Young Engineers

What Engineers Can Learn From Steve Jobs

2011-12-15T14:30:00Z

Of the many things Steve Jobs will be remembered for, his view on how design aesthetics, creativity, and technology should be closely interwoven has particular resonance for engineers.

In expounding upon how the arts and humanities were closely bound to the technical engineering demands at Apple, Jobs emphasized the foundational attainment of innovation through the balance of technological mastery with design mastery. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple co-founder, Jobs shared this insight:

“Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place…I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musician on the side…. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.”

Engineers may be the stonecutters of the modern era, but also knowledgeable in the molecular makeup of stone, the patterns of the stone, the resulting effects when some structures are made from particular types of stone. But it will take crossing comfortably and copiously over the boundaries between science and the arts to realize this: There is no boundary.

Mathematicians speak of elegant solutions versus a snarled mash of force-fitted derivations. Computer engineers and programmers speak of elegance in how a particular algorithm is composed and articulated versus the jagged methods of brute force coding. In seeking the humane, engineers also seek out elegance in how problems of society can be improved or altogether reinvented by the engineering aesthetic. There is beauty in the harmony resulting from the integrated equations, structures, and functionalities in a work of engineering.

Struggles with maintaining the equal converging flowrates of the humanities and the sciences continue to exist to this day. Engineering is present at the design phase, but also in the unknown, unseen execution phase. Take an Apple iPod or MacBook as examples of such a convergence of the engineering and design aesthetic.

The end user may notice the physical, minimalistic beauty in an iPod’s form and color or the intuitive fashion in which menus and playlists are navigated. To bring that industrial design icon to life also requires the software design underlying its inner workings, the CNC machines used to shape its metallic shell, the programming constructed just right in the CAD software. Consider also the assembly line upon which the components of that iPod were built, incubated. Consider that same assembly line’s deliberate orchestration of programmable logic controllers, quality engineering, and mechanical engineering. Consider even beyond that, the graphic design, the novels, the plays, the business plans composed upon a MacBook’s keyboard when such an aesthetic is itself used recursively as a tool propagating further creation. It is on account of all these forces and more—design, engineering, art and beyond working collaboratively—that the cumulative elegance of the device is ferried from its inception as a Platonic ideal into a domain of tangible reality.

Anecdotes of Jobs taking long walks with individuals to discuss ideas are part of Silicon Valley legend. Such a means of peripatetic thinking out loud, debating, discussing, creating, was Jobs’s preferred mode of expounding his creative vision on the world around him and with the creators he partnered with.

Perhaps it is on these well worn foot-trails in the Palo Alto hills where we may also be able to walk—engineering, science, art, and design, all in step.

Perhaps we will discover someplace new.

Introducing the Career Engineering Roadmap

2011-11-17T13:44:00Z

Around me was a backdrop of pirate ships, crystal-clad dancers, and LED arrays lighting the glass facades of steel towers sparkling with the reflections of taxis, storefront signs, and digital camera flashes. One couldn’t have hoped for a more visually energetic scene, hued in reds, blues, purples, and incandescent yellows, to talk the depth and breadth of the influence of the engineering profession and the multifarious career paths within it that made such sensory spectacles possible. The reach of engineers was further emphasized by the ubiquitous proliferation of every day experiences touched by technological innovation. Even in an electric oasis like Las Vegas, a place typically centered more on probability than on deterministic resolve, engineering is here, everywhere.

This past July at the NSPE Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, thanks to a lot of hard work by the Professional Engineers in Private Practice Young Engineers Advisory Council (PEPP-YEAC) Chair Carlos Gittens and his team, I had the opportunity to present a new career development initiative at the NSPE Young Engineers Forum. With the support of the PEPP YE team and the University of Nevada–Las Vegas NSPE Student Chapter, I shared a preview of the Career Engineering Roadmap (CER), a program aimed at career strategies for emerging engineering professionals.

Conceived first as an idea within the walls of my home NSPE section, the Connecticut Society of Professional Engineers, the foundational ideas of the CER were further developed through phone calls to NSPE offices in Alexandria, Virginia, while I was traveling throughout China and Korea on business, and then reimagined and redesigned during my tenure as chair of the Professional Engineers in Industry’s Young Engineers Advisory Council. Now over two years later, and after much input from the PEI executive board, I couldn’t be more excited to formally launch the first phase of the Career Engineering Roadmap later this month in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University.

The Career Engineering Roadmap aims to promote the vast possibilities of career development opportunities for those with an engineering background. Designed as a 90-minute seminar targeted at junior and senior engineering undergraduates and emerging young engineering professionals, the program aims to map out the career choices of emerging engineers using three key principles:

CER Principle 1 - Engineering is more than a degree. Engineering is a way of thinking.
CER Principle 2 – Engineering is a foundational skill-set, providing multifaceted career choices, including those outside the realm of traditional engineering disciplines.
CER Principle 3 – Engineering is a career path that can be planned and strategized. Individuals with engineering skills are empowered with the capability and the agility to adapt to the changing needs of the contemporary global economy.

In a recent news conference, U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu declared, “We need engineers. We need scientists. This is going to be at the heart of how the United States is going to remain competitive.”

This will be true not just for the engineering students entering engineering careers, but also for any individuals progressing through their early to mid-stage careers using technical and scientific thought processes as engines of innovation, locally and internationally. The objective of the Career Engineering Roadmap is to provide emerging engineers with a strategic framework within which such mechanisms can be honed.

The strategic importance of a country’s competitiveness—economic, technological or otherwise—begins with the aggregate competitiveness of its individuals. The ubiquity of the profession’s reach has already established the destinations to be ventured toward; the Career Engineering Roadmap strives to be the compass rose for that direction setting therein, from Alexandria to Seoul, from to Shanghai to Las Vegas and beyond.

Stay tuned for an NSPE Web seminar on this subject in the spring.

Saving Yourself from the Quagmire: You’ve Been Offered a Job—Now What?

2011-07-13T15:57:00Z

With the Department of Labor announcing last week that the national unemployment rate for June was 9.2%, interviews that convert to real job offers might be one of the most highly sought after things out there in the marketplace.

It’s great to get a new job.

What’s not so great is that after you start your new job, you realize you hate it.

While being extended a face-to-face interview is itself a motivating outcome, when interviews evolve into formal job offers, they can be difficult to turn down, particularly if one has already been in transition for months or more and has already undergone the merciless onslaught of seemingly fruitless job search engines. The combined physical, financial and psychological forces just may be too overwhelming to resist spending more than a millisecond before screaming, “Yes! I’m in!”

