WHO STIRS THE DRINK? The Engineer Does, But It Has Been Stolen From Him!

WHO STIRS THE DRINK?  The Engineer Does, But It Has Been Stolen From Him!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 5, 2014

NOTE:

Another excerpt from TIME OUT FOR SANITY!  This book is to be published in early 2015.

The paradox is that insiders capture our attention while outsiders stir the drink. Outsiders write most of the books with insiders’ names on the jackets. Athletes and entertainers, politicians and other celebrities are too busy being busy, or too busy making money or making momentous decisions to write their own books.

The scribes in the early days of Egyptian civilization a few millenniums ago provided this service; the same was true during medieval times when kings and monarchs never bothered to learn to read, much less write, and now today ghostwriters provide this service. A consultant once gave me two boxes of his seminar performances and paid me $10,000 to whip it into a nonfiction book, which I did in four weeks. This has become something of the norm rather than the exception.

Incredible as it may seem, celebrated authors of fiction, can write the outline of a story and hire a complement of writers to author their books, of course with the celebrity author’s name prominently featured, and perhaps the hired scribbler’s name less prominently (but not always) displayed. Publishing has become a “brand name” industry with the majority of such books becoming bestsellers for the author’s brand name they carry.

Moreover, outsiders are more apt than not to write the speeches, strategy briefs, and tactical maneuvers of generals, CEOs, politicians, clerics, television commentators and educators. These scribblers remain essentially invisible but apparently mesmerized by their nearness to power and celebrity while, paradoxically, denying their creative verve while abandoning their own essence for so many pieces of silver. It is, after all, a job, right?

This is played out with bizarre finality in the engineering community. The modern world is a product of the engineering mind, no other. Yet while the engineer has created this world, it does not belong to him. It has been stolen from him.

Steven Jobs was designing video games for Atari, while his engineering buddy Stephen Wozniak was working on pocket calculators for Hewlett-Packard. Wozniak designed a personal computer but couldn’t get HP to produce and market it. Jobs was touring a Xerox facility in 1979 when, suddenly, his world changed.

Jobs, not himself an engineer, observed Xerox’s computer graphic screen, overlapping popup windows, icons, fonts, and mouse, and was immediately intrigued. It took his breath away. He found himself leaping and jumping around the room, yelling, “Why aren’t you doing something with this?” He was saying to himself, “If you don’t, I will,” and of course he did.

The Xerox engineers who designed the computer didn’t have the will, or the persuasive skills to convince Xerox management that it was sitting on gold.

In the 1980s, IBM was asleep at the wheel of the pc surge. It lost more than $70 billion of stock valuation and eliminated more than 200,000 jobs. In a panic, it rushed to get into the pc computer business by putting together existing components and technology instead of launching into complete reengineering. It looked for an operating system and decided on Digital Research (DR) whose operating system CP/M was the market leader for personal computers at the time.

But IBM could not come to an agreement with the firm’s engineering head. That would be Dr. Gary Kildall, creator of Digital Research, and its state-of-the-arts software operating system.  He was out flying his plane on that day. His wife, Dorothy McEwen, who handled the business end, instead met with IBM representatives and rejected its offer as too lopsided to IBM. Her main concern was the “nondisclosure” agreement required by IBM, which would, as she saw it, have allowed IBM to hear about DR’s products, and then go out and duplicate them on its own.

Waiting in the wings was a fledgling company, Microsoft, which had more chutzpah than cutting edge technology. It could not say “yes” fast enough. It looked at the contract as a vehicle that would allow it to sell its real products, programming languages. So, late in 1980, IBM signed the agreement that would turn Bill Gates, and his partners, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer into multi-billionaires.

To satisfy IBM, Microsoft had to do some stealing, posthaste. It bought the rights to what was then called the “Quick and Dirty Operating System” (QDOS) from the small firm, Seattle Computer (SC). Microsoft first paid $25,000 for non-exclusive rights. SC had no idea how valuable DOS would become.

