We are not an ordinary company with typical ambitions.

We aspire to be a proper professional outfit that treats our people and partners with respect, while doing our best to really enjoy ourselves - whatever the ridiculous endeavour we decide to tackle. This corporate requirement directly impacts what we build and, more importantly, how we build it. Seriously, we de-prioritize revenue opportunity as long as we can have a few good laughs and not want to kill ourselves at the end of a week.

We believe this is the way to foster products, by making them with a kind of ‘love’ for the process and the journey. This provides the permission for us to constantly try things and to fuck them up… and this is okay - because it’s how we get better at what we do.

Mighty Dynamo is not looking to be bought or sold. This isn’t because of any issues with investors. We work with these groups on a regular basis in our consulting practice. It’s just not the way our business operates, for good and for bad. In fact, It’s liberating. Based on everything we have seen and done, this is the only way for us to conduct ourselves in the manner needed to uphold our values and creative nature.

This is the tune by which we travel.

What makes a good consultant?

Most of the successful consultants I know stand out because of their specializations.  You can find a freelancer, mercenary, or agency for pretty much anything these days.  Indeed there is an app-for-that and on-demand-humans are pretty much an 'add to cart' commodity.  This makes a whole lot of sense as it's become so much easier to connect people with subject matter expertise to the people who need it. 

Mighty Dynamo is atypical to most consultancies. My utility lends itself to a broad range of business scenarios, probably more-so than other individual or small shops. I have a history of handling broken or ‘uncharted territory’ situations; where there is change, there is uncertainty.

This bring us to Lesson 1: The world is shockingly small and word gets around, so beware and protect your reputation.  You never know who might need whatever the fuck you are known for doing.

I fell into my first consulting gig thanks to my reputation of resurrecting legacy brands/technologies and transforming them on new platforms with different business models.  Having experience with sleuthing a problem, re-imagining the opportunity, and then orchestrating the moving parts within an organization to get something out the door, turns out to be a generally useful skill.

When facing these kinds of business problems, clients tend to also request things like innovation and something patentable; as though those words themselves were some kind of requirement. Defining what such desirable words actually mean is the mystery bag of "what the fuck do you want?". Seems silly to ask for bionic arms when the patient is bleeding out, however, solutions can be future-proofed with the fairy dust of hope and good intentions.

My background is design and despite the fact that I am a mediocre designer, it has been this foundation that has formed how I tackle problems and how I do business.  There really is something to be said of 'design thinking' and how powerful it is to have an open mind, active imagination and adaptive approaches to address highly complicated or constrained problems. 

IMHO it is a disservice to be regarded as an 'ideas guy' because an idea is worthless without the follow-through.   Deriving the process by which an idea is nurtured and shaped into a state where it actually delivers against intention, that is the real mission. For this reason, I work on the strategic and tactical cusp – doing the trench work and crossing the lines within an organization is the only way to operate.

Lesson 2:

Even though you need to have a lot of confidence in your abilities to do whatever you do, being the most skilled is not necessarily the deciding factor of being a stellar consultant.  Of course, your client needs solid confidence in your ability to deliver, but it is their TRUST in you, as a human being, that is paramount.  You will naturally observe that this is closely connected to lesson 1, but trust is an intimate thing... not only do you need to earn it, it does not auto-renew... you are only trustworthy until you lose that status, whereby regaining that trust becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible. Inconsistency is risk and someone you can’t trust consistently is basically someone you can’t trust at all. 

Lesson 3:

For sure, there are practices and behaviours that any consultant can observe to maintain a strong and healthy relationship with clients.  The reality is, there are many techniques to entrench and milk a client.  If it is really just a recurring revenue stream and nothing else, what’s the point? Sure, there are loveless marriages too, so there is nothing wrong with a sterile partnership, but that isn’t something particularly rewarding. For me and my team, this makes a huge difference on how performant we are.  Genuinely liking your clients and wanting them to succeed is essential. There are many circumstances of necessity where such principles may be too ideal, but this is a defining factor for any work we take on. Without this, the other lessons don’t work.

Why share such thoughts?

When I formed Mighty Dynamo it was solely meant to incubate and protect new project concepts. I was unaware that consulting was an incredible gift. Only after years of client-side work did I finally appreciate the true benefits. Consulting can be financially rewarding; it can provide exposure and insights to lateral challenges, it trains you to view the world through a different lens; and it is extremely gratifying when you help people. 

