Technology Entrepreneur: A High-Tech Services Business: Think Tank Adventures, Lessons, and Product Evolutions

By C. J. Rubis

Join a technology entrepreneur as he shares the challenges he faced while operating a high-tech think tank for twenty-five years. Author C. J. Rubis delivers a fascinating story-filled narrative of the Technology Think Tank business and its effects on many government and industry projects. The numerous adventures, challenges and learned wisdom demonstrate the opportunities for the technology-services entrepreneur in this exploding age of technology to develop services and product innovations.

Technology educators, students, budding and struggling entrepreneurs, and others will find real-life stories and dozens of examples to illustrate business principles. Learn about

the history of one company that operated as a microcosm of the think tank industry;

ways to overcome problems of business continuity and stability;

methods for company formation, staffing, and business development and management; and

processes for research, analysis, and development of innovative products.

Written as a memoir, this business narrative is meant to inspire and guide entrepreneurship. It shares how to successfully initiate and grow small business opportunities in the huge government and defense technology services industry. Youll be educated and amused by the lessons and stories in Technology Entrepreneur.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469753447

C. J. Rubis

C. J. RUBIS has worked as an aerospace engineer, consultant, engineering professor and government laboratory R&D manager. He founded and operated a technology Think Tank for twenty-five years conducting hundreds of systems engineering, design and simulation projects over a very wide scope of technology. He traveled abroad and the oceans on Air Force and Navy missions, published many reports and papers and received several U.S. Navy awards for technology achievements

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Copyright © 2012 by C. J. Rubis

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Technology Think Tank—Perspectives and Mission

Chapter 2: Entrepreneurship and Company Formation

Chapter 3: The Human Technology Resource

Chapter 4: Business Development

Chapter 5: Analytical Studies and Simulations

Chapter 6: Electronics, Simulators, and Software Projects

Chapter 7: Management and Motivation

Chapter 8: The Business Environment and Competition

Chapter 9: Project and Business Failures—Their Valuable Lessons

Chapter 10: Technologists’ Adventures

Chapter 11: People, Working Environment, and Imparted Wisdom

Chapter 12: Selling, Reacquiring, and Reselling the Company

Chapter 13: Reminiscences, Conclusions, and Lessons

Conclusions

A Final Note

Notes

About the Author

To my parents, Julius and Jennie,

immigrants from Lithuania who provided the gift of life,

the incentives for my education, and, most vitally,

instilled the purpose and destiny of life.

Acknowledgments

PDI Employees

The accomplishments of this small company were due to a remarkable, productive team, particularly the core senior group that trained new staff and provided a continuity of expertise through the many tumultuous yet prolific years, and also our diligent support staff.

Particular recognition is due to Thurman Harper, the company’s third employee, a tireless worker, exceptional technologist, confidante, manager, and eventually president of the company. His computer expertise was significant to the early growth of the fledgling enterprise and he continued in both a technical and managerial capacity.

The senior technical staff was Larry Carroll, Jeff Greenblatt, Ed Campini, Jim Jefferson, Ken Mitchell, Gary Strang, E. J. LeCourt Jr., Jeff Langsner, Chuck Eser, Ken Lively, Steve Fogle, Al Witcher, Watt Smith, and Pete Archibald.

Numerous other technical staff—including medium-term employees, consultants, part-timers, and subcontractors—left their mark with significant contributions over shorter time periods as staff turnover provided a changing mix of talent.

The support staff—accounting and contract administration, office management, and clerical support—provided the daily mechanisms to keep the technical staff and the entire company productive. These at various periods included Gerry Klein, Kathi Harrison, Mae Rose, Gladys Winfrey, Sally Lang, Jeanne Duval, Debbie Browning, Eva Barnes, Cheryl Reinhardt, Sharon Richards, Julie Fisher, and Erika Alweit.

Mentors, Friends, Advisers, Confidantes, and Advocates

Earlier in my busy career and prior to the company’s formation, two bosses provided crucial opportunities, became mentors, and played pivotal career-development roles. These were Professor Glenn Leydorf, Science Department, US Naval Academy, and especially Ward Rosenberry, Control Systems Branch Head, Naval Ship R&D Center, Annapolis. Sincerest thanks and appreciation for their assistance and trust with early responsibility, inspiration, and guidance to a neophyte eager to embark on a high-technology career. Also at the Annapolis Navy Laboratory, Technical Director Harold V. Nutt and Associate Technical Director Dr. Alfred A. Wolf provided friendship, responsibility, trust, and promotion.

To Jim Fitzgerald, founder and president of Chesapeake Instrument Corp. Shadyside, MD. , my special gratitude for the consulting work he provided leading to many other consulting connections and colleagues. And particularly for the example of his inspiring entrepreneurial leadership.

