washington to industrial South Jersey was finding my office across the hall from K-Tron's R&D department.  You don't have to be a technology junkie to feel the positive energy coming from a creative group of engineers like this.  K-Tron is a company where a lot of its positive energy has started with invention. In fact, the company wouldn't exist as it does today if it hadn't introduced the world's first digital weigh belt feeder in 1972. 

I asked my long-time office neighbor Jim Foley to describe his process of discovery as he spearheaded one of the latest innovations to come out of the K-Tron R&D department, the new Acti-Flow material flow aid for gravimetric feeders. Getting cohesive or other difficult materials to flow from a hopper is an age-old problem for all process industries. The consequences of bridging or ratholing are especially costly in continuous feeding applications where reduced or interrupted flow can degrade product quality and even halt the process.

Before Acti-Flow, mechanical agitation provided the most reliable way to deal with material that didn't easily flow from a loss-in-weight feeder hopper. Mechanical agitation works but needs secondary motors, gear boxes, added headroom, and presents additional cleaning challenges. These downsides led Foley and his staff to ask if there is a better way.

"Vibrating the hopper is another option everyone's known about for a long time," Foley explained. "We know vibration is good. The problem is that too much vibration is bad. It compacts the material and actually promotes bridging and ratholing. Since constant vibration created more trouble than it solved, the best you could do with it was wait for a mass flow alarm and then turn on the vibrator. "

Making Smart Vibrations
It's a fascinating story, which I'll save for another time, of how Foley and his R&D engineers in Pitman, NJ and Niederlenz, Switzerland took a completely fresh look at all the ways vibration might be employed to make difficult material flow. There were a number of breakthroughs the team discovered.

The most important innovation, and the one that has lead to a pending patent, was the idea that the loss-in-weight controller could control and fine-tune how the vibrator (or any other device) interacts with the feeding system. "It's only because our loss-in-weight algorithm is so smart," Foley said, "that we can make vibration work with us--not against us."

As a result of having a smart controller to manage the vibration, Acti-Flow is able to vibrate continuously at a low-level, optimum amplitude and frequency that prevents bridging and ratholing. "The controller changes the amplitude all the time," Foley said "When material is moving well it runs at the lowest possible level of vibration."  If the controller senses a change, it adjusts the vibration right away before it becomes a problem.

"That's the beauty of it," Foley said. "It's a preventive strike: it lets you act, not react. "

Innovation Gives Life to Organizations
Invention and innovation keep a company engaged with its customers. It gives employees renewed purpose. It keeps sales people excited about their products and services. It gives existing customers and potential new customers confidence that they're dealing with a company that keeps getting better.

If it's a really cool design, or a striking innovation, invention gives us pleasure in simply perceiving the thing itself. Finally, invention gives us all hope in the future.

The Personal Innovation Imperative
You don't have to be an R&D engineer to be an inventor. You don't have to work for an engineering-oriented company to need invention. The truth is, in a global networked world where continuous innovation is sweeping across all industries, all the time, we all have to be innovators. The most important innovation we have to work on is ourselves.

What are you doing to reinvent yourself today?

This short article on leadership and personal effectiveness is aimed at organization leaders, but the benefits of positive energy apply equally to anyone who has any role on any group or team. That just about covers all of us, and I think it applies particularly well to those on engineering teams. Kanter writes:

"Some people become leaders no matter what their chosen path because their positive energy is so uplifting. Even in tough times, they always find a way. They seem to live life on their own terms even when having to comply with someone else's requirements…. Their energy makes them magnets attracting other people…. [Energy] is a form of power available to anyone in any circumstances. While inspiration is a long-term proposition, energy is necessary on a daily basis, just to keep going."

Kanter cites three key characteristics of people who are energizers:

1. A relentless focus on the bright side. "Energizers find the positive and run with it," she writes.

I don't think it's possible to be a creative pessimist. When I see engineers create new solutions to material handling problems, whether it's a whole new concept in feeder technology or a new take on an old problem such as inducing better material flow from a material that doesn't want to flow, I find a creative energy and excitement in the process that flows through the entire organization.