What I find rewarding from consulting is likely quite different than others. In my opinion, to engage in consulting with the intention of becoming a better consultant means it is a perpetual self-help program. Building a reputation, being a trusted advisor, and actually giving a fuck are all inward propositions and life-long work. What you strive for yourself matters. After all, as a consultant, you are the product and no one really wants a stagnant product.

Digital Engineering, “Design Thinking Savvy”, Randall Newton, 2017

“Products are fundamentally getting harder; there are a lot more dots to connect,” says Chris Cheung, founder of Mighty Dynamo. Best known for his product development work on the Alias Wavefront line of automotive design tools and then Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Cheung is a champion for the emerging recognition of design thinking as a business model.”

Check out the full published article here:

http://www.digitaleng.news/de/design-thinking-savvy/

In business and in life, we all spend a lot of time with people, lots of different types of people. Some are very, very great, like giants from legend while others are so very small that you might mistake their particular accomplishments as insignificant. Each and every one are, however, fundamentally the same template from chemical composition, psychological configuration, and biologically predisposed to peak and degrade within specific tolerances. Everyone navigates through life, trying to find their way before the clocks strikes midnight.

What is amazing about all this sameness is, everyone’s journey is an unfathomable amalgamation of distinct variables, constraints, and choices. None of us live identical lives and none of us react to the same stimulus in the same fashion, therefore, our experiences are completely unique.

Giants and specs-of-humans alike need the occasional helping hand, even if, at times, it is the back-end of a hand.

On the professional side, there’s no lack of data with respect to career development. Go internet for yourself and find endless statistics like 70%-80% of employees at any given company would rather be doing something else; that between 30-40% of them blame the lack of career progression for the rut in their life; or nearly 40% of managers admit to having no clue what their direct reports career goals are or should be. Clearly, expecting the system to take care of you might be a stretch.

As the title goes, I've selected 3 words for this post's primary ingredients, so let's see what classic alliteration can cook up.

MENTOR – an experienced and trusted adviser.

Mentorship is pretty awesome.

It is regarded as an essential part of personal and professional development by many high-achievers. I'm not a high-achiever, but am a strong advocate of it too. Had it not been for other people graciously nudging me along the way, I can only imagine my path would have been much lonelier and darker.

There is plenty of good advice on mentoring, which is useful because being a good mentee and/or finding the right mentors can be a challenging sort of dating scene. Here are 3 articles that I feel provide useful insights... I have summarized key points for you convenience:

10 Reasons Why a Mentor Is a Must, Inc. Magazine, Jan 9, 2016

1) Mentors provide information and knowledge
2) Mentors can see where we need to improve where we often cannot
3) Mentors find ways to stimulate our personal and professional growth
4) Mentors offer encouragement and help keep us going
5) Mentors are disciplinarians that create necessary boundaries that we cannot set for ourselves
6) Mentors are sounding boards so we can bounce ideas off them for an unfiltered opinion
7) Mentors are trusted advisers
8) Mentors can be connectors
9) Mentors have the experience you can learn from to prevent making the same mistakes as beginners make
10) Mentors are free, which makes them priceless in more ways than one.

8 Successful People Share How To Find A Mentor, Fast Company

1) It’s about the person, not their position
2) Don’t always expect a relationship - Mentors come in all different forms
3) Instead of insisting on coffee or dinner meetings, be flexible
4) In addition to looking up for mentors, look to your right and left
5) Your mentor usually find you (not the other way around)
6) Don’t always look for someone you like
7) Don’t ask a CEO for the roadmap - ask for advice on how to navigate
8) Remember to give and Take - Don’t be a greedy mentee
9) Mentorship is not a life vest

Mentorship Is Key To Career Success For Young Professionals, Forbes

1) Don’t be afraid to seek out mentorship
2) Learn to recognize the accelerators in your life
3) Remember that mentorship is a two-way street

MUSE – a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration.

The term is most often used in connection with artists and creative endeavours, but it is equally valid in any professional context. I’m a huge fan of this type of motivation because there is an intangible chemistry about it. It is distinctly human, emotional, and even magical in that such forces can even exist.

I’ve often been impressed by the symbiotic relationships that form among musicians, actor, director and even startup collaborators. In a land where we have such bounty of exceptional and generically over-qualified professionals, it can be these kinds of emotional connections that swoop in for the win.