This is what you’ve been waiting for, right?

Before you sign and drive, hold on a sec. You are now in possession of something very powerful that you weren’t privy to before conquering the interview process: information.

Understanding that a new job is a new commitment, a new environment, and a new workplace with all of its associated nuances in culture, politics, and expectations, your self-reflection based on experiences from the interview itself can be a key process that’s arguably more important than accepting the job.

So don’t just sleep on it. Think through some of these considerations, using what you’ve learned from the interviewers. These may help convince you whether you’re about to end up in the right place or not.

Habits and Behavior
Habits are one element of behavioral DNA that is propagated throughout a company’s culture. This is one of the easiest areas to overlook. Despite how much one may enjoy the actual work itself, the environment in which the work takes place—people, location, work hours, organizational culture—can all greatly enhance or greatly sour your overall experience.

Were you treated professionally during the interview? If you were interviewed by a panel, how did the panel members treat each other? Did the interview feel rushed as if it were someone’s to-do-list item, or did you perceive that interviewing and introducing your talents to the company were sincerely valued by the business? Was your interviewer on time? If your interviewers were going to be your coworkers whom you’d interact with daily, what’s your gut feeling on how well you’d work together?

Definition
Is your role actually defined? Are there specific responsibilities that you will be measured against? What are they? More than just a job description—what are your specific responsibilities to the organization? What does success look like in this new role and how will you know that you’re delivering it?

Growth
What are the opportunities for growth in the organization? What specific skills will you be bringing to the group? Will this be a place where your unique areas of expertise can contribute to furthering both your career as well as the organization’s objectives? What happened to the careers of your predecessors in the role you'll be taking? Did they get promoted up into the organization? Did they leave the organization to pursue interests elsewhere? If the role you're being hired for is an entirely new role, what are the prospects for its growth within the organization?

Onboarding
What does the onboarding process look like? Who would be training you for your job and how long can you anticipate the training to take place? This is particularly important for roles in which a specific level of qualification or certification in a given area is directly linked to your earning power.

If you need clarification after some quality self-reflection time, you can always contact the hiring organization to get some additional questions answered. Take advantage of this dialog while it’s still yours to have.

You’ve already been offered the role—understanding what the opportunity means for you holistically might save you from the quagmire of being in a place you wish you weren’t.

The Business Card Champion

2011-05-10T20:05:00Z

They’re emblematic. They’re sources of pride. They’re personal 3.5” x 2” flags that summarize company, title, and contact information. The business card: If this piece of pocket sized card-stock were a piece of real estate, your reputation would be its tenant. Every castle needs its monarch.

In the age of kings and feudal lords, the King’s Champion was the representative of the monarchy—king, queen, royal family, regal reputation. The Champion would represent the royalty in tournaments, feats of daring, and sometimes, even for certain rights to a kingdom in dispute. Regardless of the stakes, success of the Champion ensured that a monarch’s reputation was maintained throughout domains of their and others’ rule.

For those of us with less regal aspirations, one modern day Champion of our reputations is the business card we choose to represent us and the means by which it is sent out into our respective corporate realms.

While the act of exchanging the information on business cards is itself rapidly evolving with card scanning technology and wireless forms of data swapping, the tangible business card itself can still be a source of exchangeable identity that ranges from the Spartan, no-frills information couriers to precisely designed standalone works of art.

The path by which your card travels into someone’s possession is almost as important as the card itself. If it’s not treated as a little anthropomorphic PR executive representing you with panache long after it’s left your side, it might just cause your reputation (or lack thereof) to get guiltlessly chucked straight into the recycle bin. Consider a few guidelines as you use these traditional yet powerful little banners of self identity and self promotion.

1. Behind Every Business Card is a Business Person
Behind every business card is a person: a father, a mother, a jet lagged traveler living out of his suitcase for the third consecutive week, a parent missing her daughter’s dance recital, somebody’s sleep-deprived best friend suffering in between time-zone changes.

Before you even get into the business of business card brokering, always acknowledge first and foremost to yourself that behind every title is that first name, middle initial, and last name. Behind even that is a real live person. Build a unique relationship that’s founded on the person rather than some flimsy piece of cardstock and you’ll be off to a good start. Business cards are doors only—the real network relationship is the person standing behind it.

2. Treat Your Business Cards as if They Were $1 Bills
What does behavioral economics have to do with networking? Everything! Diamonds are prized for their rarity; chunks of street gravel are not. Don’t be “that guy” walking around the dining room with a visible four-inch stack of cards, handing them out like you’re promoting the opening of a new car wash or take-out restaurant. If potential recipients see that the card they’re being given is visibly one of hundreds, how much value do you think they’ll assign to your card?

If you’re thinking about initiating, treat your business cards as if they were $1 bills Is there a business reason for the recipient to receive your card? Business card giving is about connections—professional connections on a personal level. Without such connections, your business card is likely to be forgotten in a dry-cleaner-bound shirt pocket or in the deep, anonymous clutter of someone’s purse.

3. Be a Historian.
As a recipient of a business card, before you lose the details of that encounter, jot a few quick notations on the back of the card: date introduced or met, location, quick note on context. The strength of your connections will only develop to be as good as the quality of those connections, particularly as you get to work with someone in true collaborative form. This doesn’t mean you have to be all Hollywood façade about getting to know someone more personally—recognize that sincerity is always in style. Remembering details of a pleasant conversation is always a good memento to collect while on the path to collaboration building.

4. From Raw Materials into Finished Goods (Now).
So you’ve exchanged good information and formed a good connection. How do you make the otherwise inert raw data on the business card into something more actionable?

As soon as you can, get the individual(s)’ e-mail and phone numbers into your contacts list or address book. Don’t let that untouched, aging business card stack grow any larger. Don’t wait. Go back to the hotel room and do it now. If you connected in an important way (which of course you did, right?) send a follow-up email soon afterwards and start working toward collaboration.

5. One Size Does Not Fit All: Some Etiquette-Related Exceptions

The Courtesy Swap
If someone offers you their business card, it is just professionally nice to reciprocate with your own. If you have run out or have just recently changed roles and don’t have cards yet, just say so.

Business Cards Abroad
Pay attention to local practices, particularly if you work and travel internationally. In Japan, everyone gets everyone else’s business card, whether they will be working directly with you or not. Particularly in parts of Asia, even the method and gestures by which the card is presented is important to keep in mind.

In some countries where title alone can sometimes trump the actual purpose of the meeting itself, your card can be a real primer as to how much in-depth work you’ll potentially be doing with your counterpart.