Grateful appreciation is extended to the following individuals (many deceased) for their friendship and counsel in becoming unselfish advocates for a struggling new company, for several others who as idealistic advocates helped facilitate contract awards through the bureaucracy, and for many who helped during various times in our history. The listed titles were those at the time.

Jack Abbott, R&D Manager, NAVSEA

Rosanne Asbell, Project Manager, NAVSEA

Bill Band, Vice President, Payne, Inc.

Henry Bernaerts, Senior Engineer, Naval Ship R&D Center

Gerald Boatwright, Branch Head, NAVSEA

Ralph Bothne, President, Electronic Modules Corporation

Wilson Buckson, Sr. Engineer, Teledyne Continental Motors

Richard Carleton, Branch Head, NAVSEA

Jim Corder, Division Head, Naval Ship R&D Center

Jack Cusak, Vice President, CADCOM

John Dachos, Commander, US Navy

Ben Friedman, Senior Engineer, Office of Naval Research

Robert Gustafson, Senior Engineer, Naval Ship R&D Center

John Hartranft, Senior Engineer, NAVSEA

Maurice Hauschilt, Division Head, NAVSEA

Edwin Hieber, Senior Engineer, US Coast Guard

Isaac Cappy Kidd, International Marketing, Westinghouse

John Leigh, Former Vice President, Tracor

Ray Lisiewski, Section Head, NAVSEA

John McIntire, Senior Engineer, NAVSEA

Doug Marron, R&D Manager, NAVSEA

Andrew Mazzeo, Senior Engineer, NAVSEA

Charles Miller, Machinery R&D Manager, NAVSEA

John Moschoupolos, Branch Head, NAVSEA

Harold V. Nutt, Technical Director, Naval Ship R&D Center

James Olfson, President, Chesapeake Instrument Corp.

Lyn Palmer, Program Manager, Teledyne Continental Motors

Peter Payne, President, Payne, Inc.

Roy Peterson, R&D Manager, NAVSEA

Len Picini, Commander, US Coast Guard

Michael Resner, Branch Head, NAVSEA

Watt Smith, Branch Head, Naval Ship R&D Center

Richard Stankey, Branch Head, NAVSEA

James Tebay, Vice President, Electronic Modules Corporation, and wife, Jean

Don Tempesco, Branch Head, NAVSEA

Charles Vinroot, Commander, US Navy

Robert Vogel, Board Chairman, Electronic Modules Corporation

Luther Ward, Section Head, NAVSEA

Gayle Wayne, Accountant

Charles Weandt, Senior Engineer, NAVSEA

Al Witcher, Senior Engineer, NAVSEA

Alfred A. Wolf, Associate Technical Director, Naval Ship R&D Center

Jack Woodward, Professor, University of Michigan

Manuscript Reviewers

Fritz Hemmer, John McIntire, Dave Otten, and Zita Niemeyer provided valuable critiques.

Grateful Acknowledgments

To my wife, Linda, who cheerfully accommodated to her husband’s countless of hours of quiet isolation while researching and writing this memoir. And to the competent typists, Crystal McKnew, Jerry Kiley, and Theresa Gaffney who skillfully prepared and modified numerous manuscript versions. And one more, to Richard Simons and his friendly, cooperating staff at Sir Speedy Copy Center in Frederick, MD for printing a great many versions of the manuscript.

Introduction

We are all technologists, every one of us who knows how to do something a certain way and uses tools to do it, be they pencils or personal computers, machine tools or video screens. Teachers, auto designers, builders of factories or financial plans, whether we use language labs or lasers to do whatever we do, we participate in the technology of our age.

—Robert H. Waterman1

THIS BOOK CONCERNS TWENTY-FIVE fascinating, immensely challenging years founding and operating a technology think tank, Propulsion Dynamics Inc. (PDI) in Annapolis, Maryland, in the environs of Washington, DC. It’s an entrepreneur’s narrative of a career enterprise in a segment of our society that often remains in the public shadows, yet provides society with the technology—and its benefits—that none could be without.

This is mainly a business book written as a memoir for those engaged in technology careers. Its particular emphasis is on small-company entrepreneurship and defense systems services contracting, especially as practiced around the nation’s capital. However, there are many side topics of interest to technology educators and their students, to budding or struggling entrepreneurs, and to those fascinated by the technologists and their methods in the pursuit of a vast realm of technological wonders. Real-life stories and dozens of everyday examples illustrate business principles and people conflicts to instruct and amuse the reader. In business books, it seems that the dominant themes are bigness, growth, revenues, and profits. In this book, the themes—besides competition and growth—include problem-solutions, management, career satisfactions, and technology impacts.

