The Richwood Report

Presenting your product to a group can be difficult because feedback is hard to get. The group may listen politely but have no idea what you are talking about. You have no way to know whether you are being understood or not and the meeting is your important opportunity to get your message to the customer.

If you feel you aren't getting the support, you are getting blank stares, and people aren't responding to you -- chances are they don't understand you. So, what are some things you can do to help people to understand you?

Go here and find out.

Some notes on how to have a good business dinner are here. Most of us don't do a lot of planning when we host customers at a meal. Some planning and preparation can make a big difference when you want the customer to remember what a good experience he had at the meal.

An old anonymous poem goes:

The month of June is here again, and all across the land
The graduation speakers come to tell us where we stand.
We stand at Armageddon. We stand upon the brink.
We stand upon life's ocean where we'll swim or where we'll sink.
We stand upon life's threshold with lamps all brightly lit.
And in the midst of all this standing, we sit, and sit, and sit.

It seems commencement speeches are well-known for being long and not very helpful. Hard on the seat and boring on the mind. If you want to read one that is more enjoyable, go here. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer gives his thoughts on his own life for the graduates of Stanford University this year. His personal story is encouraging and shows how the most unlikely experiences can be the ones that make a big difference. For instance:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Father's Day is Sunday. Those who have living fathers will remember them and those who don't will do the same thing. All of us can remember the men who have shaped our lives. Kim DuToit was born to a mining family in South Africa and became an American citizen in 1989. He remembers his grandfather here. The essay is posted on Memorial Day, but seems appropriate for Father's Day as well. Everything on the page may not suit every taste but his memories of his grandfather show the powerful influence a father and grandfather can have, often without much awareness of what they are doing or how they are doing it. Many of you will see perhaps some of the miners you know in the essay. Except for a few clues that Charles Loxton lived in South Africa, the same story could have taken place in West Virginia, Kentucky, or wherever you live.

Ever wonder how the shop operations are carried out to manufacture our products? Some of us may take these things for granted, seeing them every day, but others may be curious but have never had an opportunity to observe. Here is a website that explains and illustrates the operation of basic machine shop operations like milling, drilling and sawing. There are videos of some operations and valuable safety information too. Thanks to MIT for making this material available.