Keeping Engineering in the U.S. Relevant

2011-03-01T14:16:00Z

Today’s blog posting is brought to you....

By Chris Knutson, P.E.

With completion of the recent U.S. and China summit, increased media attention has been focused on the need for expanding bilateral links between the two countries. The shift from a strong linkage between the U.S. and Europe to one with the Far East is only a change in longitude. It has not changed the fact that to continue both growth and the ability to influence our nation’s future, the U.S. must be engaged in the world. And, we must actively accept the challenge to stay engaged outside our borders and embrace diversity within our borders.

Books such as Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat may seem gloomy about the U.S.’s ability to compete in the global marketplace and our future in it. Add to this statistics for the number of four-year engineering school graduates from China and India versus the U.S. and one might become downright discouraged:

One unknown source puts the numbers at 600,000 engineering graduates from China, 350,000 from India, and 70,000 from the U.S.
A 2005 study from Duke University puts the numbers at 352,000; 112,000; and 137,000, respectively.

However you stack the numbers, the U.S. has a deficit. Why? And what needs to be done to discourage aspiring engineers from downshifting to other degree programs?

First, why the disparity? Demographics and population. First off, the populations of China and India are 1.3 billion and 1.1 billion versus 307 million in the U.S. Just by linear extrapolation there’s going to be more engineering graduates. Next is demographics. The number of 18-24 year olds in the U.S. is about 26 million, and the figures for China and India, although even more murky than the numbers of graduates, are significantly higher and projected to be so. What does this mean? A larger pool for engineering students.

Second, what needs to be done to keep engineering students engaged in engineering? I offer my opinion based on what it’s taken to keep young officers interested in staying on active duty:

1. Make it Relevant. Anecdotally most engineer students drop out in the first or second year due to the core classes, such as physics and calculus. Why? These subjects aren’t glaringly relevant. Yes, everyone knows you need to know this material to be an engineer, but it’s hard to make that connection if you’re in a lecture hall with 400 other students (yes, I was the product of a public university).

2. Make it Real. Hands-on is the greatest way to learn, period. In the trades, apprentices and journeymen must complete both bookwork and hands-on tasks to demonstrate competency. Engineering curriculums by-and-large do not. Important? See point #1—the hands-on work makes it relevant and makes it real.

3. Make Responsibility. People react favorably to responsibility. Engineering is a profession of and about responsibility. Making any task relevant and real will lead to the participant taking responsibility.

Does this work? In my experience with keeping young engineer officers past their first enlistment, yes. And it makes sense, because this is what it took for me to stay with engineering during college, stay on active duty as long as I have and, quite frankly, stay engaged with any endeavor I’ve undertaken. Make it real, make relevant, and make responsibility.

NSPE member Chris Knutson, P.E., has over 17 years in the U.S. Air Force as an engineer officer and currently serves as a lieutenant colonel commanding a civil engineer squadron in New Mexico. He is a member of the NSPE Mentoring Task Force.

Alexander the Great: Problem Solving, Innovation, and World Domination

2011-02-16T18:41:00Z

Centuries before engineers like Joule and Carnot contributed to the early stages of modern engineering problem solving, monarchs were already using an ancestor of engineering analysis to defeat enemies and expand empires.

The use of logic and rational thought has threaded across disciplines of mathematics and philosophy for centuries, when such endeavors were applied to analyze everyday phenomena. Engineering analysis can be expressed as the addressing of society’s desire for progress by decomposing a larger problem into its smaller, constituent parts. Consider Alexander the Great who applied such analytical thought processes to defeat an entire navy—while his military remained on land.

Author and speaker Lance Kurke described how Alexander the Great had to overcome the problem of enemy forces, whose possession of an advanced navy allowed their single-handed domination of the very waterways that Alexander needed to access in order to support his army with critical food and supplies.

The immediate solution could have been for Alexander to just build his own navy and try to beat his opposition at their own game. But the time to train, build, deploy, and procure the materials and soldiers necessary for this task was resource and time prohibitive.

So how does one defeat a navy without having one’s own navy?

Make the enemy’s navy obsolete.

Alexander strategically traced back the source of the opposing navy’s strength and found that the one element that could cripple the navy was, ironically, water.

In what would be construed today by the terms network analysis, critical path analysis, or root cause analysis, to name a few, Alexander tracked how the opposing navy received their fresh drinking water supplies and found that many of those delivery routes could be cut-off on land. And one cistern at a time, the enemy navy succumbed, and Alexander defeated them while simultaneously restoring his own food and supply routes to his own forces.

The interactive and analytical methods in the engineering thought process, including the analysis of a problem and dismantling it from multiple angles, allows engineers to consider varied perspectives, each moment weighing possible solutions against incumbent constraints. The search for solutions serves as a fountainhead for even more innovations.

Within the engineering mindset for troubleshooting, atop the scientific method at its base, this same strategy is at work every single day that engineers have problems to solve or new ideas to realize. The creation of ideas as a result of troubleshooting continues to expand the engineering professional’s methodology of innovation (even if world domination doesn’t appear on your career development plan.)

The Thinking Engineer: A Navigational Manifesto

2010-12-21T13:02:00Z

As Thinking Engineers, we declare that we will apply the engineering thought process not just to technological advancement, but to the overall betterment of the Self. We are individual contributors to the greater public good to which we all belong.

Engineering is a way of thinking. We are observers of the world, a unified body of critical, analytical thinkers, applying the knowledge diversity of the profession toward improving the quality of life for everyone, everywhere. This is to be done without a sense of feigned superiority or exclusivity, but instead with compassionate drive and with purpose.

We continue to beneficially challenge the profession with new bounds of practical and pragmatic innovation. We are fishers of engineers and we are stewards tasked to guide, grow, and promote the profession, filling the talent pipeline. Navigating a sea of change, we live in a world that is evolving toward ever deeper fathoms of complexity, an environment in which our thinking thrives.

Continuous improvement rests just not within our livelihoods, but necessarily within the Self. We realize that by improving the Self, when we stand by our fellow engineers, we become intellectual economies of scale, synthesizing our combined knowledge to maintain the course of civilization. But like all paths sailed, we need to remain vigilant toward our aims of improving humanity, sustainability, responsibility, and progress. This pathway will not be without flaw or adversity, but it is up to us to determine whether such mistakes will become guideposts of growth or drowning anchors.

We will start each journey with the following compass: What is the purpose by which we are pursuing progress? Who are the true stakeholders benefiting from the work at hand? How does our work support and sustain the public good? For without these, we are lost.