The small, intense enterprise of this saga at its peak in the early nineties employed fewer than eighty individuals, including full- and part-time employees, consultants, and subcontractors. Nevertheless, this close-knit company begun with no invested capital became a microcosm (some four or more orders of magnitude smaller than the giant companies) of a much larger operation with its own mini-departments (administration, accounting, sales, satellite offices, R&D projects), and later even production with the inevitable employee relations, personalities, conflicts, competition, and business crises. The small size—leaving little margin for error—magnified the always-present problems of business continuity and stability and added an unusual and constant layer of management stress involving project completion, developing, and maintaining staff competencies, rapidly changing projects, and continuity of work flow.

Our systems-analysis work for the navy and coast guard concerned the research, feasibility, specifications, standards, and design of new ships—from foreign gunboats to missile cruisers to icebreakers dealing with propulsion, machinery, control, automation, and electronics systems. The analytical work supported by large computer-simulation programs we developed and our experimental tests became instrumental in the diagnosis and solution of numerous fleet problems over several decades as advanced new technology entered the fleet. As the work expanded, it grew in scope to encompass an amazing breadth of technology, especially for such a small company. The studies, R&D, analyses, and later design, encompassed steam plants, diesel and gas turbine engines, thrusters, electric plants, simulators, digital control, and monitoring systems and many specialties from tribology to fiber optics. The ten-year ship controls R&D program together with the numerous multidisciplinary computer simulation programs influenced a whole new generation of navy and coast guard ships; over twenty ship classes while in the process building an international company reputation. Our missions included identification of needs, problem definition, concept and preliminary design, cost-effectiveness, solution of large-scale integration problems, technology assessment, and design optimization.

This book’s story is also the exciting evolution of a purely think tank or analysis operation into a high-tech electronics and control systems production facility (even with MIL-SPEC standards), utilizing the latest microprocessor-based electronic control systems for navy warships, aircraft ground power systems for the air force, sophisticated ship propulsion and digital electric plant simulators for two navy ship classes, and waterjet machinery digital control systems for ferries and yachts. These were accomplished with an unusually small, young, and motivated staff. We expanded into other fascinating commercial or government projects, including digital engine controls for coast guard cutters, a magnetic-bearing test system, a remote weather station, an industrial welding robot, a control system for shipboard reverse-osmosis water purification, a remote wireless highway monitor, a diesel compression/ignition test machine, and missile-launch ground-support equipment. On one especially crucial project, we successfully used a Skunk Works operation.

This book begins with an introduction to the system approach, company formation, the technologists among us, how business and competition develop, samples of the work they do, human interest stories, and a conclusion on the meaning and big picture of it all. It narrates the challenge and competition laid down by the blinding speed of technology’s advance and our battles to stay in its forefront. Of course, today—several decades later—it’s even faster. The recollections written more than a quarter of a century after some of our adventures began are already ancient history and technologists of today should give due consideration to the passage of time.

The last decade of the 1900s witnessed an extraordinary rise in mergers and acquisitions. Swept up by the trend, our company became part of this phenomenon not once, but twice. After our acquisition, our acquirer was itself acquired twice. Three years after our acquisition, we reacquired ourselves—only to be acquired again—eventually becoming part of Rolls-Royce. Thus, our business history and its bizarre convolutions became every bit as exciting as the technology and worthy of a chapter.

Chapter 1 introduces the systems-analysis role of origination and integration of complex projects. Chapter 2 discusses technology entrepreneurs, and chapter 3 provides insights into specialization, recruiting, and training staff. In chapter 4, the lessons of business and technology (competition, marketing, management) and human relations in this highly charged people culture (personalities, competition, relationships, egos) are demonstrated with compelling stories of humor, irony, or outlandish twist. It delves into the byzantine process of business development, including proposals, networking, joint ventures, and exploiting opportunities with lessons of tactics and blunders.

Chapters 5 and 6 describe our work in detail, with specific projects chosen for reader understandability and application. A small company generates myriad unique management problems handled by entire departments or staffs in large companies. Thus, there is often no counterpart for the sorts of everyday dilemmas encountered by a small company president and his managers. Such daily problems are discussed in chapter 7 as an insight into small-company culture and challenges particularly of interest to entrepreneurs never imagining the dilemmas and crises awaiting them. Chapters 8 and 9 involve many fascinating stories of competition, intrigue, ethics, personalities, and lessons of project failures. Chapters 10 and 11 describe the joys and adventures of entrepreneurship and the many stories of people, events, and their lessons. Selling, reacquiring, and reselling the company with its many gyrations is the subject of very unusual events in chapter 12. Chapter 13 concludes with an assortment of valuable career and business lessons.

Many of the colorful, well-known quotes and maxims used throughout have been aided by the books Unwritten Laws: The Unofficial Rules of Life, by Hugh Rawson, and The Forbes Book of Business Quotations, by Ted Goodman. They represent concentrated bits of succinct useful wisdom in exaggerated, humorous, or sarcastic forms. A quote by author and publisher William Feather says it well: The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation’s proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.

