Mission

I was talking to my wife Sarah the other day about DSP - enthusing in fact. I have been involved with DSP through my whole career (which makes it now 35 years), and I love the subject. DSP is really exciting. Not just because of its applications but for the thrill of new insights into the subject itself. And yet DSP is regarded as a ‘hard’ subject, and one that most people avoid - their dread for the topic only increased by typical exposure to an undergraduate DSP course.

So I was enthusing about how  lucky I am to work in such a fun and exciting field but also worrying, as I do, about the flawed ways in which it is taught and the puzzle of such a cool subject being thought so hard and dull. What I want, I was saying, is to teach people DSP so that they enjoy and love it as much as I do - so that they want to pursue careers in this, my own field, and so that they can benefit from insights that I have gained over years and do it really well. I was also explaining (I think ‘going on’ is the technical term..) about how much is wrong in DSP - far too much focus on abstract math and too little on engineering (for cost and efficiency) or on quantifying uncertainty or in relating the numbers back to their real-world meaning - and saying how over the past few years I have worked on those areas to understand them better so I can explain them in my own teaching.

So Sarah said: “You should write that down as a Mission Statement”. Which inspired me to do just that. But it is easier to ramble and enthuse than to write a Mission Statement. I thought a Mission Statement was a sort of inspiring vision that informs and directs a company’s work. My Mission Statement would have been something like: “I love DSP but I think it is taught wrong. I want to teach people DSP so that they love it as much as I do, and I want to teach it right.” But it turns out to be a bit more business-like than that.

Wikipedia says this:

“According to Bart[who?] (1997), the commercial mission statement consists of 3 essential components:

Key market – who is your target client/customer? (generalize if needed)
Contribution – what product or service do you provide to that client?
Distinction – what makes your product or service unique, so that the client would choose you?”

Which leaves me stumped. Who is my ‘key market’? I don’t really know. Clearly those who are already expert in the field don’t need me (unless they are the experts who are wrong, in which case they wouldn’t listen anyway), so I could say “Engineers and Programmers who design or use DSP but are not expert in it.” That sounds a bit patronising - many of my clients are very expert, just not at the particular aspects they want to learn at that time. And let’s not forget the Project Managers, R&D Directors, Product Managers: it is all getting a bit woolly. Besides, one of the best DSP courses I ever gave was to the Admin section of a major DSP company: they just wanted to know what their company did, to understand it and feel a bit of ownership - they were not engineers or programmers. I will talk to anyone about DSP who is remotely interested (and sometimes to those who are not..) and I think that anyone with an ounce of application can understand it, at least to some extent, and certainly be enthused by it.

My ‘contribution’ is a bit easier, but not much. I know things, and I want you (my ‘key market..’ to know them too.I teach DSP (I don’t do ‘learning’ because you have to do that yourself and, not being a true academic, I never really engaged with the ‘learning not teaching’ fashion in academia). But even teaching isn’t really it - I just want you, my client, to ‘get it’ - to understand, in those “is that all it is?” moments that mark genuine insight, when something that seemed hard suddenly seems obvious.

And my ‘distinction’ - what makes me, or my teaching, classes, books, unique? I mean, neither my classes nor my books nor I am unique - you can find shed loads of books and classes and teachers on DSP. Lots of them (not all..) are really good. Why would you bother to come to me, rather than one of the many other DSP consultants, teachers, or books? Well actually on reflection that comes back to what I was saying to Sarah: DSP is taught wrong, and people don’t love it - I want to teach it right, and to help you to love it as much as I do. Notice I say I ‘want to’ teach it right - because the approach I am now taking is new, and so I am also learning how to teach this way - but we have a lot of work behind us now in re-thinking what DSP is and how it should be taught most effectively. If you have followed our courses or read our books before you will see a new focus, not only in the way we introduce topics and offer insights and understanding but also a new insistence on quantitative estimation, measurement and calculation as the very basis for the subject, and on programming and implementation as its foundation rather than the less helpful abstract math. This will propagate through all our materials over the next year or so, as I revise and re-write to follow our new way of working.

And you should also see our new Mission Statement:

“I love DSP but I think it is taught wrong. I want to teach people DSP so that they love it as much as I do, and I want to teach it right.”