Such paths to serving the public interest will be charted within these boundaries:

The 10 Boundary Conditions of the Thinking Engineer
1. Excellence without arrogance
2. Wisdom without presumptuousness
3. Knowledge without prejudice
4. Technical mastery without exclusionary isolation
5. Innovation without destruction
6. Analytical rigor without becoming lost in the details
7. Discipline without blindness
8. Execution without negligence
9. Focus without myopia
10. Success without abuse

We’re All Imaginary Engineers

2010-12-02T14:24:00Z

Several years ago a friend who had majored in industrial engineering, or “IE,” at one of the discipline’s premier institutions, Georgia Tech, mentioned to me how irritating it had been when other engineers would refer to his major as “imaginary engineering” because of the perceived lack of analytical rigor relative to other engineering fields.

Back then, the two of us had been occasional karaoke tag-teamers who sang a mean cover of “Tonight, Tonight” by Smashing Pumpkins, and during our jam sessions, we’d often openly commiserate on how different engineering disciplines were at ends and had become so siloed in the context of career opportunities. While my fellow chemical engineers and I were optimizing residence times in reactors, mechanical engineers were streamlining rocket systems, and civil and structural engineers were conducting stability studies on skyscrapers. What were “imaginary engineers” like him to do when they were perceived by others as just number-crunchers relegated to the pen and paper work of stop-watch time studies?

In modern industry, the seemingly pejorative moniker of “imaginary engineering” has tended to be quite applicable, actually—but only if “imaginary” is used in the sense of “complex,” perhaps as a mathematician would, rather than in the sense of some fairy-tale calculator-wielding protagonist.

But first, let’s cue the Wayback Machine and return to post-war America, when the burgeoning discipline of industrial statistics was in its salad days as a formalized profession. Coming off of the production demands during World War II, the United States had become a heavily industrialized nation, complete with an enthusiastic, highly skilled workforce. This potential for further technological advancement was a latent energy source that was waiting to be harnessed for the continued economic growth of the country.

Enter William Edwards Deming, the iconic industrial statistician whose capabilities and unique quantitative vein of diplomacy famously reinvented the Japanese manufacturing industry before he brought those same newfound applications back to the U.S. While such skills were to become very much the DNA of modern day industrial engineering, a specialized competency called “quality” had also begun to be formalized in parallel.

What quality did to industrial engineering was to strategically, but quietly, insert itself into the modernized manufacturing processes. As a profession, quality began to evolve on its own as a standalone discipline. Quality became a profession in which traditional statistical tools were re-applied in novel ways. When the costs of uncontrolled variation reared their Hydra-like heads at the advent of widespread automation, it was this same set of traditional tools that would be later reorganized in the 1990s by Bill Smith of Motorola as “Six Sigma.” And where Six Sigma focused on the minimization of defects, the continuous improvement efforts in Japanese manufacturing systems would become “lean manufacturing,” a system seeking to minimize waste.

None of these quality methods were ever meant to create the guise of infallibility—the industry was after all, made up of human beings, inherently mistake-prone by nature (alas, yes, even engineers). Quality as a profession soon became the intensely customer-driven counterpart to traditional industrial engineering. The two disciplines to this day are often indistinguishable, with the quality departments of some companies being the primary starting point for industrial engineers. In contemporary times, quality tools are still contributing to the reinvention of the business landscape, with recent applications in the realms of finance, healthcare, and global supply chains. Wherever there were inefficiencies to be eliminated, to paraphrase the new-world musings of old-world cartographers, “Here, there be Quality Engineers.”

As a recent American Society for Quality campaign recently posited, the quality profession may be summarized this way: “Making Good Great.” Engineers of all disciplines still seek to satisfy customer, consumer, regulatory, and client needs. We serve the public in a manner that seeks to protect costs, public interests, and maintain safety. Amidst all of this, improving efficiency is forever the golden fleece.

As the business landscape globalizes, technological capabilities will continue to advance, increasing the complexity of the system as a whole. The one unchanging constraint we are faced with is that customer and client requirements will continue to be relentlessly demanding. Quality is a strategic component in order to remain both innovative and competitive.

So this is far from where the fable ends.

The aim of establishing processes in which the client’s needs are consistently being achieved is just the next chapter on how engineering as a profession, independent of field of practice, in the face of ever increasing complexity, will continue to apply quality principles in very real ways.

Quality principles are not just a set of shiny tools, but a fully integrated platform on which the entire engineering profession itself is constructed. There is a call to arms for the continued establishment of a very tangible reality of serving the public good in the name of efficiency while still meeting consumer needs; we continue to build onward and upward.

Interested in learning more? See what a professional quality engineer does by checking out the body of knowledge published by the American Society for Quality.

Engineering, Energy, and Poverty: Dispatches from the U.N. World Energy Forum

2010-10-13T13:01:00Z

Saint George clearly meant business judging by the size of his spear.

From any other angle in the courtyard where I was standing, this gigantic statue appeared to simply represent the classic tale of Saint George slaying the dragon—except that upon closer inspection, where I was expecting scales or a writhing pointy tail, the dragon’s body was instead formed from the colubrine segments of a dismantled nuclear missile, suspended in frozen disintegration.

This is “Good Defeats Evil” by sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, given to the United Nations as a gift from the Soviet Union in 1990. Two decades later, it still stood triumphantly as a symbol of the long and complex road of how, from an engineer’s view, technology can both help and hurt the common and sometimes lofty progress towards peace and human reconciliation.

This past September, I was at the United Nations to take the opportunity to learn more about technology’s interaction with international policies at the UN High Level Conference on Energy, a featured conference of the UN-affiliated World Energy Forum.

The energy policy community’s theme this year was cleaner and sustainable energy with a focus on accessibility. Accessibility, as a working definition, contains the functional elements:

Efficiency
Infrastructure & Delivery
Reliability
Scalability

As a forum encouraging the interdisciplinary interaction between industry, academia, and governmental and nonprofit policy groups, emphasis was placed on not just energy technology itself but also on how the accessibility to such technology and its supporting policies could present a life-changing impact to some of the poorest regions of the world. It is difficult to find a more poignant opportunity to live out the statement from the NSPE Code of Ethics that “engineering has a direct and vital impact on the quality of life for all people.” Looking at the functional elements, it is not difficult to see engineering’s role in enabling accessibility to serve this common good.

In regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where individuals live off of less than two dollars a day, the design of such technology would take into account the functional elements with the support of local and regional policies and their enforcement. These all fell under the umbrella goal to provide universal access to energy services by 2030 alongside a 40% reduction in energy intensity, that is, efficiency at every single step alongside its deployment.

