MIT Materials Processing Center vs. LMP turf war (1980s)

Tom's first-person account of routing his Navy welding contract through Flemings's Materials Processing Center; giving Dave Hardt his first contract; the Suh-vs-Flemings feud; Kent Bowen's 1984 offer of the MPC directorship; the 1989 founding of Leaders for Manufacturing with $35M. Tom announces this story will continue next lecture.

Dan Roos was a professor of civil engineering. Dan Roos used to teach the introductory computer science course that I took as a freshman to learn how to program a mainframe computer with punch cards. Dan used to teach that core course that had a couple hundred students in it. But then he got to the point where he knew most of the CEOs of most of the automotive companies in the world, and he sold them in the 1980s on a million-dollar-a-year program, which was a pretty good-sized research program. They were trying to figure out why Toyota was beating everybody's socks off in the marketplace. They had quality, and General Motors and Ford and Chrysler turned out junk. All the quality-measure people were quitting buying US cars and buying Japanese. James Womack was the guy who really wrote the book and did most of the study. Dan Roos at that point was a guy who wanted the title of Dean. He didn't care, he was Dean of Engineering, he wanted the title of Dean at MIT, and he didn't teach in classrooms anymore. And he had irritated some people.