Welcome to the personal pages of Jeff Lindsay, a guy in Wisconsin--no, now it's Shanghai, China since June 2011!-- suffering from Multiple Webpage Disorder. Doctors are working for a cure, but so far, the condition appears terminal—I may have only 60 years or so left. One of my latest additions is Surviving in China, which offers my tips for others coming to this nation, and especially those coming to Shanghai. A work in progress.

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"A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices." — William James

Terrain of the Cracked Planet of Jeff Lindsay:
Continents, Islands, Rifts and Faults

Recent Activities: A Wild Couple of Years in China!

The past two and a half years in China have been one of the most surprising and enjoyable periods of my life. Perhaps the best years so far. At a professional level, I've had many opportunities to share and to learn from others at a variety of conferences and events. Asia is such an exciting place, and Shanghai feels like the epicenter. I can't get over how many fascinating people live here and come here. I get to meet some of them by just riding a train, going to church, or showing up at various events and meetings. Plus I've never had such an active and rewarding social life as we have here in Shanghai, all enhanced by the world's best food (especially when my wife cooks).

There's much more to report when I get a breath. Trips to New Zealand, Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the U.S., plus many parts of China. Crazy! Some of it is documented in my photo galleries.

For so many years, I thought I was a small-town guy, totally happy in the quiet lifestyle I had in Appleton, Wisconsin. I often pitied those who live in big cities. Now I'm in the world's biggest city (by some definitions, anyway) and just love it. How do you people in smaller towns cope? How did I stand having to drive everywhere? How did I survive without veggie markets, fish mongers, bakers, banks, subway lines, and dozens of amazing restaurants within a 3-minute walk of my home? Ah, Shanghai! How I will miss you one day.

My work here in China has led to much broader networking and even far more speaking opportunities than I am used to, including many opportunities in China (some are listed on my resume page), along with opportunities in Singapore, Thailand, Australia, and even the United States. US events since coming to China have included being a plenary speaker at the Industrial Research Institute Annual Meeting in 2012, a speaker at the Managing IP forum about IP in China held in Chicago in May 2013, and a speaker at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Oct. 2011. Also had an interesting interview and video appearance for John Schmid's major story, "Paper Cuts" in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, leading to a discussion and sound byte from me on NPR's "All Things Considered."

Below is a photo from Asia Paper 2012 in Bangkok, Thailand, where I got to speak on innovation in the paper industry and take part in a panel on sustainability. The photo below is from the panel event.

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Conquering Innovation Fatigue - our book!

Innovation Fatigue - secrets of innovating and success

Buy now at Amazon

Conquering Innovation Fatigue by Jeffrey Dean Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins, and Mukund Karanjikar is published by John Wiley & Sons (2009). Get a copy from Amazon or anywhere books exactly like this are sold. Especially Amazon.

After years of working with innovators and pursuing innovation myself, I felt a need to share a different perspective on the challenges to innovation success. This perspective involves the personal side of innovation, exploring the barriers--including nine major "innovation fatigue factors"--that individual innovators face. We show how to recognize and overcome them. The book considers three different levels of fatigue factors: those involving problems at the individual level (including innovators and those they turn to or work with), at the organizational or corporate level (strategy, culture, incentives, and decision making) and also the external level that includes national policies, regulations, and taxation, with special consideration of university-industry relationships, where especially severe lost opportunity occurs.

Preparing the book Conquering Innovation Fatigue was a rewarding process. This book draws upon many experiences and interviews that I have had, along with those of my co-authors, Cheryl Perkins (the President of Innovationedge) and Mukund Karanjikar, a fellow chemical engineer and innovator. Our book is aimed at helping anyone who cares about innovation to understand innovation at a personal level.

So who's it for? Anyone who seeks to innovate, drive innovation, or influence innovation. Also, it's the perfect gift for Father's Day, Christmas, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, divorces, fans of patents (even chemical patents), you name it. For more information, see the supporting blog, Innovation Fatigue.

I Used to Talk to Myself:
Now I've Got Twitter.

Abbreviated Professional Bio

After nearly 20 years total in the Fox Valley of Wisconsin, I made a surprise career and location change by moving to China. I now live in Shanghai, China, working as Head of Intellectual Property for a growing Asian company, APP (Asia Pulp and Paper). I work in the heart of the world's biggest and most exciting city and love it. I'll be sharing more about my new life in China shortly--there's so much to tell and I've had so little time since moving here in the summer of 2011. Just like my previous jobs, it's my dream job, but the dream keeps getting more colorful. And now it's frequently in a different language.