Step changes in efficiency and reliability can allow improvements beyond basic quality of life, affecting features as commonly overlooked as the ability to prepare food properly and the reliability of health-care services, to the infrastructure needed to generate and deploy electricity to entire communities. It is a rare discipline of engineering that cannot contribute constructively to at least one of the many constituent steps leading toward these ends.

In my view, this creates two perspectives on how engineers can directly impact such accessibility attainment:

Accessibility for the Present
Engineering technologies may be developed such that by design, they are scalable and affordable relative to the economic standards of the world’s poorest communities. Engineers are no strangers to seeking out efficiency, maximizing output with utilized input. Quality and sustainability can be rigorously integrated along with traditional technological developments—that is, designed-in. With many developed countries and organizations signing up to fund such joint efforts, taking such ideas from concept to final realization is a natural development space for the engineering profession.

Accessibility for the Future
Further innovations in engineering education and career development can prepare future engineers in a way that maintains a balance between technological mastery with serving the public good on a global scale. In the context of sustainability, technologies developed and deployed locally have an unavoidable global impact in their use. Beyond the realm in which the control of carbon emissions are implied, technologies that are vetted in wealthier developed countries can also be redeployed to the poorer countries in a manner that promotes best practices, enabling a sharpening of the spear rather than its reinvention.

These thoughts are not new to the modern practicing disciplines of science and technology, but attaining the skill to innovate on such an international scope broadens the impact of such capability and casts a wider influence on “all people” that engineering necessarily serves.

In the march towards accessibility, a balance between engineering practices and broad-based international policies will continue to promote technology as an enabler rather than an inhibitor, fending off the dragon of poverty firmly and with fortitude.

LeChâtlier’s Passport: Working Across Cultures

2010-08-11T12:32:00Z

Recently at a dinner in a “small” Chinese town of just under three million people, I sat around a table with colleagues representing seven countries, speaking Mandarin Chinese, English, French, Korean, Flemish, German, Russian, and Dutch. Given that a coworker and I were born and bred well south of the Mason-Dixon Line, arguably the two of us also spoke “Southern.”

This same group was composed of the following academic backgrounds: mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, one doctorate in materials science, one doctorate in physical chemistry.

These diverse gatherings, once strictly the domain of G20 Summits, professional society annual meetings, or academic conferences, are now more and more commonplace: there we were in our cultural Petri dish that combined scientific knowledge diversity with cultural diversity.

So how to handle developing these working relationships when clients, business partners, vendors, and contractors increasingly mingle across such diverse Venn diagrams of backgrounds?

We turn, of course, to philosophy.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the origins, acquisition, and development of knowledge. The interactions between the knowledge of culture and the knowledge of technology have become the new reactants in the laboratory of the modern global marketplace.

Thermodynamics, through the eyes of the French chemist Henry Louis LeChâtlier, taught us that when we have two separate substances dosed at high concentrations into the same system, the substances will naturally flow from being in a state of localized high concentrations to dispersed lower concentrations, both substances eventually mixing or reacting altogether until the system itself is in long-term equilibrium. As such, different sources of knowledge will rarely have the opportunity to react and create new disciplines and methodologies if left isolated. Exposure to cultural practices and behaviors different from one’s own is the ultimate way of paving an exciting, new syncretic future of knowledge growth, fostering innovation in ways that isolated thought could never bring forth.

So what would the Fodor’s travel guide to this cultural expanse look like? Perhaps in the “How to Get There” section we might see the following sub-headings as trails leading us to an epistemological hybridization of cultural growth.

Translation is not Always Interpretation
When one deals in collaborative work between different cultural backgrounds, language is one of the more obvious differences that contribute to knowledge building.

The caveat is that there is a distinctive difference between translation and interpretation. For technical projects that require a higher level of technological collaboration, this difference is manifested in the ability to translate literally word for word versus conveying the meaning behind those words. This can make critical differences in the understanding of all parties involved, that everyone leaves the table with the same understanding. In the context of agreeing to a contract or the terms of a project, striving toward comprehension should always trump the half-way house of mere vocabulary exchange.

Write it Down
English speakers have the privilege of being a bit spoiled when it comes to doing business abroad (although at the rate things are going, I wouldn’t put that Mandarin Chinese edition of Rosetta Stone on eBay quite yet).

Most countries, particularly in Asia, are built with the training infrastructure to conduct business in English. One trend is that regardless of the country, even in places where speaking English may be weaker, reading and writing English is very proficient.

When in doubt, summon up your dry erase board skills and write it down in your international meetings. If that is not possible, follow up your meeting or teleconference with a clear email or memo. Feel comfortable in requesting the same from your partners.

There’s No Such Thing as Being Too Specific
No dead horses to be beaten here. Err on the side of thoroughness, albeit tinged with precision. Never assume, “Oh surely, they get it.” It’s not a function of any individual’s capability but the challenges that the very act of translation inherently brings. When in doubt, be overly specific and request the same of your counterparts.

Cultural Convergence
What can we learn from our past that can inform our present? What can we learn from the past of one culture and how can it influence the present of another culture? Cultural convergence is the application of business knowledge across different cultural backdrops, taking advantage of differences in technology, customs, and practices, and redeploying such differences in non-traditional contexts. Like LeChâtlier, allowing this equilibrium to occur is to sow the fertile landscape of creativity, innovation, and progress.

The benefit here is to remember that the modern developing countries are at different stages of each other’s economic continuum. Seeing where Japan began after World War II and where it is now, China knows which roads to avoid and which roads to pursue. South Korea might be standing just right of the midpoint. Look further back along the timeline and the countries of Southeast Asia are waiting in the queue. It’s like being able to look into the future and edit other countries’ mistakes in order to tailor them to your country’s own economic benefit. Much of what the United States learned in the industrialization of the country during the 1940s is being reapplied in a more streamlined form in other countries where industrialization is just beginning to gain firmer footing. In this way, guided knowledge becomes the sharpest chisel for global growth and development.

Japan and a Metaphysical Sense of Seismic Engineering

2010-06-28T14:42:00Z

Hello from a shinkansen bullet train, tearing through the Japanese countryside at 300 kilometers per hour. The thorough network of public transportation in Japan continues to embody the aphorism that time waits for no one and that these rockets-on-land will not hesitate to leave you and your laptop bag quivering in the supersonic dust.

With regards to the global economy, Japan, like the rest of the world, is facing its share of large-scale changes. Unemployment, while still half of that in the U.S., has reached historical highs for the country; there has been a change of regime with the election of Kan Naoto as the new prime minister; and the country’s engineering and manufacturing base is still reeling from the recent international PR fallout with the quality issues at Toyota. But despite this adversity, the Japanese industry has still seemed to maintain its technological edge, keeping its infrastructure resilient while confronting even the worst of tectonic shifts. That and the Japanese national soccer team is defying all the contrarians by advancing toward the final stages of the World Cup.

Speaking of movers and shakers, the importance of building codes had particular resonance (literally) when just two weeks ago, I was at a café in the Tokyo Narita Airport when a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck northeastern Japan. My coffee literally started pouring itself. Due to the thankless work of structural engineers, everyone just looked up as if in an afterthought, waited for the aftershock to pass, then went safely back about their business (or in my case, turning my attention to wiping the latte shrapnel off my shirt-sleeve). Particularly in severe cases like the Hanshin earthquake that decimated Japan in the 1990s, nature oftentimes overtakes engineering’s best attempts to deflect its disasters. But like the Japanese mindset of self-improvement and self-renewal, we learn anew and we seek out innovative ways to minimize risk; we roll up our sleeves and we try again.

The Toyota Production System (TPS) and kaizen are concepts that by now in the 21st century are well worn in many Western business environments and unfortunately, some to the point of banality. Just don’t let that TPS name be tainted by recent automotive press—this is just an example of where the idea has grown beyond the company that originated it. TPS is less about Toyota than it is about a system of comprehensive organizational discipline, the observations of which have been interwoven with my business travels here. Certainly, spending an occasional two-week stint a few times a year in Japan does not qualify me as an expert in Japanese culture, but as a third-party tourist of the industrial stage, I have been witness to practices that have made me exclaim, “Check that out!” (or…so desu! as the locals would say).

None of these concepts are foolproof (although the Japanese, of course, have a term for that, too: poka-yoke, in describing the inclusion of mistake-proofing directly into the design of a product or process). Ultimately, when compared to organizations outside of Japan, these practices are less about “being Japanese” than they are about how any company or individual in the modern era uses aspirations for efficiency as part of their striving towards competitive excellence.

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness (or at least Industry Dominance)
Those familiar lean production activities are quite familiar with the concept of clean and organized environments contributing to workplace efficiency. There are many Western companies that already do this very well. The culture of such practices, however, is still more consistently observable across Japan relative to what’s been observed elsewhere. These practices result in quick identification of problems and potential risks. Tools and process plans are “point of use” and within arm’s reach. These practices apply to office and design environments and are not isolated to manufacturing settings. Here, “clean” is not just “not messy” but also “precisely organized,” all characteristics that streamline the path to effectively meeting client needs.

Pride in Expertise
While many managers or shift leaders find the need to “explain” their employees’ capabilities to senior leaders and auditors, the majority of the Japanese engineers and technologists observed were self-validating masters of their craft. Taking true ownership in your subject matter area and being allowed to speak to it (and more importantly, having managerial leadership that supports such a mentality) extends beyond just being an academic veteran or licensed expert. True ownership is demonstrated when a firm’s individuals can readily demonstrate their knowledge both to clients and internal customers. This aspect separates those merely following printed job descriptions from those who possess a depth of passion and fluency in the responsibilities for which they are held accountable.

Everything with a Purpose
It is becoming more important than ever to be purpose driven in a time when resources are becoming more and more scarce. Engineers the world around are familiar with the difficult balancing of aesthetics with functional needs. But even then, anything that does not demonstrate a direct contribution toward attaining customer requirements is eliminated. Every design document, LED bulb, rack and pinion, binder full of documents, scrawls on a blueprint, rolling cart of tools, has a reason for existing. If a process is redesigned, the skeletons of the past are cast upon the pyre of progress. Superfluous nice-to-haves are tossed. John Paul Sartre would have had a successful career as a device engineer in Japan.

So in the context of these observations, it’s still perfectly okay to let out that overachieving perfectionist in you every now and then. Whether in an office environment or in the bowels of a factory, Japan reminds us to just keep shaking things up.

Letter to a (Graduating) Young Engineer

2010-05-19T12:05:00Z

Dear Recently Minted Engineering Graduate,

I use the term “minted” not lightly, but as an indication of value and of stability. Just as the strength of a currency defines the economic stability of a country, the strength of your skills, having successfully completed an engineering program of study, defines the stability of our important profession.

Congratulations.

Graduating with a degree in engineering is no easy feat. According to recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, you have joined the only 1.6 million total working Americans who hold engineering degrees. In a country whose population is just over 300 million people, in the face of a national unemployment rate of almost 10%, you fall into a significant, sought-after minority.

In the past four or more years, you have lost ridiculous amounts of sleep. You have learned how to live off of overpriced food from the university snack bar. You are one of the few who actually do (have to) use all of the buttons on their scientific calculator. You’ve made midnight runs for Red Bull and cheese pizza. You and your classmates have worked in shifts in order to complete team projects on time. You have added words to your vocabulary that will become the lingua franca of your discipline: words like “tensor analysis,” or “thermodynamics,” or “programmable logic controller.”

You are faced with new life choices. You may be in the midst of searching for a job in which to engage your newly earned skills. You may already be hired and are wondering what your working relationship with your new manager will be like. You may be pursuing graduate studies to further enhance your skills and contribute to the knowledge of the engineering field. You may be looking to add specific kinds of skills to your work experience so that you can one day add professional engineering licensure to your list of credentials. Or, you may be exploring a field not directly linked to your academic background at all.

This is a fairly intimidating roadmap to be sure, but not one you cannot conquer. You’ve just recently survived senior design capstone classes so you’ve already been through much, much worse.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, and this time you are the train.

Academically, you are better if not more prepared than most to take on the economic challenges of today. You have come to see that engineering is not exclusively just knowledge of how to solve certain problems or how to be technologically creative. Engineering is a way of thinking. A way of analyzing. A way of doing. These capabilities will not only help you become a citizen of the sciences, but a citizen of the world.

So as you take your first steps, keep a few more thoughts in mind—some of which have not explicitly appeared in textbooks or internships. I charge you with four tasks:

1) Do the Right Thing: Think and act ethically always. Engineers work to serve the public well-being, and when it comes to the common good, you must always make the right choices, even when such decisions become the most difficult ones to make.