In business, there are many stigmas with following the heart, yet so much success is reliant on irrational passion, tenacity, and conviction to believe in impossible things. Muses are there to inspire, to be the catalyst of wonderful ideas and outcomes that would otherwise not happen.

Being or finding a muse is certainly more difficult than that of a mentor. By definition, a muse is a rare and special thing, practically mythical. It is, however, not pointless to aspire for such intimate and powerful human connection. I can tell you from experience, that forming these types of working relationships is real and it empowers doing amazing, if not impossible, things.

1) Inspiring others is, in itself, inspiring
2) It doesn't have to last forever to be terrific
3) You don't need credentials to be this kind of awesome

MONSTER – an imaginary creature that is typically large, ugly, and frightening.

In writing this, I must confess, that despite having great mentors and muses in my life, I actually think it is the monsters that have contributed most significantly to my professional development. As Newton’s 3rd law states, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

1) You are going to fall, a lot
2) You will be repeatedly told the things you cannot do
3) Scary things trigger urgency
4) There are a lot of dicks out there; so much so that it’s quite possible the world probably can’t function without them

With these sorts of things in mind, we should all make extra effort to find ways to exploit these abundant resources for positive gain.

After all, mentors are hard to find and when you have them, there is no guarantee they won’t steer you wrong; muses can become a crutch or the magic can simply evaporate or turn sour… but with monsters, it’s all pretty straight forward; expect obstruction, demoralization, and disappointment as default. Knowing shit is fucked up and people are assholes can be liberating...

This is the stuff quality anti-role-models are made of! How else are you supposed to know what not to be like until you have experienced it first hand?

ME – by that, I mean you as well as me.

In the end, you are the only constant in the equation – It’s your life and yours alone. Whatever ratio of mentors, muses and monsters you manage to collect (or whether you get it all rolled up into a single brilliantly psychotic person), it comes down to how you choose to apply these influences and derive meaning into your career and life.

The secret is simple: *Find out which really motivates you most (or least)

Mentors, Muses, Monsters and Me
Illustrations by Nimit Malavia

Yep, this is shit on my desk; but it isn't an ordinary turd.

This particular piece of shit was squeezed out of a crocodile's ass 10,000 years ago, thus it is petrified, free of odour, and mostly harmless, unless, in some unlikely circumstance, I decided to drill it at someone's face.

At this point, you are probably wondering, what the fuck?

Well, I do have a business point to make eventually, so stay with me on this ride as there is so much we can learn and enjoy from it.

As a metaphor, shit is an obvious and versatile business tool. It is such a compact and direct means to convey the magnitude of a poor assessment, whist also providing an embedded secondary measure of disgust in the inflection and tone of delivery.

You can tell, I hold the term in high regard and use it quite liberally, however, this is but a tangential tribute.

This piece of shit was excreted at a very amazing time; this was formed in the Neolithic age. For humanity, this is a pretty fucking big deal!

Often referred to as the tail end of the Stone Age or the New Stone Age, this was the period where stones were polished to manufacture new types of tool, the appearance of pottery, the construction of megalithic structures, monuments, and permanent shelter.

From even my shitty surface-level online skimming of this timeframe, it is obvious that this catalytic shift boils down to the gradual adoption of agriculture. Moving away from a nomadic or transhumance existence to a more sedentary lifestyle was the direct result of learning to farm. Just think of it, rather than having to set up camp, work your balls off to exploit resources, breakdown camp, then carry all your shit to the next place to set up camp and do it all over and over again... people could suddenly invest into establishing shit with their time.

According to Ancient History Encyclopedia, agriculture affected how human society was organized and how it used the earth. With the capability to cultivate and stockpile food for long periods of time, people could invest the intellectual resources to develop new technologies and then improve them over time.

Agriculture equals more food and, it turns out, less preoccupation with finding food results in more people, more complex social organization, which in turn makes more people and more complexity, until voilá, you find yourself reading this article on the internet.

This crocodile is minding its own business, like it has since the Cretaceous period, and takes an innocent and probably unexceptional dump, unwittingly enabling some human to postulate the significance of its excrement 1000 decades later.