Before moving to China, my previous dream job was as an innovation and IP consultant at Innovationedge, where I got to work with some of the world's largest companies as well as small startups, lone inventors, and everything in between. I especially loved working with bright, innovative people who were out to deliver breakthrough products and services to the world. Experiences ranged from helping world-class teams develop IP strategy for new products to helping new technologies get connected with partners for licensing and commercialization. I had four years of fun and adventure at Innovationedge and loved it. Great firm! Will always be grateful for the privilege I had of working there and learning from such good people.

Before that, I was Corporate Patent Strategist at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, a terrific consumer products company. I was at K-C for nearly 14 years in the research community there. My activities at K-C included:

  • Developing and driving strategies to protect new technologies for tissue making and tissue products, absorbent products, RFID technologies, and many new product concepts.
  • Founding a thriving community of practice called the Intellectual Property Chapter,
  • Leading a couple of patent review committees.
  • Leading efforts to pursue "business method patents" and build new strategic estates in areas related to marketing, RFID and data management, virtual reality, logistics, etc.
  • Strengthening patents through design-around efforts, technology scouting, competitive intelligence and IP strategy. Efforts included successful development of enhanced estates with chemical patents, for example (patents for new chemistries such as fibers modified with cyclodextrin or chemical patents for polyvinylamine applications, wet wipe binders, etc.).
  • Introducing and implementing an aggressive defensive publication effort as part of a low-cost intellectual asset strategy.
  • Pursuing numerous patents (also assisted in drafting many of them) and drafting many publications.
  • Helping groups around the company build their intellectual asset strategies and estates.
  • Forging connections with external groups offering promising technology.
  • Providing technical assistance in many areas to support new product development.

I'm a registered US Patent Agent with a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University. After BYU I was an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology (originally the Institute of Paper Chemistry). I joined that private graduate school as a faculty member in 1987 when they were in Appleton, Wisconsin. After a tumultuous $43 million move, the whole Institute relocated to the Georgia Tech campus. I made the move (loved Atlanta!) and became an Associate Professor in 1992, was named IPST Teacher of the Year in 1993, and then joined Kimberly-Clark's R&D group in 1994, which brought me back to Appleton. Had 13 great years with that terrific company. When our Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Vice President, Cheryl Perkins, left to form a start-up company centered around innovation, I would soon recognize an opportunity too exciting to ignore. In August 2007 I joined Innovationedge as Director of Solution Development. Had several wonderful years there before China called.

My Most Important Honor: "The Smartest Husband Ever Award"

While I've won a few awards during my life, the most important one by far is the "Smartest Husband Ever" (S.H.E.) award granted by the World Federation of Exceptional Women, a monumental honor based on my incredibly wise selection of a spouse. With all due humility, I can only say WOW! When I married Kendra Larson (now Kendra Lindsay), I felt pretty smart, it's true, but it would take years before I fully appreciated what a stroke of genius that was. To be honest, I didn't fully foresee that my incredible young wife would continue blossoming into the breath-taking woman that she is today. I didn't guess that she would organize an entire community and tackle massive barriers to create a successful charter school in Appleton, Wisconsin based on academic excellence (now the Classical School, a public school with over 450 students K-8). I didn't know what a terrific mother she would be, raising four amazing sons whom she would imbue with a passion for excellence and love for life and learning. And how could I possibly have guessed that after four children and almost 30 years of marriage, she would keep getting even more beautiful? The world may call me a genius, but I just think of myself as incredibly lucky. Nevertheless, I'm very proud to be the recipient of the S.H.E. Award. Many thanks to the terrific people of the World Federation of Exceptional Women, and thanks also for allowing me to be the Awards Chairperson for that esteemed organization.

Photography and Other Hobbies

I've got many collections of photos throughout this site, such as the recent "Memories of Winter" gallery (winter scenes from the Fox Valley, Wisconsin, 2008). They are copyright 2003-2008 Jeff Lindsay. Please don't use them without permission. Here are a few recent thumbnails, with links to various pages of photos:

"I'm Confused. What is JeffLindsay.com about?"

This eclectic little site contains my collection of writings on various topics over the last decade or so. It sprouts off in dozens of directions - photography, education, religion, RFID, investment ideas, politics, and my (former) town of Appleton, Wisconsin.

This site began in 1994 (though it took a couple years before I switched to my own domain name) as a repository for satire and spoofs as well as serious writings on topics I care about, especially some of my religious writings. I've also added samples from my hobby of photography. It's out of control now (see the Site Index - some links are just iceberg tips), but I'm working on improving it over time. It's meant to be family-friendly and helpful, though my oddball sense of humor is likely to grate some people the wrong way. Sorry about that.