To the engineers, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs reading this book: your collective observations, complaints, frustrations, and inequities—as well as the excitement, challenges, and joy in your work—will hopefully be found condensed in these pages. There are stories of sarcasms, wit, eccentricities, ego clashes, bravado, but also cleverness and wisdom. This book will be more of an entertaining adventure story than the typical how to do it book of this kind.

The focus of this book is technology entrepreneurship with technology services leading to product innovations. Yet many of the experiences and lessons could well apply to all entrepreneur types and ventures. Certain principles of business, human nature, competition, risk-taking, the drive for achievement and success are almost universal in all types of businesses large and small.

The Essence of This Book

THE QUARTER OF A century’s wisdom accumulated through the many experiences and lessons portrayed here can serve as a catalyst for the technology entrepreneur anxiously awaiting his turn at one of life’s greatest adventures. The many stories of predicaments, challenges, and opportunities demonstrate what the entrepreneur can expect.

The technology-services business conducted for government and industry is a unique, highly productive spawning ground for launching innovative, profitable product lines. More than ever before, this is the technology entrepreneur’s moment and shining opportunity as the world—driven by technology—advances ever faster enabled by the computer, Internet, globalization, widespread education, and a growing global middle class.

Chapter 1:

Technology Think Tank—Perspectives and Mission

Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. It focuses on defining customers’ needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, then proceeding with the design synthesis and systems validation while considering the whole problem.

—International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE)¹

The Information-Technology Revolution

The most dramatic change in the past two decades has been the information technology (IT) explosion with instant worldwide communication by satellites, the Internet, and the widespread application of computers. It is causing a societal change and universal globalization with massive impacts on economics, finance, science, technology, culture, politics, and almost every sphere of human activity.

On February 27, 2010, The Economist² ran a special fourteen-page article on the data deluge claiming that 1200 exabytes (exa is 10¹⁸) of data will be created in 2010. Some estimates say this is over twenty million times the information within all the books ever written. The mid-nineties international best-selling book The End of Work³ chronicled the rapidly disappearing jobs as machines, automation, and computers continue to displace workers on a worldwide scale:

A new generation of sophisticated information and communication technologies is being hurried into a wide variety of work situations. Intelligent machines are replacing human beings in countless tasks, forcing millions of blue- and white-collar workers into unemployment lines, or worse still, breadlines.

The massive technology change of the last few decades is changing the world’s economies, workplaces, and opportunities. Technology’s growth is being advanced by increasing and deeper specialization. And this is true in virtually every sector of knowledge as we have advanced beyond the industrial into the information age. Services now comprise the largest part of our economy, one that has become information-based.

The growth of specialties has dramatic consequences leading to ever more knowledge; new specialties; and continual, rapid evolutionary change. Thus, specialists at the forefront and feeding the information revolution can themselves become obsolete, now more quickly than ever. Nature’s law of survival requires continual adaptation from one specialty becoming obsolescent to another or evolving into generalists through the systems approach in the management of an almost overwhelming global technology revolution. This is one of the themes of this book.

A Perspective on Technology

In the book New York Times Management Reader⁴, Harold J. Leavitt said the following:

Organization leaders seem to be the driven at least as often as they are the drivers. Again, why? Why globalization now? Why a continuing orgy of takeovers, alliances, and acquisitions? Why a crazy, roller coaster stock market? A large part of the answer seems clear: technology. Many other forces certainly play their part, but, far more than any of the others, it is burgeoning technology that bubbles and spits at the core of the great volcano of organizational change. It is technology—especially the long, wide reach of information technology—that has forced globalization, forced the flattening of hierarchies, forced organization to grow larger, forced alliances and mergers, and forced organizations to remain constantly on the qui vive lest they be gobbled up by passing predators. It is technology too, that has changed the whole notion of what constitutes a lifelong career.

The conception, development, and introduction of new technology are usually a tortuous gestation period—particularly where the systems, such as military weapons, are fiendishly complex. In our day, technologies now taken almost for granted have consumed the dedicated, gifted minds and energies of countless scientists and technologists. Examples include defense systems, worldwide satellite and cellular communications, Global Positioning Systems/GPS, the Internet, aerospace (jetliners and space exploration), computers, the human genome, medical systems, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and the continual introduction of technological wonders for work and play. However, this is just a glimpse of today’s technology fed continuously by ever more scientific discoveries. This book deals mainly with a certain part of the defense sector of technology. The consumer high-tech variety borne of commercial, business competition is having the greatest daily impact on society. The technology with arguably the greatest impact on human history may be the cell phone.

As noted in a Washington Post article entitled Planet’s Fastest Revolution Speaks to the Human Heart:⁵

The human race is crossing a line. There is now one cell phone for every two humans on earth. From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cell phones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about twenty-six years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history—faster even than the polio vaccine.