2. Redefining negatives as positives. Kanter writes, "Energizers are can-do people. They do not like to stay in negative territory, even when there are things that are genuinely depressing…. 'Positive thinking' and 'counting blessings' can sound like naïve cliches. But energizers are not fools…. Studies show that optimists are more likely to listen to negative information than pessimists, because they think they can do something about it."

Gundlach's Mike Hamby wrote an article recently on this blog about how the crusher company's founder turned his late night, rain-soaked experience repairing the company's first roll crushers into a commitment to easy-maintenance crusher design. More than 85 years later, every Gundlach crusher continues to be designed with easy maintenance in mind, saving customers countless hours if-not-days in downtime for routine or emergency maintenance.

3. Fast response time. Kanter holds, "Energizers don't dawdle. Energizers don't tell you all the reasons something can't be done. They just get to it…. They are very responsive to emails or phone calls, even if the fast response is that they can't respond yet…. Because they are so responsive, others go to them for information or connections. In the process, energizers get more information and a bigger personal network, which are the assets necessary for success."

The days of the lone scientist or engineer working solo for the big breakthrough are largely behind us. Today, technical solutions require technical teams with a variety of skills and knowledge. The larger your network of skilled people who know and support what you're working on, the greater you chances of success.

Kanter concludes, "The nice thing about this form of energy is that it is potentially abundant, renewable, and free. The only requirements for energizers are that they stay active, positive, responsive, and on mission."

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

You can see Bhatt's rock idol video here. He is an Intel fellow and the co-inventor of USB, today's standard for connecting devices to computers.

Bhatt is a good sport in playing what must have been an uncomfortable video role. But this send up of modern fan adulation does more than bring attention to one of Intel's many stellar engineers.

Intel's rock star video serves as a reminder that real people make the things that make the world a little better. And while we can't elevate every engineer--or engineering team--to the star status they deserve for their innovations, we can at least share the names of the ones we know of.

Announcing the Process Industry's Engineers Star Quest
So here's your chance to join in the nomination of our own process industry rock stars. You can nominate historical figures or contemporaries. To help get you started, here are some individuals who might qualify for star status:

Joseph Priestly (1733 – 1804): Powder and Bulk dot com publisher Joe Taylor nominated Joseph Priestly because "he's the guy who figured out oxygen and gases."

Priestly actually received a rock star's welcome when he emigrated from England to the United States in 1794. But the adulation was more for his outspoken support of the new republic than his discovery of oxygen.

According to the Chemical Heritage website, Priestly had been encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, when the later was in London, to complete his first scientific work, The History of Electricity (1767). Priestly went on to publish more than 150 works. In addition to his scientific research he was a noted English theologian, natural philosopher, educator, and political theorist.

While Priestly is credited with the discovery of oxygen (he called it "dephlogisticated air"), Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier also hold claim to the discovery. Priestly wrote six volumes on Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air.

In Birmingham, England Priestly joined the Lunar Society, a group of manufacturers, inventors, and natural philosophers who met monthly to discuss their work. The group included manufacturer Matthew Boulton, chemist and geologist James Keir, inventor and engineer James Watt, and botanist, chemist, and geologist William Withering.

Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC): Going even further back in history, my top choice for engineering rock star is Archimedes whose breakthrough screw design is still used in bulk material handling. It's the basis for the screw feeder, by far the most commonly used volumetric or gravimetric feeder found today. You can find the Archimedes screw pumping and metering liquids and bulk solids in virtually every process industry.

Archimedes wrote the earliest known explanation of the principle involved in the lever. He is said to have remarked, "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth."

Archimedes designed block-and-tackle pulley systems, allowing sailors to use the principle of leverage to lift objects that would otherwise have been too heavy to move. He is also credited with improving the power and accuracy of the catapult. During the First Punic War he invented the first odometer. As a cart outfitted with the odometer moved forward, a gear mechanism dropped a ball into a container upon each mile traveled.

