thomas malloy wrote:
Terry Blanton wrote:
I can't allow the denigration of engineers in the automotive industry
continue. I had a friend who was an engineering manager in Detroit
I agree, IMHO, it's the MBA's and the lawyers.
Please, let us not oversimplify. Yes, there are cases such as Enron
where a small group of malicious or stupid people destroyed the
institution, but in most cases institutions fail for more complex
reasons. The design engineers, production line people managers and
everyone does the best they can, yet they fail. I think the three
most common causes are:
1. A change in the environment. A strategy or product that was
successful previously no longer works. This is what drives most
species to extinction in biology.
2. Systematic failure. The institution itself degrades or goes off
the rails, so that even skilled and competent people are no longer
able to do their job properly.
3. Bad leaders commit institutional suicide. The classic example is
Napoleon invading Russia.
I have long been fascinated by the failure, especially institutional
failure in corporations and military history. I have a shelf full of
books with titles such as "Mismarketing -- case histories of
marketing misfires," "Computing Catastrophes" "Military Misfortunes
-- The Anatomy a Failure in War" "British Butchers and Bunglers of
World War I" plus several books about the Titanic disaster, which I
summarized here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusion.pdf
As I said in the subject line, failure is as complex as success. To
ascribe it to one person or group of people is like saying that Bill
Gates gets all the credit for the success of Microsoft, and all the
blame for the low quality of Windows.
There is no doubt that Gates is a skilled businessman and he deserves
a lot of credit for the success of Microsoft. He is also rapacious
and greedy and this is reflected in Microsoft Windows. It is a
shoddy, infuriating product in many ways. A software product, a
machine, work of art, a meal -- anything made by the hand of man
always reflects the personality of the maker. When an archaeologist
digs up a fragment of a pot made thousands of years ago she can tell
much about the lives and personalities of the people who made that pot.
But Gates doesn't get all the credit -- or blame. The success of
Microsoft also came about because of a unique set of circumstances
and coincidences. Personal computer technology circa 1980 required
tight adherence to a single software standard, and this gave rise to
a natural monopoly. This also explains why Windows is so shoddy: it
has to be backward compatible on a huge range of different hardware
which Microsoft does not control. (Not the way Apple controls the
Mac.) Today, the "tight technical standards" model is changing with
the rise of web-based software. This may hurt hurt Microsoft while
benefiting Google and other companies.
Before Microsoft, IBM had a huge market share in computers because of
its experience in the 1930s with punch-card based data processing
equipment. This gave IBM extensive knowledge of business
applications, well-deserved credibility among large corporations, and
a cadre of people skilled in electromechanical devices such as tape
drives and disk drives, which were some of the most problematic
components in early computers.
Sometimes, it is difficult to judge whether a strategy was a success
or failure. It works well in some ways, but in the long term it
causes a calamity. IBM achieved its peak profits and and industry
dominance by introducing the Personal Computer. But by the late 1980s
the rise of small computers nearly put IBM out of business. The PC
was made with off-the-shelf components, and IBM decided to use an
open architecture and to let Microsoft write the operating system,
and to let Microsoft sell copies of the operating system to other
companies. These were sound business decisions at the time. At worst,
they might have been considered minor mistakes. IBM managers expected
to sell a few hundred thousand PCs. They never imagined that a
gigantic PC compatible industry would soon arise or that Microsoft
would make billions of dollars selling the operating system to others.
Success also evolves into failure when it causes hubris, or
overconfidence. In 1861 and 1862, beginning at the first battle of
Bull Run, the Confederate armies won many decisive victories. They
began to think that they were invulnerable. They did not take steps
to build up arms manufacturing or fight a long war. Lincoln, on the
other hand, began an unprecedented expansion of military forces, both
men and material. By 1865 the size of the Union armies and the mass
of ammunition, food and other war material being shipped to the front
was larger than anything the world had ever seen. When the
Confederates surrendered there were hundreds of thousands of Union
soldiers who had "never heard a shot fired in anger." They were
waiting to be deployed, while the Confederate armies had been ground
down to a few tens of thousands of starving men. Lincoln pushed the
Union into the first "total war" economy in history. The Union had a
larger population and greater industrial capacity to start with, but
the Union advantage at the end was much larger than that initial gap.
Also the Union destroyed southern industrial capacity and railroads
in Georgia because Lincoln, Sherman and Grant understood total war.
The principal nations engaged in World War I and World War II also
adapted total war economies, but once again the U.S. did it on a
bigger scale than any other, and again it was larger even than our
initial advantage in GNP. You might say that the failure at Bull Run
taught the US government a lesson in how to fight a war that led to
the overwhelming might of the US in 1945, and even the atomic bomb.
But, history never stands still. Circumstances change and evolve . .
. and our over-dependence on material might lost the wars in Vietnam
and Iraq, and probably Afghanistan. A strategy that works well in one
era causes disaster in another.
- Jed
