“Business briefs - Dubuque Telegraph Herald” plus 4 more

Business briefs - Dubuque Telegraph Herald
Feuding father, son take fight to court - Delaware Online
Redefining a Profession - New York Times
State set to recover sooner than US - Boston Globe
Michigan briefcase: Firms seeking engineers - Detroit Free Press

Business briefs - Dubuque Telegraph Herald

Posted: 27 Sep 2009 08:05 AM PDT

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Feuding father, son take fight to court - Delaware Online

Posted: 27 Sep 2009 07:15 AM PDT

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Under Christopher's leadership, the company expanded into Maryland and Washington, D.C., and saw sales grow more than 20 percent from $55 million in 2005 to $68 million in 2007, according to Christopher's suit.

"During this period, Bob remained in retirement and out of touch with the day-to-day operation of the business," Christopher's lawsuit says. "Although he continued to be Chairman of the Board, Bob deferred to Chris's management of the Company affairs."

A tale of two stories

In legal papers in which N.K.S. is the plaintiff, Robert, who owns the majority of the stock, tells a different story.

In the spring of 2008, the company's lenders expressed concerns to Robert about the company's financial performance and weak internal controls, N.K.S alleges in its lawsuit.

" ... By July 2008, Chris' mismanagement had resulted in NKS being in a financial crisis," Robert states in legal documents

Robert began working to return N.K.S to profitability and to "shore up its finances."

"Chris did not join in those efforts and actively resisted Bob," the N.K.S. lawsuit alleges.

While it was true Christopher had been entrusted with day-to-day management of the company, Robert denies in legal papers that he had retired.

What's more, Robert denies that he agreed to resign as trustee of the controlling trust. He was paid approximately $1.75 million, but it was repayment for loans he had made to N.K.S., legal papers said. Robert also disputes the amount of salary and compensation Christopher said he paid to his father, legal papers say.

By the time 2009 rolled around, Robert took steps to legally remove Chris from all positions with the company. But then, Robert, in an effort to reach a resolution, dropped his lawsuit and ended up reappointing Chris as president, according to legal documents.

Still, the situation at N.K.S. grew worse, the N.K.S. lawsuit says. By April 30, Christopher was removed from all positions with the company.

Anthony M. Horvat, managing director of NachmanHaysBrownstein Inc. in Philadelphia, a consulting firm that works with troubled companies, had been hired as the chief restructuring officer of N.K.S., according to legal papers.

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Redefining a Profession - New York Times

Posted: 27 Sep 2009 08:05 AM PDT

LONDON — The bet was for $50,000. It was offered by George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, to the designer Raymond Loewy, in 1940. The challenge was to spruce up the packaging of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Loewy accepted the wager, and Hill asked when he expected to finish. "Oh, I don't know," drawled the designer. "Some nice spring morning I will feel like designing the Lucky package... I'll call you then."

Loewy won the bet, and claimed the credit for the subsequent increase in Lucky Strike's sales. That was nearly 70 years ago, and design has changed dramatically since then, as the designer Tim Brown relates in his new book, "Change by Design." "Few designers today would even touch this type of project," he writes of Loewy's assignment. "What excites the best (design) thinkers today is the challenge of applying their skills to problems that matter."

He's kind of right and kind of wrong. Much as I'd like to believe that designers are too altruistic to bother fiddling with the graphics on cigarette packets, many still do. But it is true that more and more designers are devoting their time to serious stuff, like repairing environmental damage or kindling economic recovery, and it is their work that concerns Mr. Brown.

Born in Britain, Mr. Brown is now the president and chief executive officer of IDEO, a design group based in Palo Alto, California. His book?'s objective is summed up by its subtitle: to demonstrate "How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation." He marshals lots of examples of how this works in practice, although his underlying theme is as much about how design itself is changing, as how it effects change in other industries.

When Mr. Brown, 47, started out as a product designer in the late 1980s, design was mostly about creating physical things, such as the widgets he developed in his first project for a machinery manufacturer, or visual ones, like the graphics on a Lucky Strike packet. Designers now also tackle intangible strategic and behavioral issues, such as helping businesses and government to organize themselves more efficiently and make their services more user-friendly. Mr. Brown describes this as the shift from old-school "design," which he regards as "technology-centered," to the "human-centered" discipline of "design thinking" — a term coined by David Kelley, who co-founded IDEO in 1991 originally to develop tech products for clients in Silicon Valley.

Design thinking is an elusive concept, as Mr. Brown admits. His punchiest definition is that it is "about more than style." In a nutshell, it involves the application of the traditional skills that designers develop, often without realizing, to identify problems and invent solutions in collaboration with experts from other disciplines, their clients and the people who will use the results.

For IDEO's designers, this has meant working in multidisciplinary teams alongside engineers, computer programmers, marketers and behavioral scientists. One design thinking project involved developing a new type of low-tech weekend bicycle — named "coasting" — for Shimano, the Japanese cycle components maker, to persuade the adult Americans who had loved riding their bikes as kids to take up cycling again, rather than developing a dazzling new bicycle as old-school designers would have done.

Another project encouraged the nurses employed by Kaiser Permanente, the U.S. health care group, to work out how to improve the care of patients by redesigning their own schedules. A third analyzed people's spending habits to invent a new Bank of America service that helps them to save by rounding up each purchase to the nearest dollar and depositing the difference in a "Keep the Change" account, just like throwing spare coins into a change jar. IDEO's teams of design thinkers have also worked on projects for nonprofit organizations, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and U.S. government campaigns, as well as on conventional product design and branding programs.

Mr. Brown gives glimpses of what it's like to work at IDEO. He recalls an executive from the furniture company, Steelcase, sinking into a snazzy-looking chair only for it to collapse. (It was a painstakingly detailed $40,000 foam prototype, not the real thing.) He also recounts the horror of the lead designer on the development of an Oral-B toothbrush, when he spotted one of his products washed up on a deserted Californian beach, six months after the launch. And what designer wouldn't relate to his description of how: "I cannot count the number of clients who have marched in and said, 'Give me the next (Apple) iPod,' but it's probably pretty close to the number of designers I've heard respond (under their breath), 'Give me the next (Apple ceo) Steve Jobs."'

There is a danger of books like this deteriorating into sales pitches, as their designer-authors trot out examples of their companies' prowess. But Mr. Brown writes with a winning combination of thoughtfulness, pragmatism and enthusiasm. IDEO looms large, but the references are relevant, and interspersed with descriptions of successful exercises by other companies, from the development of the Netflix online movie store, to that of United Airlines's Premium Service between San Francisco and New York.

Mr. Brown also puts design thinking into a historical context by explaining how some of his design heroes practiced it, albeit unknowingly. Take Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great 19th-century British engineer, who designed the bridges, viaducts and tunnels of the Great Western Railway in southwest England and Wales, not only as spectacular structures, but to make passengers feel as if they were "floating across the countryside." They still do.

Critically, he avoids the trap of presenting design thinking as a panacea. Mr. Brown charts its failures as well as successes, and sees confusingly designed Web sites and dysfunctional help lines, as the latterday equivalents of the Industrial Revolution's "dark satanic mills." Nor does he pretend that it is easy. Instead, he depicts it as a messy, uncertain, often inconclusive process, albeit one that is more fun, and much more productive than tweaking cigarette packets.

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State set to recover sooner than US - Boston Globe

Posted: 27 Sep 2009 08:27 AM PDT

As a result, MetraTech has added 15 jobs to a workforce of about 100, and is expanding into larger offices. Meanwhile, professional, scientific and technical services, a bellwether tech sector that includes firms like MetraTech, has gained jobs in three of the past four months, and added more than 2,000 since February.

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Michigan briefcase: Firms seeking engineers - Detroit Free Press

Posted: 27 Sep 2009 07:58 AM PDT

The Engineering Society of Detroit Fall Engineering & Technology Job Fair will be held from 2 to 7 p.m. Thursday at the Rock Financial Showplace in Novi.

More than 30 companies will be on hand to recruit talent from various disciplines including architecture, design, chemical, civil, computer, energy, electrical, biomedical, environmental, aerospace, transportation, biofuels, manufacturing, mechanical, programming, technical and other engineering and technology related fields.

The Engineering Society's spring job fair attracted more than 1,500 attendees.

Cost to attend is $15 and includes a one-year membership to ESD and the opportunity to network with corporate employers from numerous fields.

Attendees are encouraged to bring several copies of their updated rsum and to take advantage of ESD's Job Bank by entering their rsum free of charge.

To register, visit www.esd.org or call 248-353-0735. For more information, call Leslie Smith at 248-353-0735, ext. 152, or lsmith@esd.org.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: Science incubator opens

The Michigan Life Science and Innovation Center has opened in Ann Arbor to connect entrepreneurs with business accelerator organizations and start-up life science companies.

The 57,518-square-foot facility is a collaboration of the Michigan Economic Development Corp. (MEDC), Ann Arbor SPARK, Greater Wayne Economic Development Corp. and a private foundation that contributed money to purchase the facility from Pfizer. The center offers office space, in addition to laboratory facilities.

Current research and innovation taking place at MLSIC includes focused drug development, clinical research organization, biological processes, and life science services. Among the companies:

• Algal Scientific Corp., a biotech company working to develop a system to convert proprietary algal strain into fuel.

• Chef House Catering, a catering and events planning company and the center's caf operator.