AcMo Innovation Lab

Issues are part of life.  No matter who you are or what you do, there will always be issues.  How you choose to deal with them can determine your level of success.  Success has a different definition for everyone.  AcMo’s definition of success is two consecutive days without blowing up anything or having an incident with a client’s vehicle.  We tend to appreciate the simple victories.

The most difficult issues sometimes have quite simple solutions.  The trick is to allow different perspectives to flow into your mind, and then use those to find new trajectories to reach the goal.  I can be found on occasion standing on my head to force my eyes to see the whole picture.  It is a means to gain new insights.  It has not worked yet, but I persist because it has to do something.  I challenge the staff and anyone I encounter on the street to force me to think and work in a different manner.  We often overlook simple and obvious details because we are running on autopilot and our brains love to fill in gaps with what we expect to see.  This is why so many people walk into fountains and traffic while using their phones.

The issue today is that I arrived at HQ1 to find the office dark and all of the staff sleeping.  The party was two days ago, and it wasn’t that great.  There is no reason for the staff to still be sleeping off the festivities.  I could wake them with the fire system, but I doubt I would get anything productive from them for the day.  That also puts AcMo at risk if we have a fire later in the day.  This is a time when I need to do the unorthodox.  I’m going to let them sleep, but they can forget about getting paid for their time while unconscious.  That is ridiculous.  I’ll take that fight all the way to the Supreme Court if I must.  In fact, I may suggest that all of them pay me for their time while asleep in AcMo’s facilities.

This unplanned lull in activities provides an opportunity to give you a brief tour of one of our operations.  I invite you inside an important AcMo unit:  the AcMo product innovation lab.  The lab is responsible for the creation of new ideas and reverse engineering existing products to influence future designs.  Because so many companies make great products, we spend a lot of our time reverse engineering them to see if we can steal their mojo and secret sauce to create our own and better version.  We of course change the name, appearance, packaging, and sometimes the SKU before unveiling the product as our own.

The lab is a secure area within AcMo that has multiple layers of anti-intrusion tech.  Our work inside the lab is fundamental component of our ability to maintain our position at the forefront of advancements.  One of the most exciting aspects of the lab is the vehicle dynamics station.  Here we disassemble client vehicles to learn more about what makes them special.  We also learn what makes some of the vehicles mediocre.

We improve upon any design deficiencies or cost cutting measures wherever we can.  This work helps us better understand how we can skimp on materials or processes when AcMo begins vehicle production.  This is how we will avoid building vehicles that are subjects of massive recalls.  We pour through the data from the other manufacturers to pinpoint the exact areas where their design and production teams malfunctioned.  I force the desk engineers to do this so they can better understand the difference between conceptual design and a production item.  AcMo will eschew a pushbutton start or keyed ignition lock to avoid the recent problems facing Lincoln and GM.  We couldn’t have benefitted from this knowledge gifted from those manufacturers if they hadn’t messed up so much.  The ignition button and lock issues are obvious issues that even the lay people can identify without effort.  The deeper problems, such as chassis dynamic issues and metallurgical incompatibilities require more work to uncover.  We do this at the track, and it is the excuse we use when we are tracking our client’s vehicles.  It is all in the name of testing and making safer vehicles.  We’re looking out for our client’s best interests by serving ours.

All of the detail work is necessary because the Scuderia AcMo F-One team will need a technology transfer repository.  Everyone knows that the only reason auto manufacturers enter F1 is to create new technologies relevant to road cars.  Since AcMo doesn’t yet have road cars, we will use data from the F-One team to drive our first road car build.  Our extensive experience twin turbocharging animals will benefit during the creation of our automotive power units and extra cost tuning options.

We are working with a multi-stage plan, and the information I’ve shared details only a small aspect of the daily activity that occurs in the innovation lab.  Exclude today from that because no one was in the lab except for me.  Everybody else was sleeping.  The first full week of 2015 will be more productive or more staff redundancies will occur soon.  I won’t send out the warning memo until Thursday at the earliest if it proves necessary.  Heads will roll on Friday.