Okay, now, you might start to see this post really is about the shit referenced in the title photo above; only, it is representative of all the figurative shit that each and every one of us do. And yes, we produce a lot of it, which really is a blessing and a curse.

In our personal and professional lives, we amass heaping piles of experience, featuring both failures and achievements. Busy and forward-thinking lives don't typically have affordance for reflection or strolls through memory lane, but I'm proposing that there is a lot of value to making the time to take stock.

The first time I had to roll back time was before moving to the UK. It was a little more intensive than updating a resume because I didn't have a resume to update. That happens when you are serving a long tenure and have an inward view of yourself with respect to the organization you serve, so I had to go full-blown archeological dig of myself to find the relevant pieces of information that communicated who I was, how I directly contributed, and what my competencies were.

It wasn't a nostalgic task because I was pulling shit together against the clock and a little worried with representing the right content as to meet the immigration criteria, but this was such an important exercise to take stock and remember ghosts from projects-past.

I'm talking about the forensic evidence and the marks that we, as individuals, leave behind. Our CV, LinkedIn profile, creative portfolios, our affiliations, they are a few of the pieces of the historical record that define who you have been.

I literally just saw a post on Instagram quoting JFK "For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.". It is a decent enough quote and what is timely about seeing this is, how it deliberately expresses "those who only...", so not implying that you shouldn't "look to the past and present".

Context setting is pretty fucking important, so plowing forward without any regard of where you have been or having some introspective view on who you actually are seems ridiculous.

Recently, I started documenting projects that have been important to me. It started with my last 4 most recent projects. The format was a one-slide summary for each item that included timeframe, project background, an image or related snapshot, key collaborators and why I thought it was significant to my career. I was surprised that before I knew it, I was on slide 28 and had already gone back as far as 2003.

I'm not finished with it yet and have started to interlace personal milestones because my desire is to map key points in my development and visualize common themes, consistent behaviours and recurring ideas and interests. Also, when I see it in this format, I don't just see a church or state view of myself... I get an holistic historical snapshot.

I have to say, this has affected how I view myself and how I run my business. It lets me reflect on the projects that failed and the moments that made them great, it reminds me of the circumstances that drove why I made decisions one way or the other, and it presents me with patterns that I can interrogate and critique in 3rd person fashion.

Naturally, it's a work-in-progress, never really meant to end or result in a singular conclusion or epiphany. But as the everyday shit continues to pile on, making a point to reflect on the things that matter from time to time, keeps healthy conduits between your past, present and future.

Last words with respect to my petrified crocodile shit. It was a present from my wife and came fully wrapped and wasn't a gag-gift even though it is completely nonsensical as I don't collect fossilized shit. This alone elevates its value significantly above all other petrified or fresh mucous-coated shit.

I'm pretty sure that our friend, the crocodile, had no idea that something so insignificant as its feces would survive millennia to find a home on my desk to inspire so much thought and provide so much joy. This reinforces how a little shit can go a long way.

An Epic Journey, aka A Shit Story
Photos of petrified shit by Chris Cheung.

Are you experiencing some machine anxiety? Perhaps concern that some manner of robot will take your job away.

This theme never seems to get tired, but this time, when it happens, it will trigger a chain reaction on civilization as significant as harnessing fire. It is the dawn of an age that will fuck with our minds on a whole new scale. And yes — tick tock — it’s almost time to cull the herd!

We’ve all been reading stories about it for years, watching all the keynote speeches, embraced the hype, and made our purchase decisions to fuel giants, so each of us, in our own way, has participated in the nurturing of the machine. We have been feeding it, placing our trust in it, surrendering our identities to it.

After all, machines will be machines… and for the most part, guided by external forces; they are, until now, tools in our service.

It’s understandable that when you read articles about artificial intelligence, they usually fall into one of two extremes, A) wonder with optimistic hope and B) the ‘we are totally fucked' Skynet camp.

This is the way we tend to operate. We all hate an ambiguous 3 star movie review ; how many of us are happy when friends respond with ‘maybe’ to our dinner party invite? In every way, it is easier to extract and derive meaningful feedback from polar extremes.

As Dekkard put it in Blade Runner… “Replicants are like any other machine - they're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.”

The problem with this, and this whole article, really, is it doesn’t really have anything to do with fucking robots!

When I grew up, there was a lot of people that didn’t dig sci-fi as a genre. At the time, those that loved the shit tended to be social misfits, and were rightfully ridiculed, which in turn motivated them to take over the world. Thus, today, sci-fi is completely mainstream. For those late to the sci-fi party, do you ever get the sense you’ve missed out on the backstory of our present and the rudimentary survival training that came with it?

The shit is now.

According to an American trend study conducted in 2014 by Pews Research Center, Science and Technology ranks among the top 3 interests. It’s on top of Business, Sports, Entertainment, Religion and Government… with only local community events and health ranking higher.

We, as a civilization are booking it, full steam towards smart, autonomous, self-aware machines. Once this tips, a whole shit load of ‘holy fuck’ will unfold because the amount of change impacting daily life will be at unfathomable proportions… Think of the legislative and regulatory perspective, the economic impact, and, on a human emotional level, are we remotely prepared?

When you walk in on your partner fucking a self-aware machine, is that adultery? If you are the ASFR-type and fall in love with your robot companion, will your marriage be recognized by the state? How do we feel about hunting self-aware machines for sport and pleasure; is it cool? Will machines be our new slave class? Will they need human rights?

As the cantina dude at Mos Eisly said, “We don’t serve their kind here!”

It’s like opening a big ass can of tapeworm caviar.

Some people write how ‘we’ can steer this technology and make good social decisions. For sure, I support this kind of positive proactive approach as much as I oppose evil… but there is no shortage of examples where good intentions result in calamity… and, let’s face it, who is ‘we’ anyway? This stuff will be decided by organizations that have monetary measurements and line items for good deeds won’t balance the books.

It really isn’t about the robots…

Humans don’t like each other so much, we never have. We tolerate each other to maintain enough of a social fabric and cohesion so we aren’t alone to fight groups that we tolerate even less. In 2015, Wired published “Why people care more about pets than other humans” citing research by two American universities. What resounded most to me from this article was our ‘special concern for creatures that are innocent and defenceless”. In many of the experiments and research, humans demonstrated “the lowest levels of emotional distress” from victim scenarios involving human adults. This isn’t a smoking gun to support my point because I really don’t need any additional reinforcement beyond what I see, hear, and read on a day to day basis, it’s just fascinating that there are so many circumstances where we value animals over human lives.

Let's throw an inanimate object into the mix… save your phone or save a stranger scenario. I can only assume it would be a lot tougher decision than many would care to admit. If there was NO social consequences, I predict entire cities (if not civilizations) could be sacrificed to avoid the minor inconvenience of replacing a SIM card and having to set up a new device.

Now, from a workforce perspective, I don’t think anyone reading this has not been exposed to an employee, a business partner, co-worker, or boss who is certifiably useless, unreliable, or downright contemptuous. According to recent reports by Gallup, worldwide employee engagement remains dismal. 70% of people are just disengaged, unhappy, and have little to no trust in their bosses. They just don't give a shit.

Even though I am a sucker for a good underdog story, the reality is, I haven’t experienced enough turn-arounds where a disengaged under-performer becomes a super-star or even an asshat demonstrating slight improvement in attitude or partial reformation. Have you? Top that off with your most performant members bailing on you for better opportunities, it is typically an uphill battle on the HR front. Now how appealing would a nice reliable machine-force be to replace all the fuck-faces that seem to go out of their way to undermine your chances of success?

I get why we are fearful. Robots are scary not only because they can be better than us in many, if not all, functional ways; 1) they can be deployed in a manner that can take away your livelihood-as-you-know-it (btw, you are likely okay with them taking someone else's), 2) their purpose is programmed by an organization or person you do not entirely trust, 3) at one point, they will not require any human intervention at all to self-perpetuate, 4) they will learn to fear us like we fear ourselves, 5) they will evolve to become complete assholes too.

With any great invention or new innovation, any manner of good or nefarious purpose can be applied.

What I do know, however, is there will always be something to be worried about. The panic-du-jour will be robots one day and once we’ve come to terms with that (if we survive it), we will find something else to fill in the void that is somehow that much more terrifying.

I find solace in the illusion of preparedness.

My survival regime includes active participation in tech to earn some baseline of credible opinion, watching lots of sci-fi movies imagining they are real-world scenarios, studying news and history documentaries pretending they were created by screenwriters, and then making and saying shit as though tomorrow really matters.

After all, for now, it's still all about humans.

Robot Artwork by Tom Lopez.