Archimedes was born, lived and died in the Greek city-state of Syracuse, in Sicily. Like all the early innovators, he was a generalist and is known as a Greek mathematician, physicist, inventor, and astronomer. And he was most definitely an engineer. "His name is inextricably associated with the genesis of engineering in ancient Greece," according to this profile on the website of the Technology Museum & Science Center in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Gordon E. Moore (1929 - ): Gordon E. Moore didn't invent the computer, and he can't take full credit for the microprocessor, though he and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce certainly gave it a hand. Over the years, his Intel engineers have taken a commanding lead in development of the computer chip that has become the backbone of countless products and the transformer of nearly every business and industry.

The thing that makes Moore stand out from all the others is his early recognition of just how big this chip revolution would be. In 1965, his Moore's Law predicted the trajectory of how many transistors could be placed on a computer chip. The time frame has stretched from a year, to 18 months to two years as the size and complexity of the chips have grown, but the law has held for more than 40 years. Each new generation of chips has doubled the computing power of the previous chips. As a result computing costs have been cut in half every one to two years, while speed and computational capacity have grown exponentially.

The impact of the microprocessor on the process industries cannot be overstated. Many modern processes simply would not be possible without today's digital controls and sensors. In the bulk material handing sector, just to take one example, highly accurate loss-in-weight and weigh belt feeders wouldn't be so accurate without their microprocessor controls. Digital weighing technology simply isn't possible without their onboard microprocessors.

Moore earned a bachelor's in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 and a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1954. For those who might say he's a chemist or a business manager, not an engineer, it should be noted that Moore is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Engineers. He serves on the board of trustees of the California Institute of Technology and received the National Medal of Technology in 1990 and the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 2002.

Who Are Your Engineering Stars?
So now it's your chance to nominate our process industry rock stars. They may be historical figures whose work we continue to build upon today. Or you may want to nominate a contemporary like Ajay Bhatt whose work is moving us toward tomorrow. Post your comment here, or send an email to don@powderandbulk.com with the subject line Engineering Stars.

Don Dunnington
Blog moderator

"People really appreciate that were doing this training online," Joe told me in a phone conversation, "because the economy makes it hard for them to travel to seminars." In addition to the usually high price of the seminar, there's the travel, hotel and food that can more than double the total cost.

"Even when companies have the budget to send people to seminars," Joe said, "with the leaner staffs most employees can't afford the time it takes to travel to training."

Currently four online classes are available, and a fifth is about to be released. They are part of an eight-session series on bulk solids flow:

• Lecture 1: Flow Problems - Their effects and flow patterns
• Lecture 2: Design principles for reliable flow - wall friction, flow functions, bin design parameters 
• Lecture 3: Volumetric and Gravimetric Feeding Devices
• Lecture 4: Measuring Bulk Solids Flow Properties-Shear Testing, Variables that Affect Properties

Each class costs $39 and is available for seven days following purchase. A class consists of a video lasting about one hour, downloadable class notes and a self administered quiz with answer sheet.

"It's a neat package," Joe said, "you get the video, the handouts, the quiz, and I'm available by phone and email to answer questions." He said that people like the fact that the video is available to view any time. "It's a great convenience to be able to view it on your schedule, and it makes this information more easily accessible to an international audience." He said he has had participants from the Middle East, Australia, South America, Canada, Europe and across the US.

Some companies have been using the videos in group settings.

Powder and Bulk Dot Com publisher Joe Taylor told of a company that brought 10 employees into a conference room and showed the video using an LCD projector. "Bringing people into one room allowed them to discuss the video as a group. They could play, pause, talk and resume play whenever they wanted," he said. "And at a cost of just $3.90 per person to train 10 engineers, there ought to have been enough left over in their training budget to buy coffee and donuts for the group!"

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator