Castool Community

1) Ready yourself, become familiar with him or her

2) Be an expert. They cannot be an expert in everything.

3) Appreciate his or her perspective, this does not mean you must agree.

4) Determine what you are trying to achieve as a result of the meeting.

5) Prepare a short summary outlining the main points that you can give him or her.

6) Treat his or her assistant with respect.

7) Great him or her with a smile and a firm hand-shake, and let them set the tone as to whether or not there will be small talk.

8) Be quick. Present the background and the reasons, and expect to be interrupted.

If you don’t know the answer when asked, don’t bluff; say you will find out. If challenged, don’t automatically back down and agree. Remember you are the expert. If you back down too readily, you will lose credibility. However do not be stubborn.

IF YOU HAVE ACHIEVED YOUR GOAL, LET THE MEETING END.

If you are new to my blog, you may not be aware that I race vintage motorcycles. We are starting to get ready for the 2012 season. I will be racing a Ducati F1 and Ducati 851 in period 4.

Vintage Road Racing is becoming increasingly well known as a venue where motorcycle racers go to have fun.

The racers themselves are not there for the glory, the fame or the money. They are there to compete, to test their skills, to push their machinery and themselves to absolute limits; to wrench, to curse, to skin their knuckles to the bone, and then pull on the leathers and line up against their friends and archenemies on the starting line.

These are serious weekend warriors. There are no posers who don their best “bad boy” leather costumes and ride from one donut shop to the next.

Instead their leathers are stained with sweat and blood on the inside and asphalt kisses, or more on the outside.

This is real motorcycle riding with an edge.

The mere word “innovation” has been so overused in the marketing and advertising industry as to become nearly meaningless. Of course, every company should aim to be innovative or at the very least moving forward and improving. As one saying goes, “If you’re not innovating, you’re dying”. This is often replaced with the concept of growth to an almost interchangeable degree. So what really is innovation?

Innovation is not what many companies claim. Too many companies simply take what others have done and either directly “borrow” the idea with their own flair or simply make minor improvements that don’t have significant impact on customers. Think of the throngs of “me too” products that range from smart phone cases to tablets to HDTVs. While they may claim it, there’s no real innovation in the lion share of companies clamoring for consumer attention.

Not that i mind giving flowers on Valentine’s Day, but society’s obsession with romantic love – the notion that one day you will find the perfect one and live happily ever after – is responsible for more misery than any other myth of modern life.

Our culture tells us to follow our hearts and not our heads.

You may realize that the kind of partner you always thought you wanted may be a complete disaster. I know so many people who have wasted their lives believing that the person they thought was their type would eventually sober up, conquer their writer’s block and sell their novel, or change in some other manner.

True love is not lightning bolts. It is not something that just happens to you. It is something that builds over time.

True love isn’t what i used to think it was at all.

For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one.

The Castool team is an attempt to build a whole team of A players. People say that A players will not get along. We realized that A players like to work with A players, they just do not like to work with C players.

To succeed in doing this you require a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone, even if they are going to be in sales, we have them talk to the design folks and engineers.

Until now, innovation studies have focused either on radical innovation pushed by technology or incremental innovation pulled by the market. Design-driven innovations do not come from the market; they create new markets. They don’t push new technologies; they push radically new meanings.

For companies this means having a vision and taking that vision to your customers. Think of game-changers like Apple’s iPod. They overturned our understanding of how we listen to music. Customers had not asked for these new meanings, but once they experienced them, it was love at first sight.

But where does the vision come from? For truly radical breakthroughs, we must look beyond customers and users to those he calls “interpreters“: the community of players — from artists to technology suppliers to design schools — that surround every product and deeply understand and influence how people give meaning to things. By identifying and interacting with the right interpreters, companies can generate offerings with long life cycles, significant profit margins, strong brands, and sustainable growth.

There’s a systematic process — led by a firm’s top executives — for leveraging relationships with interpreters into radical new meanings for products:

• Listening: Identify and attract key interpreters and access their knowledge about possible new meanings.
• Interpreting: Develop unique proposals based on this knowledge.
• Addressing: Use the seductive power of interpreters to sway customers’ minds and hearts.

Providing a provocative innovation, thinking and practice, is how design breakthroughs that delight customers and give the company an unbeatable competitive advantage.

Too many managers believe that they must offer bad jobs to keep prices low. As a result, almost 20% of NA workers suffer low wages, poor benefits, constantly changing schedules, and few opportunities for advancement.

The presumed trade-off between investment in employees and low prices is false.

To meet short-term performance targets, many managers cut labour. The unmotivated and poorly trained employees who remain often cannot keep up with their tasks in a complex operating environment. The result is a vicious cycle, in which lower sales and profits tempt managers to cut even more employees.

Instead, you should simplify operations by offering fewer products, train employees to perform multiple tasks, eliminate waste in everything but staffing, and let employees make more decisions.

You will create a virtuous cycle of investment in employees, stealer operational execution, higher sales and profits, and larger labour budgets. And at the same time make work more efficient and fulfilling for employees, improve customer service, and boost sales.

We have had a breakthrough at Castool in relation to die heating.

Our new CX SCDO with 3 phase heating controls is reducing TTT (time to temperature) by 30%.

Not only is the CX type oven faster, but the cost to heat the die is also less. Our conventional oven costs approx. $1.67 to heat a 16″ did X 6″ die to 860 F, the 3 phase CX oven costs approx. $1.21. This is 27% less.

The CX ovens heats dies 30% faster and costs 25 to 30% less to operate.

Example: 16″ X 9″ dia. Die Ring /Die   Standard Heat Cycle 2 hrs 46 min / CX Type Oven 1 hr 46 min (36% reduction in TTT)

Also, with reduced TTT, fewer ovens are required to service each press. This reduces the capital outlay and the amount of floor space required.

Existing ovens can be upgraded, or traded.

When you near the end of a project, it always takes longer and costs more money to complete than you think.

If the first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% of the project will take another 90%.

You may begin to wonder whether it is worth the effort, but you must persist.

Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have a product that has no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it is manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

Take a close  look at our QR Container sometime. We have an air-cooled version for the Superextruders that extrude at such a high rate that there is a slight build up of heat using the standard QR container design.