2) Think Globally: Next to music and mathematics, engineering & science may just be the third universal language. Our discipline is rooted in the application of physical laws to fresh innovative realities. Use these skills to broaden your homeland and then share and interact with the world. Leave borders to politics. Engineering knowledge does not and cannot discriminate. Serve the world’s technological needs and you will become wealthy in character, culture, and in spirit.

3) Help Others: You will make great friends on your journey. They will help you along and you must also help them in return. Improve lives. Inspire purpose in yourself and in others. Your skills make your knowledge valuable to the assistance of others who would otherwise be helpless. You are a technological facilitator and innovator. Build bridges both literal and metaphorical.

4) Promote the Profession: Become a fisher of engineers. Encourage youth interest in the math and sciences. Teach. Tutor. Mentor. Know that you will be the key in the growth and continuation of the engineering profession. We await the inclusion of your capable hands and visionary minds.

This is just the beginning. And you’re off to a great start: yours.

I leave you with an excerpt of Act III, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Henry V, reinterpreted with some poetic (engineering) license:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…
In peace there's nothing so becomes [an Engineer]
as modest stillness and humility…

Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
to his full height. On, on, you noblest [Engineers]…

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
straining upon the start. The game's afoot…

The Recession-Proof Engineer

2010-04-19T20:12:00Z

In March of 1970, Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) presented the concept of a CORElator: certain scientists with the technical background to expand and apply their skill-sets across multiple disciplines. In 2003, then editor-in-chief of C&EN Madeline Jacobs revived the concept in the wake of the dot-com crash. She reintroduced the CORElator in a contemporary context as an individual who,

“related his or her core knowledge to other specialists and to the broad questions facing society. The challenges that faced humanity in 1970 were profound—and they are no less profound today.”

In the present day, scientists and engineers cut from this same CORElator cloth have once again come to the public forefront amidst the backdrop of a shaky (yet slowly recovering) economy. When work process efficiency and making-do with less has become a priority for all sectors of the engineering discipline and, more broadly, the business landscape altogether, this desired knowledge-diverse assemblage of an individual’s capabilities becomes highly sought-after. Such scientists are uniquely positioned to take their specific areas of expertise and relate them to the core of a business, overlapping commonalities that benefit multiple functions simultaneously. When challenged to do “more with less,” the engineering discipline is now rife with opportunity to produce a similar caliber of passionate, cross-functional individuals who grow to become indispensable to their respective organizations and fields of practice.

Are You Indispensable?
In his recent book Linchpin: Are you Indispensable?, Seth Godin investigates what it takes for an individual to reach a status of becoming indispensable, or a “linchpin”—a person without whom the daily work of a firm or organization cannot afford to do without, oftentimes literally.

As an illustration, Godin shows what a linchpin may look like, using the example of wait-staff in a restaurant. To paraphrase Godin, consider the scenario where there are four wait-staff at a restaurant, all trained equally. Despite all of them being capable in their daily job description duties, one of them in particular also knows how to placate disgruntled customers, has the ability to troubleshoot the credit card system, knows which dishes take more time to prepare, and organizes the orders in a manner that supports the hectic kitchen staff, volunteers to cover colleagues’ scheduling conflicts, and possesses the uncanny memory to address all regular customers by name.

Which one of these four wait-staff has more job stability?

Which one, even in the event of restaurant closure, can take this track record to any other role in the service industry and demonstrate these same skills with the same level of excellence?

That person is Godin’s Linchpin.

When can linchpins, regardless of sectors of employment, really thrive as invaluable resources? Godin argues that that organizations will “reward and embrace someone of extraordinary depth of knowledge,” highlighting that such scenarios are created when knowledge is always needed at a “moment’s notice” or if that specific kind of knowledge is constantly required for the daily business of the firm; additionally, that individual is especially valuable when the alternative cost of bringing in a third-party consultant becomes prohibitively expensive.

This does not necessarily mean that going above and beyond one’s job description is the only key to becoming indispensible. Rather, it’s the consistency and excellence by which seemingly common tasks are performed, ever more strengthened by drawing on a wellspring of knowledge that overlaps other linked functions.

For engineers, this may be pursuing development opportunities beyond one’s traditional area of expertise—not to abandon ones strengths, but rather to supplement one’s role with new sources of strength through the interaction with correlated disciplines. These are individuals who then grow to demonstrate knowledge mastery deeply and broadly, execute thoroughly with detail as needed by the task at hand, work well cross-functionally, and deliver actions in a timely and accountable fashion, regardless if the customer is internal or external.

As Linchpins and CORElators, such performers leverage engineering skills, both technical and managerial ones, unique to their respective disciplines, and look for ways of redeploying them to other fields, customer types, and market segments. As a result, clients become served in a way that cannot be replicated anywhere else.

Such individuals become the most highly demanded instead of the least needed, regardless of economic circumstances.

Irrationality as Strength: Hewitt’s Four Disciplines of Leadership

2010-03-19T13:33:00Z

When former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan coined the phrase “irrational exuberance” in the mid 1990s, he was referring to the seemingly irrational behavior that the markets were exhibiting with regards to general consumption. The S&P Index had been climbing to record levels even as the economic environment suggested that a more conservative consumer response would have been more prudent.

In the 1990s, this exuberance ended in the infamous dot-com bust at the turn of the millennium. However, acting irrationally can sometimes produce beneficial results where self improvement, career growth, and overall public good can be positively impacted. In the 2009 Hewitt Top Companies for Leaders study, irrational behavior for growth is actually what maintains an organization’s robustness, at least in the area of leadership. For engineers, re-applying these behaviors to one’s own working environment can produce results that are resilient even in the most disastrous of times.

The Hewitt Top Companies for Leaders
Conducted in collaboration with Fortune Magazine and the RBL Group, the Hewitt study assessed over 500 of the world’s top companies for leadership development. Despite the surrounding economic decline, the top companies for leaders were found to invest equal if not more energy into leadership growth rather than dissipating that energy to focus on other areas of the business. The top companies in the 2009 study included:

1. IBM
2. Procter & Gamble
3. General Mills
4. McKinsey & Co.
5. ICICI Bank
6. McDonald's
7. General Electric
8. Titan Cement Co.
9. China Mobile
10. Hindustan Unilever

This internal focus on development may appear to be an irrational act in the face of external challenges. In times of financial and market stress, wouldn’t companies be instead searching for cost reductions? Re-evaluating existing products and services? Re-allocating budgets? Such business factors are without a doubt included on the agendas of many an executive board; however, rather than exclusively focusing on the external factors, the most robust companies have also learned to look inward at the mechanism of how business is steered by its leadership.

