My parents arrived in England in the 1960s with the typical three No’s, no education, no language and no money. With three rug-rats and a rented leaking roof to pay for, they did what immigrants do best. They sucked in their pride, started at the bottom and worked their stones off to give us kids a chance. 

My brother and sister became doctors. The ultimate passport for Chinese immigrants to escape the bottom of the rat race. I on the other hand didn’t. When we went back to the village in Hong Kong my father would proudly present his successful kids as Doctor Yau, and this is also Doctor Yau and this is Ah Dee (my family name meaning baby). 

Dad regularly over-inflated how well he and we were doing. I cringed with embarrassment. As a kid I used to witness others chuckle at his embellishments and boastings in his broken English. They were laughing at him, not with him and sadly he couldn’t tell the difference. As a result I am petrified that I am just like him and I run away from any self-promotion. Hence writing this bio is one of the most painful of exercises. (Deirdre won’t let me off the hook) 

With that upbringing I had only one mission. Get into the biggest bluest-chip companies and race to the top, so my Dad could proudly announce to the village, this is Dr Yau, this is also Dr Yau and this is my son the top Business Executive. My operating model was simple – blindly do whatever my superiors told me to do, head down, bum up and work harder and longer than anyone else. That not only worked, it was admired …. when I was a junior. The wheels fell off, though, as I went further up the ladder.

There was a benefit of applying my operating model in 100+ year old blue-chips. Whilst racing up that greasy pole in Philips Electronics, H.J.Heinz, Sainsbury’s and Coles Myer I was conditioned to build operations where human errors were systematically rubbed out. Faults not only sucked, they were sackable offences. By osmosis I had developed a sixth sense to search and destroy errors.

It didn’t stop there. It took seven ventures to end up in the business graveyard, before I started to figure it out, because I stupidly worshipped that model. Luckily I have a gorgeous patient, supportive and forgiving wife. I just want to share some of those important skills I learned with the world… ‘cos how I went about building success in the first half of my life …was just wrong. If nothing else from this bio, don’t do what I did. 

In building my second career I got to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs complaining about their chronic growing pains, like the intolerable levels of errors, their own cursed work-life balance, their eternal burden to find people who can do the job… To help them I would offer a tiny dose from my sixth sense, and several weeks later that same entrepreneur would be invigorated and refreshed. They had self-medicated with that little advice and had evidence of healing. I used to believe everyone knew about the sixth sense stuff, it was nothing special, when in fact it was a lost art to this entrepreneurial audience.

At the core of my being I am an industrial designer. What does that mean? It means I love working out how something is made and how people will interact with it.

Industrial design courses (and there were only a handful of them scattered around the country) were all about ergonomics and user interfaces, or in other words: how can you tell how to use something just by looking at it.

Australia was a manufacturing powerhouse when I did my initial degree. Many of my generation went on to become pioneers in product design. I went into manufacturing where I could see things being made.

Working in manufacturing taught me how to design for producibility and to ensure mistakes couldn’t happen by designing processes that worked and could be measured.

I fell in love with production processes. Working out how to make something repeatedly scratched an itch that I continue to need to scratch to the day.

Happily I landed a job with Bridgestone which was, and still is, a multinational Japanese company with Total Quality Management at its heart. There I ran the Quality Circles program which taught the production line workers how to identify problems in their work area that could be fixed, then to measure the size of the problem, research options and recommend fixes to senior management. This was TQM simplified to the most hands-on level possible and distilled into easily understood ideas.

My next move was to a company making gun holsters and body armour under the guidelines of the ISO 9001 quality system. I designed gun holsters and body armour but more interestingly I worked on the manufacturing process to ensure that every piece of body armour would be made correctly and be traceable back to the individual who made it.

So much fun!

I have taught design for manufacturing to undergrads, creative problem solving to people with learning difficulties and ergonomics to engineering masters students and, of course, quality circle techniques to production line workers. Add in committees or boards for course design, industry training and sailing and I have been involved in education and training at almost all levels.

But the most transformative experience was working with production line workers on quality problems. Tweaking or redesigning processes for efficiency, better working conditions or more consistent quality ticked such a big box for me.

To present day – my company works at the manufacturing end of the graphic design spectrum to produce the unproducible whether it is because the timeframe is too short or there are too many things that could go wrong or because no-one can work out how to do it. Our business (I have a business partner who also comes from manufacturing) is built on a foundation of Standard Operating Procedures and process design. Without them we would be no different to any other design company. With them we do what others can’t.

Somewhere along the way I completed a masters degree in design management, became a yachtie, a paddler and a pilot. I am happiest working with the geniuses in our studio to nut out how to do something the most efficient way, and on days off taking to the sky or the water for a fly or a splash.

I am glad I started work in the era of Australian manufacturing. Everything I learnt about designing processes, reducing errors or waste, costing out jobs, documenting processes and teaching people how to make the new thing, are all skills I use everyday. Only the environment has changed.