§1. Paperclips as a materials selection problem [00:00]
Anybody have any questions before we get started? I handed out some packets a couple times ago of paperclips. Did anybody take the opportunity to study all these different paperclips and figure out what was important — which are the better types of paperclips? Looking at this stuff, you have a big one and you have little ones. You have a big what's called a gem paperclip, because it was invented or patented by the Gem Paperclip Company of Pittsburgh about a hundred years ago. There's a big one, there's small ones that are coated, but there are some in here that in my opinion are definitely inferior. Anyone figure out what those are?
Student: The smaller ones?
Flimsy. But what type of material is it made out of? Plastic, right. Why are plastic clips such lousy things? If you want a clamping force to hold the paper together, you can get a bigger clamping force with a bigger clip. I personally don't like small gem clips, I like sort of intermediate sizes because I get more clamping force. But there's all these other clips that are basically made out of steel rather than aluminum or copper. Why don't they make them out of aluminum or copper?
Well, A, they don't have enough stiffness because their Young's modulus is one-third that of steel, and B, those materials are too expensive. You can get stainless steel paperclips but they're pretty pricey, and they're hard to find, because you can chrome plate a regular steel clip and it works as well — you're not throwing them in water in most cases, the paper tends to get soggy. But there were in here three different plastic clips. Actually, this is a composite clip — it's plastic but it's got a steel spring, so it actually has a reasonable amount of stiffness, in part because it's heavier, more material, and you get the stiffness from the geometry, not from the modulus of the metal or plastic.
Anyone have an idea what the typical modulus of most plastics is? You can give it to me in gigapascals, or I know it better in psi. It's about two million, as opposed to thirty million for steel. It's fifteen times less stiff, so you've got to have a lot of geometry to give you — there's two ways to get stiffness. You can either do it with the basic modulus of the material, which is the strength of the chemical bonds, or you can do it with geometry. You can make a bigger beam and it will be stiffer. That particular one is not too bad but it's still not quite as good. You could have slipped a number of pieces of paper in there and then pulled on it and seen how tightly it stuck.
With these plastic clips, you've seen them before, they're worthless. You pick up the sheaf of papers and they all fall apart because the clip cantilevers them. So why would anyone make them? They're actually not as cheap as the steel. I think it's because you can get them in different colors. They made this little smiley face, they punched holes in it and made it orange. That has no functionality, it's basically aesthetics. But you could go through — there was this one which is sort of like one of these clamps, but it has no levers to open it. I mentioned that you really had to have something else in order to grab it, and it turns out you have to have one of these, which is pretty expensive.
Did anybody read the little article on paperclips that was put on Stellar? Apparently three out of every ten paperclips is never used, it's just lost, fell on the floor somewhere. When I came in here the other day there was a paperclip on the floor. But this thing — you push it, slides it up, opens it, and I could shoot it at you. One of the problems is, it has a good clamping force, but you have to have just the right number of pages. Clips clip something together. So the point is even something as simple as a paperclip, there are thousands of designs. Many of the designs have no great functionality, some of them are sort of standard designs, and there's a reason why they're sort of standard designs. Steel is the material of choice.
§2. Young's modulus and the Lennard-Jones potential [05:53]
What choices do you have for something that has a higher Young's modulus? If you look at all the metals out there, or other materials, which materials have the highest Young's modulus? Anybody know something higher than steel?
Student: Diamond.
Diamond. That's the best, has the highest modulus. A little bit harder to form it into a clip, and it also could be a little pricey. But it has the highest stiffest modulus by how much, more than steel? A factor of two. Tungsten is almost as good as diamond, it's about a factor of two. Molybdenum is also about sixty million, it's about a factor of two. There's not a lot in between steel and those three. There are some ceramics — I guess you can consider diamond a ceramic — that are up there in the sixty million, but there's nothing any stronger. Diamond's the strongest chemical bonds.
