Managing a New Machine
My father was the manager for the technology project which was outlined in Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine. He had a brief period of fame where he was asked to do things like give commencement speeches at graduate programs. This was one from Boston University’s Management Information Systems program in 1987.
Boston University Graduate MIS Program
Commencement Address, 8–9–87
J. Thomas West
Thank you, Mike. It’s an honor to be here.
Those of you who read Soul of a New Machine probably wonder what an R & D manager and a graduating class of MIS professionals have in common. I kind of wondered that myself.
And the answer is: a lot more than you might expect.
Your world, like mine, is going to be a world of technology choices… a world of risk-taking … and a world of complex management decisions against a backdrop of high pressure and continual change.
I know that this curriculum is one of the best in its field, and has prepared you well in the ways of managing businesses and corporate careers. But I think I could add three or four things to that body of knowledge — observations from 25 years of watching how the world works in our industry and how people stay on top of it.
What I’ve learned may be surprising, but also very encouraging: specifically, that success is only somewhat influenced by outside forces, and much more influenced by our own personal efforts.
Let me first make a few observations about what I think a manager really does. You’re probably familiar with the conventional wisdom that there’s an overall methodology for managing projects. That you can look at the whole process, analyze it, and put together a master plan with a set of PERT charts and then follow them. But in practice, the chances that any one person can understand or control the whole process are close to zero. The best we can probably do is manage only pieces of it.
A phenomenal amount of management’s time gets wasted on things that really don’t lend themselves to being managed — when people work, how they work, or what they think.
What you can manage is the simplest description of a project’s goals; the cost and schedule targets; and things like resources and tools. You can manage the environment, keeping forces in the company from derailing the project.
But mostly, your primary responsibility, I believe, is to manage yourself.
That may sound a little Zen, so let me give you an example — the details come from my experience at Data General, but the basic scenario could occur within your first 6 weeks on any job:
You walk into my office after staring at a piece of paper for 30 minutes or so, not being able to figure out if the counter you’re designing should be 8 bits, 16 bits, or 32 bits wide. Now chances are I know the answer to your question, having been there and back a few times.
If I tell you the answer, you go away and write it down… and the next time you hit a problem maybe you spend only 5 minutes on it before you’re back in my office. Before you know it I’m designing this thing, you’re sitting there as the draftsman — neither of us have learned a thing.
So what? Well, that may not seem like much when you’re 6 weeks into a career. But I can go up to the director level at Data General and show you people who are still doing that — delegating problems up to their boss instead of presenting solutions. Many of these people seem to rise to their positions through a chain of command that believes managers are chosen because of their superior abilities at giving orders, or the correctness of their world view. That may be true in the military, but it’s seldom true in American business.
As a result, these managers often become experts at delegating things up, down and sideways, instead of developing the self-discipline needed to see a problem all the way through. Eventually their responsibility could grow to the point where it’s directly reflected in the company’s bottom line… their inability to own that particular problem space becomes visible at very high levels of the organization, and can no longer be delegated up… so they’re caught. Soon they’re being moved from one lateral position to another. Without anyone ever saying so, their career has reached a dead end.
The bad news is that the corporate policy manual never told us that we had to manage ourselves, or that we should learn to extend our attention span beyond the point where we want to give up.
The good news, however, is that it’s a very important component of most successful careers I’ve seen… and it’s directly within our personal control.
Another observation has to do with risk.
I know you’ve heard a lot about risk — not the new computer program architecture, but the unwelcome possibility that the CFO’s spreadsheet drops a bit and your company starts buying cement factories in Peru.
My view into this is that most people try to minimize risk almost as soon as they get into a management position.
They put backup strategies in place with backup projects in case the first one fails, demoralizing everyone concerned.
They staff the project with people who’ve done the same thing many times before, so the end-product winds up looking predictably just like the last one.They throw more people and dollars at the problem, slowing down the process to the point where it may not get done….
Or they try to define projects that they feel fairly comfortable about scheduling — and fairly comfortable about the outcome.
The problem with all this is that if you already know the answers before a project starts, it probably isn’t worth doing. If it’s safe, it’s obviously not close enough to the leading edge.