The Hewitt study summarized these observations into Four Disciplines of Leadership:

1. Leaders Lead the Way: Top leaders, given their visibility and influence within their companies, lead by example and allow themselves be held transparently accountable. Part of leading is creating an environment of expectation so that new leaders being forged are aligned with company purpose, mission, and values.

2. Practical and Aligned Programs & Practices: Best practices and policies are engrained into the company’s internal culture, including succession plans and ground-up leadership development. A culture of serving the consumer and, in the case of engineering, the public well-being, when seeded into employees at all levels during the present, emerge as strong, customer-focused leaders in the future.

3. Unrelenting Focus on Talent: Talent is never underrated and neglected. Possession of talent is not enough—when talents become honed through practice, then leadership becomes embedded into one’s daily behavior. Talent, when executed as common practice, leads to adeptness and flexibility in the face of change. It is up to leaders to back talent not as a “nice to have” skill but as a true financial asset. In engineering, this could range from the highly technical to bigger picture service to the public good.

4. When Leadership Becomes a Way of Life: When role models, procedures, and talent development intersect and become commonplace for doing business, leaders become trained to respond consistently, regardless of circumstance. Crises are handled in a disciplined manner rather than as a reactive scrambling for solutions. Leadership development initiatives of the top companies also include regimented mentoring programs that focus on coaching and the controlled, but accelerated, growth for high potential performers. Mentoring becomes an expectation rather than a surprise benefit. Within NSPE, groups such as the Mentoring Task Force are out to accomplish exactly that—expanding the availability of mentors to foster such leadership skills.

Strength in the Irrational
Regardless of an engineer’s environment, whether one is in industry or in private practice, in higher education or in government, these Four Disciplines can be used to buttress career stability and long-term growth even in challenging circumstances. The machinery for leadership growth may be of larger scale for a Fortune 50 company, but even for small engineering firms, the engine to fuel that growth is proportional to the individuals driving it.

This is Greenspan’s irrational exuberance re-deployed with a positive outcome. Ultimately, it is not great companies that build successful leaders, but great leaders that build successful companies. By focusing on leadership, this outcome can be designed to remain consistent, regardless of economic climate.

Surviving Professional Decline: How Tough is Your Parachute?

2010-02-01T13:31:00Z

In the present economic straits, even some of the most robust corporations have just now begun to start climbing up out of the embers. Of the many books on the subject that have appeared, Jim Collins’s How the Mighty Fall, captures the act of collapse from a systems point of view. Written actually before our present recession, Collins and his team discretized corporate collapse into distinct phases, some survivable, some irrecoverable.

Many of these underlying principles have analogous examples to our careers as engineering professionals. In comparison, Collins’s five stages overlap very well with how one rises in one’s career, how one grows one’s reputation based on results and excellence, and also, how it can all be lost in a millisecond. Think of this re-application of Collins’s corporate failure prevention strategy as a durability-based addendum to Richard Nelson Bolles’s famously popular What Color is Your Parachute? career development guide; that is, now that you know what career path you’re destined for, what preventative measures or indicators can you apply in order to ensure your that your parachute is a robust one—one that can slow or altogether prevent a personal professional collapse? How can we re-frame the fall of companies to that of individuals, to understand how no one is immune, no one is “too big to fail,” no one is too smart to fall into professional ruin?

Stage I: Hubris Born of Success
You’re a successful early- or mid-stage engineer and you’re getting positive reviews and broad-based support. Your client list is strong and your first several contracts are a tidy collection of home runs. In these situations, complacent success can often evolve into expectation of success, sometimes unjustified. Personal complacency can allow the ego to start making excuses for the lack of results; overconfidence replaces hard data.

Stage II: Undisciplined Pursuit of More
In the engineering world, there is certainly such thing as too much, too fast. Even our NSPE Code of Ethics, in Section II.2 indicates that the promise of success or opportunity should not blind individuals from accepting work that is beyond their abilities, particularly from the perspective of time or professional expertise. Taking on too many clients in private practice or raising your hand for every single project that comes along in industry allows for more chances of failure rather than more chances of success. This is not to say individuals should not be aggressive and tireless in pursuing and stretching personal abilities, but understanding one’s personal capacity and its limits for good work is just as important a factor.

Stage III: Denial of Risk and Peril
We live in an unpredictable world, but one aspect of the exhaustive analytical nature of engineering work is that at the end of the day, we are trained as engineers to ask, what does the data really tell us? Denying gaps, loopholes, or inconsistencies in data, taking chances because of deadlines, downplaying the risk involved to the public we serve, can all be very dangerous, yet self-imposed blinders. This comes from allowing all aspects of a project to be a means to an end—completing the contract, closing out an exhausting program, meeting a deadline. This denial of process risk then leads to a risk in damaging one’s career and for some, even ending it.

Stage IV: Grasping for Salvation
When one’s career is in a tailspin, every solution seems like a good solution for reversing the situation. Data gets interpreted in ways it otherwise never would have been while under sane conditions. Rules that can be bent will be torqued to the point of figurative mechanical fatigue. Project leaders begin blaming technicians, auditors, other functions, everyone but themselves as a last attempt to recover what little fragments of their credibility that remain. In Collins’s study, many leaders resorted to pointing fingers at everyone except themselves.

According to Collins, this stage is the last point that one can halt the fall and still save oneself, albeit accompanied by a long, hard road of recovery. Accept personal accountability and return to the principles that brought one into Stage I to begin with: that success for clients and for the business first originated in solid, grounded results and level headed decision making guided by good data.

In the professional poker world, grasping for salvation is referred to as “going on tilt.” This means making decisions blindly, absolving oneself of all aspects of strategy, patience, or responsibility, and watching futilely as one’s chip stack diminishes.

Don’t go on tilt.

Stage V: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death
A macabre as Collins’s title for this stage may sound, it is, in essence, the absolute end of one’s career. One’s credibility is completely destroyed because personal risks, personal gain, or unsupported analyses took the place of the best interests of the client or consumer. This is perhaps the career equivalent of what thermodynamicists call “heat death”: the lowest point of energy a body or system is capable of reaching without any other energetic input, the end of a cycle of success and growth. The best way to prevent Stage V is to start by treading carefully while in Stage I.

In the professional world, strategies for success are the engines of our innovation. But understanding the possibilities of our failures are equally important. Pull hard on the rip-cord, let the parachute open, and plan the landing, knowing it will be some time before one might return to the summit, but that such a possibility is inspiration enough to re-think, re-motivate, re-invent.

Design a better parachute.

We’re engineers, after all.