The Government’s Role in Technology Innovation

Following is an excerpt from the Washington Post article Washington in Spotlight at Electronics Show,6

The government now has a new technology officer

The nation’s top techie, the geek-in-chief, strode across the crowded floor of the Consumer Electronics Show like a high roller in Caesar’s Palace. Most Americans might not even know that the country has a chief technology officer, but at this year’s CES, Aneesh Chopra is being treated like a celebrity. Appointed by the Obama administration last year to be the first person to hold the post, Chopra is responsible for the White House’s technology policy goals.

Government R&D Organizations

The Task Force on American Innovation has reports available on the Internet, including the May 2009 Internet posting, Basic Research: Tackling America’s Twenty-First Century Challenges.

This eight-page booklet prepared by the Task Force on American Innovation gives a brief review of some of the most important breakthroughs that resulted from research supported by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Defense. Some of those breakthroughs include the Internet, lasers, fiber optics, Doppler radar, synthetic rubber, global positioning, magnetic resonance imaging, speech recognition, lithium batteries, and computer-aided design.

The government operates research and development organizations for the purpose of conceiving, developing, introducing, and testing new technologies for the defense industry. A Washington Post article⁷ noted that the Defense Department was looking for new recruits for its civilian ranks. There were nearly 700,000 federal employees with nearly 700 occupations supporting the nation’s war fighters.

The US Navy has concentrations of many R&D and testing centers throughout the Washington metro area funded by defense appropriations and administered through the Pentagon and its many naval commands. The various naval commands manage the continual development, deployment, and support of numerous large systems involving ships, submarines, planes, and countless subsystems—as the saying goes, womb-to-tomb. These managers at many levels become technology think tank clients requiring technology decision making support. A think tank becomes their much-needed brain trust as they fund and manage countless developments from ship hull forms and engines to command, control, and communication systems. These managers, especially at the system level, handle such a vast and complex universe of technology, they require in-depth, objective analytical support at every level—from conceptual design to the solution of problems in deployed systems.

When conceptual design groups, often with think tank inputs at this early stage, identify and describe new system needs, they develop the procurement specifications in close collaboration with government program or systems managers. The resulting specifications can be a yard-high bundle of documents for a very complex system such as a new ship class, fighter, or combat system. In turn, the prospective contractors and their consortiums produce boxes of proposals by each contractor prepared by teams of perhaps a hundred or more specialists. There may be several viable competitors having spent millions on their approach with corporate survivals hanging in the balance. The government managers faced with daunting complexity and potentially years of study and analysis break up the evaluations, form committees, engage experts, and parcel out portions of the proposal evaluations to government laboratories and think tanks pledged to the strictest confidence and objectivity.

Meanwhile, beyond the technologist’s reach, politicians are feverishly deciding whose district will get the contract while the competitors apply all sorts of pressure with their delegations and lobbyists. For example, in 2008—and still continuing in 2010—Boeing was fighting the award of an aerial tanker contract to a European-based company. The evaluations of enormously complex projects and their proposals can be so Byzantine that nobody may be sure whether they have picked the right approach. However, often it doesn’t matter anyway—politics and pork barreling will readily find the answer where technology is baffled. This is a highly simplified introduction to the procurement process for big federal and military projects, but a similar competitive scramble is occurring everywhere at state and local levels, including infrastructures for roads, buildings, airports, water facilities, ad infinitum.

Technology Think Tank Mission and the Systems Approach

The primary purpose of a technology think tank is the distillation and analysis of information and contribution to unfolding technology to enable rational decision making on the development, procurement, and utilization of complex, multidisciplinary systems. Virtually nothing is simple or clear-cut; there is always a trade-off between alternatives, the consequent risk-reward scenarios, and the so-called cost-effectiveness criteria.

A decision making tier of levels in what analysts call multivariable problems characterizes large systems. As the complexity of the system increases, some of the factors become obscure and some may not be recognized at all. Perhaps this is at the root of Murphy’s famous law: If anything can possibly go wrong, it will.

Engineers are very often characterized as detail-oriented—and for the most part, it’s an accurate portrayal. After all, the heavy dependence on mathematical precision that underpins their work is necessary for virtually any engineering project or design—from space vehicles to computer systems. This penchant for detail is a hallmark of technologists and it’s duly noted by those outside their circles.

Thus, while extreme detail dominates the work of typical technologists, the broad sweep of systems analysis can be almost alien to their thinking and approach to problem solving. The systems types ask, Why are we doing this? How does it fit into the big picture and how do we integrate the parts? What are its chances of success? And a large part of our work was the analysis and optimization of large interconnected multidisciplinary systems. This was followed by identifying and solving the introduction problems of complex, newly deployed systems.