Microsoft then quickly paid an additional $50,000 for exclusive rights. In 1986, six years later, Microsoft paid Seattle Computer nearly $1 million to settle a dispute over the rights to DOS. Microsoft was now home free and on its way with MS-DOS.

This is a common story throughout the history of engineer-in. Engineers have been finessed and baffled by opportunists since the discovery of the wheel. Engineers have shown a lack of moxie and sophistication when it has come to selling and profiting from their ideas. That is due, in part, because they reason from the general to the particular (deduction) or cognitively, whereas marketing types reason from the particular to the general (induction) or intuitively.

Moreover, engineering is a conforming discipline whereas the entrepreneur defies convention operating on instinct and intuition, and outside the box. No surprise, two non-engineers, Jobs and Gates were college dropouts who defied convention.

 The engineer deals with dead matter, whereas the entrepreneur deals with live matter, and subjugates himself to free creative design with the self actively involved in self-direction, alert to the will and fickle twisting of humanity as it insouciantly expresses itself. The strengths of entrepreneurs are in selling, not inventing or building. And so it has been to the present day.

In “The Lost Soul of the Engineer” (1993) I observed engineers have a fatal attraction to exploiters. This is the aftereffect of a conformist education of skills honed to engineering and mathematical precision that can easily be replicated and therefore are indisputable. The world of commerce is imprecise, contradictory, and disputable. It involves effective presentation, writing and speaking skills with a modicum of persuasion. Engineers tend to look on these requirements with disdain, and suffer for their failure to develop them.

The hard wiring of engineers is to stay and not stray from the consistency of the engineering discipline. While this may solve who controls the design phase, it leaves engineers viler-able to non-engineers who are likely to control the final product. They are outsiders in which insiders can exploit them at will, and unfortunately do.

Engineers deal with what is concrete and can be quantified. They develop their rational side, and ignore or deny their irrational side. The Jobs and Gates of the world embrace the irrational with gusto.

A consistent complaint of engineers is that they are underutilized. It never occurs to them that it is their fault. They expect their value to be self-evident and appreciated without any action or risk on their part.

Engineers are not decisive because they don’t see decision-making as part of their job. They are problem solvers that are easily thrown off stride by interdepartmental turf wars or company politics regarding perks and salary concerns. Consequently, pay them a dollar more an hour than they can afford to quit and you own them.

Their tentative nature surfaces when placed in a position of authority showing a mania for data collection to verify the most routine of decisions. It is no accident that major corporations manned by engineers seldom show the flexibility to deal with sudden disruptive change.

Engineers-as-leaders fall back on what they know, failing to trust their instincts, their counterintuitive hunches often putting their behavior on a collision course with the unexpected. Take the topsy-turvy American automotive industry. It is dominated by CEOs with engineering backgrounds, and is struggling.

As Plato might observe, engineers have the power to see into their own soul, but much prefer looking in the opposite direction. These technology creators have spurned responsibility for its chaos. They have allowed technocrats and entrepreneurs to possess, exploit and manage their creations. Fault not exploiters as they have come to this advantage by default.

Obviously, not all engineers are outsiders. But the general perception is that they have allowed insiders to run with their ideas and often into the ground. We see this in automobile exhaust emissions, nuclear waste, pesticides, the weapons of mass destruction, indeed, all the toys and tools of the electronic age. Engineers have taken a subservient role corrupted by their debilitating passivity, when they should be in charge and managing the process.

Contempt for things non-engineering has put them in a cage of their own making, and society with them. Society is sick because it is out-of-control. It is out-of-control because the designers and builders of the modern world are waiting for someone else to demonstrate moral authority. The age of science has often seen scientists and engineers acting like children, and we with them, passively consuming our own waste and being sickened for the inclination.

This plays out in a bizarre way. We applaud scientists and engineers for short-term cures of diseases that are essentially illnesses associated with pervasive toxic social behavior. We are playing catch up when we are only running faster and faster in place. We look for definitive answers when problems, at best, can only be controlled, never solved.

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