There will usually be a competitor out there who’s willing to push out the barriers and go for it, if you won’t. So while management is taking as many steps as possible to minimize the risk of failure, the company slides into a going-out-of-business strategy as it becomes less and less competitive on the open market. Its failure was in fact ensured.
I’ll tell you something that happened recently in my own organization.
We were developing a new computer under incredible pressure to get it to market, and one of our managers came to me and said he wanted to put a new power supply on the machine. This was an untried design, based on a new technology that we’d only read about in books.
My reaction was “You must be nuts! We’ve got enough risk going on this project without building a new power supply.”
To which he said, “Maybe I’m nuts, but I’m gonna try it anyway.”
Well, you can guess the answer.
Some months later I walked in the lab. The power supply had been functional for over a month; it ran the first time; it put us way ahead of the industry; and it’s been the most reliable design we’ve ever fielded.
That’s unheard of for a power supply!
I came perilously close to firing a guy because the risk he took could have placed the whole project in jeopardy.
Of course, it was a well-calculated risk… and it was a spectacular success — a success attributable to two major factors: one, an individual’s desire to be excellent, and two, management’s ability to control its anxiety over seeing something done in a new way. Like it or not, we all have to take risks in order to sustain growth — the growth of our businesses and industries, as well as our individual careers. So I think the strategy that wins is not trying to prevent something from going wrong, but being able to tolerate that prospect while optimizing for a successful outcome. Once again, the policy manual didn’t tell us anything about how to manage our insecurity about risk. But it’s another very necessary business skill, and again, completely within our control.
So far I’ve talked about things that contribute to success.
My third observation has to do with being personally prepared for it.
We have an industry that’s really new.
In fact, it’s probably been less than 10 years since the MIS professional moved out of the computer room and into a position of front-line responsibility and authority.
The growth rate has been phenomenal, and it’s all being fueled from the bottom by college graduates like yourselves.
At Data General, which is not atypical, the average age of a thousand-man R & D organization is 27 or 28 years old, and will probably get younger, not older, over the next few years.
What typically happens is a college graduate will spend a few years on a project and then become a first-level manager; and probably a second-level manager a few years after that.
That’s really the requirement to keep this thing going.
So the management opportunities are going to be there at a very early age to begin taking control of large pieces of the corporate business, and also, large portions of other people’s lives. If that kind of success is important to you, then I suggest you’ll probably achieve it.
The people in my experience who know what they want and are willing to work very hard for it — which always requires sacrifices — usually succeed.
Perhaps the question you should be asking yourself is not, Can I do it? but Is that what I want? Because, you know the saying — sometimes what you bought ain’t what they sold.
You could be making major business decisions 10 years before your parents did.
Or managing 20 to 50 people before you’ve started a family.
Big opportunities, but also big personal choices.
And it’s a real dilemma for a lot of young professionals today who are being forced to make these decisions when they may not have even discovered what all the options are.
The college graduates who worked with me in the Eagle days have advanced so rapidly in the organization that they were never really conscious of the choices they made along the way.
And now, in their early 30s and managing multi-million-dollar projects, some are facing what amounts to major life crises as they try and come to terms with that success.Those who are deriving the greatest satisfaction from what they achieved seem to have been driven by a deep, personal need for the kind of success that can be found uniquely in this management arena.
So I think it’s very appropriate that you’ve spent a year not only studying, but really thinking about these issues, because it’s more than just academic.
Understanding the decisions you’ll make — whatever they are — will free you to enjoy the rewards.
And there really are rewards.
It’s an exciting business, it’s fun, and though much has been said about burn-out in our industry, I believe the challenges keep people young.
So… cultivate the discipline of managing yourself…
Develop your tolerance for risk…
And prepare now for your success.
Those are the 3 major things I’d be thinking about if I were in your position.
They probably have more to do with successful career building than serendipity, corporate politics, or possibly even native talent.
They’re fundamentally under your control.
And you can start applying them immediately if you haven’t already.
At this point I think you might like to receive your diplomas and start celebrating.
So let me just say congratulations, and thank you for the opportunity of joining you on this occasion….
Best wishes to you all.
Thanks to Forrest Macgregor for the OCR and text massaging.