And in fact, does anyone know how the chemical bond relates to the stiffness? You didn't learn this in freshman chemistry? You ever heard of the Lennard-Jones potential? Basically the force of attraction between atoms, or the energy of attraction. If I have an atom right here and I bring another atom up close, there will be an equilibrium energy, and that's the equilibrium distance of separation. This is the radius from here to another atom that's brought in, and it will go to the energy minimum. This is the nuclear repulsion, this is the attractive — one over R squared — and you get a net energy, and you have an equilibrium distance of separation.
If you differentiate energy with respect to distance, what do you get? Force, very good, that's freshman physics. If you differentiate the force with respect to distance — take the second derivative of energy with respect to distance — what do you get? Stiffness, or Young's modulus. Now what is that in mathematical terms? What part of the shape of this energy function is that? It's the curvature. The second derivative is the curvature of the line or the curve. So the stiffer something is, the sharper the Lennard-Jones potential and the greater the stiffness. If I had something in here, it acts like a little spring, you can think of it as one-half KX squared. A little atom vibrating down in here — the stiffer it is, the sharper the Lennard-Jones potential. It's all chemical bonds between things, and it turns out there's nothing better than diamond. It's only a factor of two better than steel, and that happens to be one of the reasons that steel's so widely used. Aside from the fact it's cheap, it has very good stiffness. It's one of the best, within a factor of two of the very best on the periodic table. Just trying to bring some structural materials into this structural materials course.
§3. Science versus engineering [09:48]
Anybody have any questions about anything? So my summary is, science seeks to increase human knowledge, and engineering seeks to improve the human condition. If you go back with various definitions we've had of science and engineering, you'll find the engineer somehow — when the first day I asked you what's engineering, one of you said something about benefiting society. When you talk to a scientist, they like to talk about increase in knowledge.
And they say — I've been listening to this all my professional career — that we need to do more science, because doing more science will bring us great new things like the transistor. Well, it turns out the guys who won the Nobel Prize, Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain at Bell Labs, developed the transistor. But they were doing it because they wanted a highly reliable switch. Everybody says, oh, this came out of basic research. No. It came out of the fact that in the old days — you see it on the old movies, you see the switchboard and operators making the connections. Then they got to the point where they had switches, and just down the street from me is a great big AT&T building — it just be full of switches in the old days. Today they could put it all on a little laptop to do all that same switching.
AT&T had done some studies, Bell Labs in the 1920s, on reliability of switches, and it turns out a switch might be good for 10,000 hours of operation, flipping back and forth. When you start getting to ten million switches, that means you're going to have a thousand failures an hour. So they were looking at the reliability of the whole network just going to fall apart, as they extrapolated into the future. They needed a more reliable switch, and so they were actually trying to find an electronic switch. That wasn't basic science, that was applying basic physics to an actual need. So you always hear, jump-starting basic science was what brought us the transistor. No, it was a specific need of society to have a bigger communication system that wasn't going to be constantly breaking down. And electronic switches were known to be about a million times more reliable than the mechanical switches.
But typically, the scientists tend to say, society should fund us because we're so smart and we want to study whatever we want, because if you do basic research and just learn more about anything, somehow there're going to be spin-offs and society will benefit. That is an absolute fallacy. I just gave you the example of the transistor. Most things that have come about have actually come about because of a search for a human need. But this argument that the scientists make to Congress and the general public — we need to just study things for their own sake. So we spend a billion dollars trying to prove gravity waves from space in the LIGO project, and it's really kind of neat, they're doing some great things, and they've improved surveying as a byproduct of it. Sending someone to the moon, which actually was an engineering challenge more than a scientific challenge — you could calculate what size rocket you needed, you just had to then go out and build it, which is an engineering challenge.
