Category Archives: Management

I have been reading the book Building the H Bomb: A Personal History by Ken Ford. A major character in the book is Edward Teller, a very famous physicist who is best known as the father of the American H-bomb. I had to smile as I read about Edward Teller. When I worked at Hewlett-Packard, an electrical engineer named Russ Price talked about interviewing for a job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he walked into a room and faced Edward Teller as his interviewer. He and Dr. Teller then proceeded to have a very technical interview. Continue reading →

I was sitting in a management meeting today that seemed to be rather unproductive. It ended up in a philosophical discussion that did not go anywhere. I commented that we seemed to be engaging in omphaloskepsis, which is the name for the ancient Greek practice of contemplating one's navel (Figure 1). I first heard this word at Orbital ATK, where it was used to describe some of the meetings there. Continue reading →

I was talking to an old friend the other night about the positives and negatives associated with working for a startup company. Overall, we both enjoyed working with startups enormously, and I would seriously consider joining another. However, both of us understand the special challenges that startups face. Continue reading →

I recently had an employee retire in my group that caused me to look at the age distribution within our entire HW organization. After seeing the age of our engineering staff, I made a proposal to our management team for ensuring that the skills of our senior staff members were being transferred over time to our junior staff members. This post shows how I presented the age information to internal management. The presentation was successful, and I thought it would be useful to show here. Continue reading →

The older I get, the more I see the relevance of the classics to modern life. As a boy, I read a children's version of Aesop's fables, which I loved and are still relevant to daily life. Later in school, I read about Greek mythology from a book called Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton. I still have a personal copy of this book that I refer to occasionally. It may seem odd, but the more time I spend in engineering management, the more relevant these myths seem to become. The last two weeks I have mentioned two Greek myths several times – the tales of Cassandra and Sisyphus. They seem particularly appropriate to modern management. Continue reading →

I have been reading an article about our new Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a US Marine general who is well known for his thoughtful insights on the world situation. He is also viewed as a superb manager, which means I want to learn as much from his experience as possible. In the article, Mattis has listed some of his management credos. I thought I would look at coming up with corresponding credos for managing a civilian engineering team (Table 1). Continue reading →