Everything here was produced using 100% free-range Webmasters. And only organic electrons and photons are used with this site. Yes, JeffLindsay.com is 100% ORGANIC and completely free of preservatives, meaning that some things are stale, out of date, and full of bugs. If something does look broken, please let me know. It's getting a bit unwieldy, and though I'm overwhelmed with email, I try to listen and respond. Sometimes.

My Other Views

From where I perch on the great tree of life, I see a lot of things that I need to squawk about. Things that I think will help you, things you might enjoy, or things that might make you chuckle. I'm a bit shy in person, but not in writing. I love to write, and to blog a bit.

What, another blogger? Yes, sorry, I'm one of those people. Many of my views on religion and social issues are shared at Mormanity. The latter is my most developed blogging effort with fairly food traffic, and where I have the most fun - just a few minutes here and there, of course. I still have a life!

Some of the issues that I take on at JeffLindsay.com include education, religion, social issues, politics, trends in Corporate America, and the most important issue of all, food (in the form of my restaurant reviews for my fabulous little former town, Appleton, Wisconsin). Will I now be reviewing Shanghai food? Whoa, it's so great--where to begin? Email me if you're coming here and I'll share some tips. Some of the best food in the world is here in Shanghai. And so affordable!

Some odd projects are still in the works, such as PINSafety.com, a website where we will be developing concepts in my recent US patent on improved security systems. There's nothing there yet, but oneday PINSafety.com will have some fun content, I hope.... Meanwhile, a less serious invention, but one that has been stolen and used worldwide by leading food companies, is disclosed at WonderWhacker.com. With this leading edge concept, you can begin cutting calories like crazy today without going hungry. You'll get the knack. Give it a whack!

Regarding education, I hope parents will demand excellence and refuse fads. If kids aren't learning, they probably aren't being taught - at least not with proven methods. One fad in particular that I take on here is Block Scheduling, where I have provided resources used by many parents, teachers, and even students in resisting a popular but potentially harmful restructuring of schedules in schools. Sounds like an esoteric issue to most people, but it's a hot topic in education. The controversy illustrates quite a lot about some of the problems we face in public schools.

That Religion Thing

Now here's a topic that really spooks people. I should warn you that a portion of this site deals with religion. "Mormon? No, please, tell me you're anything but a Mormon!" - to quote one woman I met in Switzerland. Mormons? Latter-day Saints? What's up with that? Yes, I'm an active but highly imperfect member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (see LDS.org) and have written quite a lot about the Church and its beliefs. I take on a lot of common questions and attacks in the section I call Mormon Answers (LDS FAQ) and even have a Mormon blog, Mormanity, plus one that is sometimes related at The Nauvoo Times (a project by Orson Scott Card). While I am an amateur "LDS apologist" whose work is heavily used to defend the Church, I am not saying that the Church is perfect or has a monopoly on truth. In fact, I have tremendous respect for many religions and recognize that we can learn much from most of them. I also recognize that the Church has plenty of those pesky mortals in it, even running much of it, and that means errors and problems and embarrassments from time to time. OK, I can't give my full endorsement to every historical event and statement and practice over the years, neither in modern Church history or the Biblical record, for that matter. But I do think we have some amazing things that the world should know about, especially The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Got one? It's a major reason why I am proud to be a member of this Church. My experience with that book has greatly added to my conviction that Jesus Christ is real, that God lives, and that there is a way for men and women to find joy, peace, and meaning in this life and beyond. Oops, there I go, preaching again....

Webmaster: Jeff Lindsay of JeffLindsay.com    Contact:
Last updated: July 27, 2012
URL: "http://www.JeffLindsay.com/index.html"

This site is 100% free of bovine growth hormone, MSG, old growth forest products, baby seal fur, and trans-fat. Only 100% organic electrons are used for all our HTML coding and graphical displays. All visual testing of this site was done without the use of rabbits, cats, mice, dogs, roaches, or other cute creatures, so only human eyes were subjected to harmful visual testing during site development. If you experience any adverse effects, please realize that your anguish may have spared a rodent. Finally, the webmasters and writers who have slaved away to produce this site (well, just me) have been treated as well as we could afford, in spite of painful allegations to the contrary, so we're proud to announce that this is a Fair Trade site.

Note: In spite of any claims I may have made during my delusional episodes, this site is not necessarily endorsed by the National Institute for the Prevention of Mental Health—or is it? Remember, only you can prevent mental health, but this site can help.