Crucial decisions may be based on competing trade-offs, cost-effectiveness, and other factors (politics is a big one that infuriates them) aided by statistics and probability methodology.

Cause-Effect Is Multidimensional

Since multidimensional/multivariable cause-effect relationships are immeasurably complex, engineers and systems analysts working on projects have daunting challenges seemingly becoming more so as we increasingly uncover the secrets of science.

Spencer’s Law is named after Herbert Spencer, the nineteenth-century philosopher and social theorist.

Every cause has more than one effect. Translated into personal terms, this becomes, as posited by biologist Garrett Hardin’s Law, You can never do merely one thing. When the chains of causes and their multiple effects are considered in all their unfathomable complexity, it is apparent, in the words of naturalist John Muir, that Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.8

These observations recall the well-known saying from chaos theory about the butterfly’s wings in Brazil contributing to a hurricane in the Caribbean.

At the highest levels of decision making, the factors are enormously complex and involve the greatest number of imponderables and unknown consequences where computer simulation is often the only possible analytical approach. In an earlier time, it was President Roosevelt’s decision to commit the nation to building the atomic bomb. Later, President Kennedy’s launch of the space race and President Reagan’s decision on Star Wars. In recent times, China decided, after almost fifty years of analysis and agonizing, to build the Three Gorges Dam (the world’s largest hydroelectric project) across the Yangtze River, thereby changing the lives of millions (a news clip in October 2007 claimed that China planned to relocate up to four million people) and the possibility of unknown catastrophic consequences affecting hundreds of villages, towns, and factories. After the 2003 power blackout, our nation faces agonizing decisions on the gigantic undertaking of replacing or revamping the nation’s obsolescent power grid—a project of truly monumental scale.

As this book was being completed, this nation and the world were facing a financial crisis of massive proportions. The solution endlessly debated was to spend trillions of government capital to rescue the economy. Nations all over the world suddenly drawn into this catastrophe are applying similar measures with unknown and potentially perilous consequences. It is truly a Herculean systems problem. There’s almost a universal truth that things are more complicated than they seem and actions can have unforeseen consequences.

Yet objective truth—often in conflict with subjective perspectives—is always an essential, ethical goal of a think tank’s mission. Recall the uproar over the highly controversial military base closings, the so-called base realignment and closure process or BRAC, in the mid-nineties and again in 2005. Changing requirements and needs had identified many bases as no longer needed. Independent commissions, studies, and Department of Defense committees determined defense dollars were being wasted. Something had to be done. Consider the following perspectives: a congressman can’t let a base in his district shut down. It will affect the economy of the whole town or region and he may be voted out of office. Or a maintenance worker at a base worries he will be out of a job. Or a taxpayer in another district complains about his high taxes and defense planners must discard costly, obsolete holdovers from the past while juggling bloated defense budgets. The numbers of perspectives on the same dilemma are nearly limitless. What does any of this have to do with a stronger defense? Nietzsche said, The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.

Virtually any public project involves the same conflicts between objective necessity and narrow, self-serving interests often irrelevant to the principal objective. That’s politics. The above scenario had a personal and local touch; the former US Navy Laboratory in Annapolis was closed in the nineties after about a century of operation, affecting the careers and lives of many friends and colleagues.

Decisions at the highest levels involve factors relatively unknown at the lower or design levels. Thus, for mammoth national projects involving technology—dams and power grids, defense systems, space exploration, transportation systems, the atomic bomb of an earlier era, or long-term medical research, and even waging war and anti-terrorist activities where huge expenditures and national commitments are required—cost and politics have become paramount. The Defense Department for example, is in the process of remaking itself with new weapons and strategies to accommodate the new realities of warfare (insurgencies, small-scale but potentially deadly conflicts) as compared to the traditional massed weapons approaches. Today, when the human element enters the picture with conflicting questions of political jurisdiction such as what district gets the massive government project and who benefits from the pork barrel, one has to look at the elusive, ever-shifting perspectives of participants in the turf wars.

Perspectives

The perspective or viewpoint of an observer to events can significantly shade or interpret meanings, impressions, and conclusions. Consider the following thought experiment, from the book Human Destiny,9 to demonstrate perspectives:

Let us suppose that we have at our disposal two powders. One white (flour) and the other black (finely crushed charcoal or soot). If we mix them, we will obtain a gray powder, which will be lighter in color if it contains more flour and darker if it contains more soot. If the mixture is perfect, on our scale of observation (that is, without the help of a microscope) the phenomenon studied will always be a gray powder. But let us suppose that an insect of the size of the grains of flour or of soot moves around in this powder. For him, there will be no gray powder, but only black or white boulders. On his scale of observation the phenomenon, gray powder does not exist.

