Many a student has lamented the requirement to take courses in math and science when they believe it to be unlikely that the concepts taught there will ever help them out in real life. Diana Cano and Ido Shatzky are here to tell you to think again.
They are the authors of “Applying Physics Principles in Tech Leadership as The Formula for Success” and the featured speakers at the Princeton Tech Meetup’s gathering on Tuesday, May 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Princeton Public Library, 65 Witherspoon Street, Princeton. The event is free to attend; register at www.meetup.com/princeton-tech/events/300234711.
According to her biography on the Meetup site, “Cano recently completed a two-year accelerated product development program as senior vice president of the enterprise technology program management office (PMO), platform engineering (DevOps) and quality assurance (QA) at a leading audio content and entertainment company.
“Prior to her last role, she spent 20 years at Educational Testing Service (ETS) empowering the research and assessment development division and scoring operations, serving in two divisional chief information officer (CIO) roles. At ETS, she earned three US patents for innovations in assessment. She began her career with 10 years in factory automation and robotics specializing in global package distribution.”
Shatzky, according to his bio, is an independent consultant who “provides go-to-market and business development services to entrepreneurial SaaS companies in the USA, Israel, and the Czech Republic, covering topics such as machine learning, mobile applications, cybersecurity, retailers’ technology, neuroscience, and single sign-on solutions.
“Before his current role, he spent more than 25 years in sales organizations, leading teams in entrepreneurship at mid-size companies. During this time, he walked the walk and talked the talk by implementing the MGU framework to reach and exceed the team sales target. The same framework was used in different industries across the sale cycle, from opening new markets to increasing the penetration of existing customers. Every year, when the sales team gets their targets, the first thought is how to reach them. Ido used the spring theory time after time to eliminate skepticism, recruit early adopters and influencers, and demonstrate to the organization that it can be done.”
Their book, published in July 2023, is aimed at mid-level managers who have a background more focused on tech than on leadership. It takes concepts from physics and engineering that would be familiar to them and translates them into principles of leadership, especially in the context of leading a team through change.
The follow excerpt uses the example of Newton’s first law: that objects at rest will stay at rest, and objects moving in a straight line will continue on that path, unless they are acted on by an external force.
“With Newton’s first law, people will continue as they are unless and until a force is applied. We work our 40-plus hours with our teams on projects in the way we have managed them in the past. Let’s unpack this one. We work 40-plus hours each week — we are in a routine for waking, dressing, working, coming home, relaxing, sleeping, and starting again. We work in teams with subject matter experts who pull together to complement each other to get our work done. We start and finish projects that have funding, timelines, milestones, and results. We manage our teams — whether traditional or agile — in a somewhat hierarchical manner where there is a lead (e.g., manager, scrum master) and members (e.g., business analysts and developers) who perform the work needed to complete the project.
“Changes to this routine will only occur when there is a need. External forces may be market disruptions, like a new competitor releasing an innovative project. Internal forces could be a change in team members. These forces are applied to the group. These forces may have small magnitudes or large magnitudes. When COVID-19 erupted, there was a massive force on our routines that caused changes in how we worked, from in-person to remote, almost overnight. When a competitor releases a derivative product, the magnitude of that force is small; but it is still a force.
“So, Newton’s first law tells us that when there is a force on a group, it will cause a change in direction — a change in the way the team does their work. The question is where will this force take them? What will be the impact on how the team operates? And what is the effect of the change?”
