Career Flexibility in Rapidly Changing Times
KENT KRESA
Northrop Grumman Corporation
Los Angeles, California
It is an honor to be here with such a select group of the country's best and brightest. First, I congratulate all of you for being chosen for this symposium.
This year's symposium addresses several exciting areas, including information technology, chemical and biological engineering, optics, and energy. You are all certainly getting your minds stretched. As you heard, I am in the defense business, and a couple of these topics are extremely important to my industry and me.
Information technology, for example, reminds me, as a designer and builder of defense electronics and other battlefield management systems, that information warfare is right behind it. The interesting part of information technology is that while the ''good guys" evolve the technology to create and protect the systems of tomorrow, the "bad guys" are trying to bring down these same systems. The more our society becomes dependent on these systems, the more susceptible we will be to sabotage and information warfare. Cyberspace is the new dimension that will tie the world together and, as you can imagine, it is a key concern of the defense industry.
Certainly chemical and biological weapons, another focus of this year's symposium, are also a great concern for my industry. My past experiences in the 1970s with these issues suggest that we will make little headway unless we get better intelligence. And, quite honestly, I am not confident that we will be able to handle this threat of bugs and gas, given our overall lack of success in drug interdiction. But that is the nature of today's world. Small and rogue states may learn how to create these weapons a lot easier than ballistic missiles, which take a larger infrastructure.
As you heard in the introduction, I have engineering degrees, but I haven't practiced engineering for 25 years. Some of you, like me over the past two and a
half decades, are also focusing on management issues, and I am sure that, over time, more of you will spend a greater percentage of your day in that management capacity. I found that my engineering background has been a tremendous benefit to me as a manager in two ways. First, engineering and its black-and-white, hard-lined perspective allows you to look at problems in a relatively dispassionate way, hopefully leading to quicker and more productive solutions. As an engineer, using raw data and hard analysis, I try to understand the conditions and how I can solve the issue, whether it is a technical problem or a human relations problem.
The second benefit of having an engineering background has been the adoption of an enormous "BS filter." Proposals from my organization and from the outside are thrown at me every day. Applying an engineering perspective to issues has allowed me to quickly turn on that filter, even as people are explaining these proposals. So don't be afraid if you've got to go into the management side of things, because, believe it or not, your engineering background is really going to help.
As I thought about my talk tonight, I realized that I certainly can't tell you anything new about engineering disciplines. But what I might be able to offer is a little bit about how I see the world. The first thing I'd like to say is that change is accelerating, and if I remember my engineering terms correctly, that's a third derivative. Change, including in my business, is occurring at such an intense rate—far faster than at any time that I have ever witnessed. This change will undoubtedly continue to affect your own careers and actually your career structure. It used to be that an engineer could go through a whole career while focusing on a specific engineering discipline. Today, engineers probably maintain a specific discipline for half of their career, at most.
As a result, you are going to have to become quite adaptable, innovative, and agile in order to have a full and prosperous career. Product cycle times are coming down dramatically. Today they are measured in months, not years. And it wasn't so long ago that American business cycle times were operating in decades—in fact I was involved in one that took more than a decade.
The real reasons change is happening are computers and communications and the ability to automate processes in various ways. Projects that I spent quite a bit of time on as a young engineer are done trivially today on computers. As a matter a fact, I almost wasn't an engineer. At MIT, I was in a co-op program and then went off to Boeing as a junior to learn about engineering. I was placed in a room with 1,200 people with Frieden calculators (mechanical calculators to calculate the stresses on an aircraft wing). This process amounted to a human computer—the information would come in one end of the room and go out the other. I quickly realized that this was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Now that was engineering in the 1950s, at least for the aircraft industry. When I went back to school, professors told me that a "new world" was coming
involving space and other great advancements in aviation. These comments excited me, and so I remained an engineer. Change really began to occur in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and change has been taking place ever since.
Today, change is so intense that I am not clear how businesses are going to operate in the next century. The barriers to market penetration and the ability to guess wrong, and therefore be out of business in a very short period of time, are something new. Size used to matter quite a bit in business, because a company could weather an occasional storm. This is not true anymore. Just look at what is happening with marketing on the Internet and the effect this is having on people's buying habits.
Blockbuster, for example, is roughly only a decade old, and has experienced an extremely impressive growth spurt with the evolution of videotapes. Now, just 10 short years later, the company faces extinction. Management understands this dilemma and is working hard to transform Blockbuster's business. But what Blockbuster is struggling with after a decade of growth is occurring in just a few years at many other companies.
I was deeply involved in a significant time of change while on the board of Chrysler Corporation. During the 1980s, the American auto industry was under tremendous pressure. The Japanese automobile manufacturers went from a modest presence in the United States to becoming a significant force. They were producing great high-quality cars at a much lower cost than General Motors, Chrysler, or Ford.
Management was initially concerned, but it discounted the severity of the problem and decided that Japan's lower labor and capital costs were the sole reasons for that country's success. But when the Japanese began to open factories on U.S. soil with the same impressive results, management at the Big Three automakers took notice. The American managers realized that the Japanese system focused essentially on cycle time and value stream analysis—novel concepts back then. In those days, teaming was not even considered. A stylist designed the car, then threw it over the fence to the engineers. The engineers turned over the process to the production group and finally a car came off the production line. It was the Japanese model that dramatically changed this process. Partnership agreements were entered into to take advantage of Japanese production methods while retaining American strengths in automation.
As a result of this dramatic shift in operating philosophy, both U.S. and Japanese auto industries are more robust, innovative, and cost efficient today than ever before. The real winner is the consumer, because the quality of today's cars is so much better than a decade ago. This is true of virtually any product these days. I can remember when consumers always purchased the warranty when buying a television, because they would last only six months or so. Today, warranties are not nearly as popular because the quality of the products is so good.
One very big project that required a change of thinking for our company
engineers was the B-2 stealth bomber. When we started this project in 1987, we went beyond state-of-the-art in every conceivable direction. In the decade that followed, there were about 3,000 patents that were produced to make this aircraft a reality. It was the first aircraft to be designed, developed, and manufactured on a computer screen. We networked plants all over the country to conduct this computer-aided design in a highly secure fashion. As you can imagine, it was an enormous undertaking. The network program was definitely way ahead of its time, but just a decade later it's an extremely common approach. Everybody's got CAD for whatever purpose they want, and it's probably on their PCs.
This time lapse will continue to shrink. I know some of you are in businesses that have six-month cycle times to get a product out to the market. I would imagine that pretty soon cycle time would be measured in months for most businesses. This approach will certainly have a tremendous impact on your careers.
Another important quality of a good engineer is vision. Vision may be a scholastic process. I think that everybody has a vision, but most people fail at those visions. Every one of us, I'm sure, has examples of key visionaries. There are two that come to mind for me. The first one is of a couple of guys at ARPA in the late 1960s who pushed the concept of packet switching. They pushed because they needed a cheap way to couple computers at various large research universities in order to perform complex nuclear bomb computations without having to build a massive computational facility. So they developed a device—I think it's called an IMP—and went around selling the concept to universities. Over time, people at universities figured out how to send data on this equipment, and every now and then, they added a message to their colleagues along with the data. This was the start of the ARPANET, which has evolved from ".edu" to ".mil" to ".com."
The other group of visionaries, in the early 1970s, came from government. They developed the global positioning satellite. The GPS was not in vogue at that time, in fact, the military services did not want it. At the time, the Navy and Air Force each had its own systems, and there were other navigational schemes going on. A few visionaries pushed extremely hard for a unified system and, over time, others determined that this unified approach could open tremendous possibilities for military and nonmilitary functions, including precision weapons and navigation.
For every successful visionary story, I am sure there are dozens of failures. If you truly believe in your product or idea, you must maintain your drive to make it happen. Again, if you have a vision, pursue it with all of your might. And if you fail, get back up and try something new. The system will accept failure as long as people are trying to push great new ideas.
The final piece of advice I will share with you is to have fun with your job. Many people take their jobs very seriously, and that is important and admirable. But we spend more than the traditional 40 hours a week, including Saturdays and
Sundays, worrying about our jobs and careers. My point is, enjoy the ride. You are all in enviable positions as leaders in your professions. You are part of exciting and rapidly changing times. Enjoy it! And maybe, when you get to be as old as I am, you can stand before a group of bright young engineers and discuss some great visions that you contributed to. I wish you continued success in your careers.