This brief example provides a useful insight into many of life’s dilemmas where—faced with decisions and difficult conclusions—intelligent, rational people can differ so radically even with identical facts. Remember the amazing polarization of the nation in recent presidential elections.

The Lesson of Perspectives

The message and wisdom of this thought experiment is expressed in the adage, You can’t see the forest when you’re in the trees.

The specialists are investigating the black and white boulders while the systems people from their perspective are seeing none of these—they see only the gray powder. Their role is the big picture, the integration of the parts, the forest, and not the trees. Both have their unique roles to play—for without the trees, there would be no forest, but the forest must be overseen and managed.

The Decision Hierarchy in Large Systems and Systems Integrators

A technology think tank working at the middle tiers of the projects doesn’t encounter the stressful, weighty decisions directly affecting national economy or defense strategy. Rather, its results are the technology part of an enormous structure of decision making on the fate of government programs. It’s interesting to speculate on the reasons (technological, political, and cost) that finally doomed the superconducting supercollider even after huge expenditures and well-advanced construction. This is just an isolated example of many projects begun, modified, cost overrun, abandoned, or even nonsensically continued when shown unneeded or obsolete. During the 2008 presidential campaigns, Alaska’s bridge to nowhere became an issue of contention and mockery.

Most of our work encompassed the entire ship as a system with its countless subsystems. The global level affecting decisions of types, numbers, and development of ships, submarines, and aircraft is the domain of the top navy levels and policy-level think tanks, but the hierarchy does not stop there. It progresses to the very top from the Department of Defense strategies and polices to congressional committees and the president. This book deals at the mid-to upper-technology system levels well below the global or policy levels. Yet there is technology’s influence as the hierarchy ascends to the final decision makers at the highest levels. The large defense contractors—particularly the aerospace companies—have developed systems technology to a high degree in their business due to the enormous complexity of their products and thus they are in the business of large-scale systems integration. In the design and building of leviathans with the size and complexity of the Boeing 747 or, more recently, the 787, the systems approach is essential and it becomes embedded in their company cultures. In recent years, news articles have noted how leading defense contractors are becoming systems integrators to produce high-tech networks for the battlefield as integrators of advanced technologies and systems.

A systems approach has reportedly been in use by Ford’s CEO, Alan Mullaly, since 2006, after his many years experience at Boeing.

The Systems Engineering Discipline1

You’re at a party and the inevitable question arises: So, what do you do for a living? Your answer—I’m a systems engineer—results in nothing but blank stares, so you spend the next ten minutes explaining what your job title means.

• There is no precise definition for the job title ‘systems engineer.

• The title systems engineer should be reserved for those who have spent decades accumulating the technical skills and know-how that enables them to coordinate large, multifaceted systems.

• You have to become a domain expert in something before evolving into a traditional systems engineer.

• It’s something you grow into—systems engineering is typically practiced by those far along in their careers.

• Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems.

• System engineering integrates all the disciplines and specialty groups into a team effort.

• An organized approach to problem solving.

• Systems engineering is wider than it is deeper; it requires strong leadership and communication skills.

• People who tend to be natural problem solvers are the ones who understand system engineering; they would be well served to study behavioral and social sciences, such as business, economics, communications, and management.

The Systems Analogy in Medicine

Some nonengineering specialties now use a systems approach. In the medical world, the general practitioner (primary care) doctor comes close in function to the systems analysts of technology. With a broad knowledge of medicine, but not the countless specialties, the primary care doctor’s role is to identify medical problems and steer the patient to the right specialists where the specialties constantly grow in number, diversity, and depth. Thus, one of the first questions from a specialist is Who’s managing your medical problem? The new generations of doctors can be found using the jargon of systems analysts with such terms as risk-reward ratios, cost-effectiveness, statistically marginal effectiveness, insignificant return, etc.

A recent personal example: an elderly relative had just undergone extensive medical tests with the discovery of several ultimately fatal conditions in the near-term. One of the young doctors explained his prognosis embellished with such sophisticated systems terms, as above, that his daughter later apprehensively remarked, "I sense he’s very competent, but do you think we’re getting some kind of double-talk?

Our Company’s Mission

Systems engineering was our main company mission headlined in our company brochure as follows:

We define systems engineering as a branch of engineering which integrates various engineering disciplines to produce new hybrid knowledge. It is the unique function of the systems engineer to characterize the big picture, to draw specialists together, to integrate the parts, and to produce a unification of purpose, concept, application, approach, and design.

Our definition of systems engineering, as noted above, was to a large extent focused on our integration of the various engineering disciplines to assist in design, optimization, and long-term analytical support of very complex systems.

Why were we known as a technology think tank instead of an engineering-services company like so many similar technology/engineering companies?