But there is this thing that the scientists think that they should be funded because they're so smart, and everyone else will somehow benefit. They can't tell you how they're going to benefit, and they don't really care if there's someone else benefits. One of my favorite quotes about science comes from Lord Kelvin. I have this mounted in my office. Professor Cohen had it mounted in his office, he was an Institute Professor from this department, I TA'd him when I was a graduate student. "I often say that when you can measure what you're speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it. Then when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind. It may be the beginning of knowledge but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be."
A scientist wants to discover new knowledge, and mathematics is the language of science. You've got to try to quantify it. And that's why scientists are typically very good mathematicians, who can quantify things, and if they can't, they simplify the problem so they can, because they're not really interested in solving a real problem, they want to create knowledge. Whereas an engineer has different constraints. An engineer is going to be involved with complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and all kinds of other constraints on the system. When you're dealing in the real world, you're looking for a solution, you're looking for a good solution. People often say, we're looking for the optimal solution, but there is no such thing as the optimal solution. Design is the synthesis of knowledge. There are no unique solutions for complex systems. It might be a better system, but there's no single unique optimum.
In science they like to define problems in a way where they can get some eigenvalue, and they know this is the answer. And if you think about it, you've been taught that all through your problem sets. We give you problem sets where there's one correct answer. Has anyone ever thought about why they do that? I've already told you — they give you just the right amount of information, you manipulate it, don't leave anything out, don't put anything extra in, crank it, and you get a single number, right. If I'm grading a thermo quiz, if I have specific numbers, I see that number, I go on to the next question, pop. If it's wrong, if I want to be nice to the student, I'll try to find out where they got it wrong.
When you're grading, you find many students will make the same mistake. They use the gas constant in one set of units rather than another set of units, and they'll get the same incorrect numbers because they had the same incorrect input. But it's a determinate problem. If you put in the right numbers, you can turn the crank and math facts will give you the same answer. It's much harder to grade an essay question. In fact, it's almost impossible, because I can't read writing, and if I try to understand what you're saying, it's even worse. So I understand why the engineers and the scientists give you nice closed-form answers. It's much harder for the faculty in humanities and the social sciences, because they give you a quiz that's actually trying to find out what you think. And it really, it's painful to grade those essays. I have to do it in the sense of — a student gives me a thesis to evaluate, and I have to read and try to figure out what it is that they're really saying.
§4. The hierarchy of snobbery: scientist, engineer, doctor [18:46]
So I consider the hierarchy of snobbery, that I call it. If you talk about scientists, engineers, and medical clinicians — a scientist, the goal is to increase human knowledge; an engineer, to improve the human condition; and a medical doctor, to improve human health. The scientist just wants to do something to discover something new. They don't really care if it has an application. Take the definitions, listen to what the scientists say. Are they saying I need to do this for the application it's going to solve? If they're saying this is to improve the human condition, they're probably doing engineering, or medicine. They're not doing real science. The basic scientists, the people studying the big bang theory, the people trying to understand what's going on in outer space — it's not clear that that's going to really help the people who are starving in Bangladesh.
The engineer is trying to do good, the medical doctor is trying to do no harm. That's their mantra, but in fact, they're trying to do good. The old Hippocratic oath is do no harm. The scientists will study anything because anything is good — everything's fair game for the scientists for studying. The engineer, if you remember von Karman, create something that never was. So the engineer's trying to create something, and that thing is probably going to be something that's useful. In fact, engineers look down on people that are doing things — just like I'm looking down right now on the scientists who are doing useless things — because to the engineer, the ultimate thing is to do something useful. Same thing for the medical clinician, they're going to administer to the sick, and also nowadays the healthy to keep them from getting sick.
But the service for the engineer and the medical doctor is to society. It's not clear who the service is to for the scientist. They just want society to provide them with the resources for them to go out in their sandbox and do what they want to do. You may be saying it pretty strongly, but that's what I've been listening to for many years, and that's the argument. So when you hear these arguments, you can tell if the person is really a scientist or if they're really an engineer or a medical person, depending on who they're trying to help.
