Engineering Management Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: A Personal Perspective

Engineering Management Journal, Sep 2009 by Farris, George F

George Levitt, a distinguished chemist at DuPont who received the National Medal of Technology, described himself to me as the "Forrest Gump of the Chemical World," naively stumbling around but finding himself present in situations where important things were happening. In many ways this mirrors my experience in engineering management, especially the early days. It was very much an accidental Odyssey One experience led to another, which led to another, which led to another, and here I am.

The Early Days

The year was 1966. I was a newly minted PhD and had just finished teaching in the MIT summer course on R&D Management. Don Marquis, who directed the MIT program on the management of R&D, approached me and asked if I would like a free trip to London on the SS United States. His wife and sons couldn't go, and the ticket would be wasted if I didn't use it. I jumped at the opportunity. In the UK I met Alan Pearson, founder of R&D Management, and several other British scholars, including several from the renowned Tavistock Institute and the new London Business School. That fall I discovered that my MIT salary was partly paid by Project Hindsight, a DoD effort to link innovation to basic science. No one had bothered to tell me that when I was hired.

MIT was an exciting place in those years. Some of the most important early work in engineering management was being done. Don Marquis was contrasting radical, incremental, and large systems innovation; Ed Roberts was studying technical entrepreneurs; Tom Allen was studying technical communications and technological gatekeepers; Jim Utterback was contrasting product and process innovation; Eric von Hippel was identifying users as innovators; Jay Galbraith was developing his seminal ideas about organization design; and Ralph Katz and I were studying individual engineers, technical teams, and leadership. We shared ideas, commented on one another's work, and served on thesis committees together. Funds were readily available from DoD and NASA, we interacted with Dick Rosenbloom, Bill Abernathy, and Paul Lawrence at Harvard, the students were very smart, engineering managers came to see us, and in general life was good. There was a genuine curiosity about technological innovation, effective engineering management, and management of technology, and the field was so new that everything we discovered seemed important at the time.

My own work in engineering management didn't start at MIT. As an undergraduate at Yale I began in electrical engineering, but changed majors to psychology because EE, at least as it was taught then, seemed boring and a lot of drudgery. A psychology major exposed me to all sorts of interesting ideas and research findings; moreover, it freed up my time for more �lectives in the arts than EE allowed. I ran rats with Neal Miller, studied creativity with Don Taylor, learned a lot about doing research from Fred Sheffield, and had two courses including a T-group from Chris Argyris. It was exciting that a kid like me could actually do interesting scientific research in the social sciences right away, unlike EE, a more mature field.

I went on to the University of Michigan for my PhD in Psychology and immediately found myself as a research assistant in a graduate perception course although I had never studied perception. Early on I met Frank Andrews and Don PeIz and worked with them on their classic book Scientists in Organizations. The study was significant , since it included 1311 scientists and engineers from 1 1 different industry, university, and government organizations, a huge sample in its day. My Master's and doctoral theses came from that project. My master's thesis tested some of Chris Argyris' ideas using data on scientists and engineers. It used a correlation matrix for much of the analysis. In those days everything was on punch cards, and it took me one month to get back my 28X28 matrix from the computer center. Today SPSS can do the same thing in seconds on my laptop.

My thesis, "A Causal Analysis of Scientific Performance," looked at 3 development labs of a company and found that engineers and scientists earned their organizational climates through their performance. An indication of how primitive our knowledge was at the time is that I tested 10 hypotheses, based on the research and theory of that era, and they were all wrong! Rather than climate leading to performance, the primary direction of causality was the other way. This research attracted lots of attention at Michigan, but it was sometimes cited as a "Casual Analysis of Scientific Performance" rather than a "causal analysis!" I had a wonderful doctoral committee. Chaired by Bob Kahn, it included Frank Andrews, Keith Smith, Basil Georgopoulos, and the philosopher Abe Kaplan. Michigan was exciting place- I studied creative problem solving with Norm Maier and Dick Hoffman (who connected me to Rutgers 15 years later), and I got to do many hours of field research, thanks to Floyd Mann, Rensis Likert, and others. My fellow graduate students and I spent many hours with the Teamsters in a grocery warehouse and with the inhouse Board of Directors of a major international company- not engineering management, but tremendous learning experiences for graduate students in their early 20's.