Engineering in the public mind is often characterized by the drawing-board syndrome along with the slide rule of former times (i.e., engineers design systems or products). We produced relatively few designs or drawings until later in our history. Our expertise and reputation rested on the willingness and ability to solve nonlinear dynamics problems of complex systems using computer simulation. From these beginnings we expanded into a wide range of systems projects. The complexity of nonlinear dynamics problems helped give birth to the new science of chaos theory beginning its impact in the 1970s and 1980s. We also used a systems approach to solve large-scale, multidisciplinary challenges, create technical standards, evaluate trade-offs and alternative approaches, and advise clients on complex technology issues. In other words, the work was highly analytical and used for advising clients across a wide spectrum of technology from conceptual design to procurement specifications and standards. Thus, we were in essence a technology think tank as that name is commonly used, or a systems house developing new information including trade-offs, cost-effectiveness, optimization, and performance criteria for decision makers. One of our principal customers often referred to our company as a campus operation and another called us a bunch of academics.

Our Company Culture

A founding entrepreneur’s vision and style typically develops an enduring company culture. If the founder is a hard-driving, business- growth-, and rapid-success-driven person, he will attract and surround himself with like-minded individuals. Or an operation founded around an entrepreneur’s reputation or technology will typically continue in that direction. The danger in high-tech company survival is accommodation to an ever-changing technology, which can obsolete the old technology and rapidly drive the enterprise out of competition and business. This happens all the time among those high-tech companies not fast enough for the essential continual adaptation or founded and tied to a single idea or product. There’s a later discussion on innovation and the so-called S-curve of technology.

A firmly established company culture and reputation often becomes so entrenched that it can be difficult to change. The Naval Sea Systems Command, NAVSEA, in Crystal City, VA, at the time, was one of our biggest customers for years when our reputation had been established as dynamics, control, and machinery systems experts with certain groups. During a conversation with a branch head, one of our strongest supporters, I remarked, Can you start giving us more conventional engineering tasks like many of your other contractors? It would help our work flow. His immediate rebuttal, Oh no, we’re saving you guys for the hard, analytical work. We can’t dilute your services. Some years later, one of our customer liaison employees reported, They think of your company as elite academicians. And so with this customer, and others at NAVSEA, we were firmly locked into a certain niche.

It’s a double-edged sword, keeping competitors at bay, but restricting expansion and growth. Ultimately this restriction turned out to be an impediment to our expansion in this technology sector—even with customers right across the hall in the same building. There were other side issues to this same dilemma. During the process of hiring a retiring senior government employee, he kept asking with apprehension, You’re not going to put me to work solving differential equations, are you?

This chapter began with an introduction to the information technology revolution. As if to fulfill these predictions, our company and its history narrated here demonstrate the main theme of this book: the spectacular growth of knowledge. Much of our work and reputation rested on the utilization of computers and computer simulation to solve large-scale systems problems in the naval ship arena. All of the work involved the gathering, processing, and evaluation of huge quantities of ever-changing information fed by an exploding base of technology. In the truest sense, our mission was the gathering, processing, and analysis of high-tech information and creating new hybrid information for planners, decision makers, and designers.

Some earlier advice stated, You have to become a domain expert in something before evolving into a traditional systems engineer. From our experiences as a systems company, we could extend this advice to a company level as follows: A systems company should have pockets of deep experience in one or more domains as an intellectual anchor and sufficient depth to counteract the image of freewheeling, impractical academics out of touch with the real world. In other words, when required, they can compete even with experts in certain areas of specialty. A critique of the broad-based systems approach might invoke the well-known adage, A jack of all trades is a master of none, acknowledging the impossibility of achieving potential in every area, but systems analysis requires mastery. There’s room for divergent opinions. A systems company developing the academic image needs to be counterbalanced with some practical experience. Ours was the design of digital machinery control and monitoring systems and ship systems simulators and of course, our best-known specialty: large-scale systems simulations.

The Systems Approach—An Often-Slippery Slope

At the heart of the systems approach are several questions. What is the ultimate purpose, objective, or goal? What is to be achieved and how does the objective mesh or conflict with other purposes? Is it worth doing? Does it make sense? Is it cost-effective? Sometimes our customers, in response to continuing streams of proposals, would ask whether something could even be done. Finally, what’s the best method or approach to achieve the objective? In other words, what is the big picture?

Systems people have their own techniques, methods, and buzzwords—functional analysis, operational requirements, cost-effectiveness, risk assessment, and many more. Mathematical modeling and computer simulation with software programs have added a spectacular new dimension and capability for systems analysis involving problems of almost unbelievable complexity. However, these idealistic objectives are often either unseen or obscured in a hurry to get the immediate job done—and that means funding, jobs, benefits, careers, etc.

Large projects are typically so divided and parceled out with specialists each doing their thing that the big-picture for them is neither apparent nor relevant. It’s usually up to top-level management to force project attention and focus on the big picture