§5. Leaders versus managers — the Nibley framework [21:34]
That gets down — I gave you this article out of the Faculty Newsletter on the very first day of class, on leadership management education at MIT. At the time, I'd just spent fifteen years working with people over at the Sloan School of Management. I had some good friends who rose to the top of Harvard Business School. And it used to bother me — the last slide I put up the last time I lectured was a comparison between starting salaries and the decision-making responsibilities of an engineer versus a manager. If you go to get an MBA, you're going to make fifty, sixty percent more as a starting salary. You'll have managerial decision authority, whereas the engineer is just sort of a technician that makes less money. And that's a problem for engineers.
And I came up in this paper with a short synopsis. The leader seeks to help others, a manager seeks to control others. If you start thinking about it, you can watch someone's style, because some people who are the boss are actually leaders, and some people are control people. They want to micromanage, they want to be the boss. The basic problem that I have with business schools is they teach management, not leadership. We need more leadership in the world, we don't need more management. Well, I take that back — there's actually two groups of people. One of the problems is I live in this little shell called MIT, where everybody is pretty capable. I don't need managers at MIT, I need leaders. You're capable of doing things yourself. If I just leave you alone, you'll do a better job than if I manage you, because the MIT students are a selected group.
If you get out there in the real world, you're going to find a lot of people just don't have any motivation, and you have to have someone to kind of kick them to get them to do things. In that case there's two types of leadership. One is what I call Confucianism, which is the set of rules — typically the way they run the unions, they have certain sets of rules that the management sets up and they negotiate with the union, and everybody lives and dies by the rules. That's what Confucius taught, he had a bunch of rules and that was how you're supposed to live your life. Then Taoism — yin-yang, go with the flow. Taoism is the opposite of Confucianism. There's no rule that can't be broken in Taoism. You let however the spirit moves you at the moment, go with the flow.
MIT used to be that way when I was a student. There were all kinds of rules, but you could get out of any rule at MIT when I was a student, if you had a good reason. There were actually people that would listen to you. What's happened in my opinion over the last thirty, thirty-five years, as MIT got to be a bigger business — when we passed the billion dollar mark in the annual budget, they started hiring more and more managers, who want to set up rules, who want to control people, and it doesn't have the flexibility or the ability to be creative that we used to have. Now you're supposed to be a conformist. So I'm going to go through basically what's in that article that I gave you the first day, about leaders versus managers.
This comes from an address that Hugh Nibley gave at a commencement at a university in the early 1980s. It's called "Leaders to Managers: The Fatal Shift." He says it pretty strongly, I can't say it any better than he said it. "Leaders are movers and shakers, original, inventive, unpredictable, imaginative, full of surprises that discomfort the enemy in war and the main office in peace." So this is the troublemaker. If you're at war, they're creating problems for the enemy by doing things differently. If you're at peace, they're creating problems for the administration. "Managers, on the other hand, are safe, conservative, predictable, conforming organization men and team players, dedicated to the establishment."
"The leader, for example, has a passion for equality. We think of great generals from David and Alexander on down sharing their beans or matzoh with their men, calling them by their first names, marching along with them in the heat, sleeping on the ground, and being first over the wall." Now I'll make a racist comment for those of you that come from Asia. Is the Asian culture management or leadership? How many Asian students want to call me by my first name? The Asian culture is such that the professor is somehow way above everyone else, right.
§6. Cultural differences in hierarchy — Asia and the West [27:21]
I remember I had a brilliant student from India, and he was going home — he was a graduate student doing his doctoral thesis. He says, I'm going back to India, what do you want? And I said, what do you mean, what do I want? Well, it turns out the tradition for him in India, and in many other parts of Asia, is you ask your professor what they want, and whatever the professor says, you have to get them, even if you can't afford it. And as he explained this to me — as I kept on saying, what do you mean what do I want — because in my culture it's actually almost a crime for the professor to extract something from the person beneath them that they have supervisory authority over. But it's a sign of respect in Asia. It's actually the opposite in the United States, it's actually abuse.
I remember my first student from Asia, he didn't like calling me by my first name. I said, just call me Tom, who calls me Doctor? I'm not a medical doctor, I can't give you a prescription. That's the difference between Western culture and Asian culture. There've been lots of studies — why are Asian students, why is Asian society not as creative? Well, they are as creative, but they've been trained to think in the Confucianism style of certain rules and doing things by the norm and being obedient. Whereas we teach disobedience in the Western culture, and you're seeing it now with terrorism and everything else. It's kind of gone to an extreme.
In any case, it wasn't really a racist comment, but there are cultural differences that I continue to see. One of you was sort of insisted on calling me professor. I teach the military officers in Tewmen [?] during the summer, and they always call me sir, and I was turning around, who's he into? Because none of the MIT graduates would call me sir, and I wouldn't have called somebody sir when I was at school. It's a sign of respect, but there's more of a feeling of equality among the kind of Western culture than there is in the Asian culture, where it's a hierarchical society.
§7. The German General Staff and the manager's promotion ladder [30:00]
Nibley went on to talk about the German High Command, the General Staff, which after World War Two — tried desperately for a hundred years, going back to the 1880s, to train up a generation of leaders for the German army, but it never worked, because the men who delighted their superiors, the managers, got the high commands, while the men who delighted the lower ranks, the leaders, got reprimands. And as I started to rise up in 1990 through the MIT administration, I saw this all the time. I could spot the person within minutes of whether they were a manager or a leader. Were they trying to suck up to the people who were the bosses above them, or were they trying to help the people that they were put in charge of?
I see it among faculty supervisors of students. Are they telling the students what to do and expecting obedience, and are they thinking for the students? Or are they someone that says, okay, here's the laboratory, it's your sandbox, I want you to solve this problem, and letting them have the freedom to do it? Where do you think you get more creativity? The latter, because two heads are better than one. And in fact, the advisor — faculty advisor-student mentorship, if it is a partnership, it is two heads, or five heads if you're part of a group, thinking together.
There's a faculty member who's passed away now in this department, he would sit down every week with his graduate students and he would go over their lab notebook every week. Took a lot of time, and the graduate students sort of feared going in to see him, because he would start nitpicking at little things. He was actually from Minnesota, and he was a wonderful man in many ways, but he had learned this sort of management way that it was his job to hand the knowledge down to the student. The story was, a student went in, and he was telling them about thermocouples — you know what thermocouples are, you take two dissimilar metal wires and you put them in one hot zone and one cold zone, and you get a voltage in between, you can measure the temperature. So he's telling them, when your thermocouple breaks, cut it off very close to the tip where you made your little weld, so that you can reweld it.
And I thought he was talking about platinum and platinum-rhodium thermocouples — platinum wire which can cost a few dollars an inch. He was talking about chromel-alumel, which is stainless steel and nickel alloy, which costs pennies per inch. But that was his mentality. You do everything by the book, and he would sit down and tell them what to do. When they were all done, who had learned how to do a doctoral thesis? Not the student. This particular professor — I won't rub his name into the ground, because he was a very kind person in many ways — but he just thought his job was to tell people how to do things because somehow he had more knowledge than anybody else.
§8. Teaching a student to do anything [33:35]
I learned in my very first week at MIT that I was in the bottom third of my entering class, so I always assumed — I'd let the students figure out how to do things. I'd give them a problem, and for a doctoral student, to a certain extent with a master's student, but a doctoral student, I'd sit down with them and say, okay, we got the research contract for this, this is the question that we have to answer. The question could change over time, but at that time that was the question that we wanted to try to address. And these are some of my ideas of how I might go about it, but I want you to go out and come back and tell me how you want to do it.
Some students would come back a week later and say, well, I've thought about it, I want to do XYZ. We talked about it, and most times, their idea was better than my idea. Then there were other students who were intimidated by that. I did that with my very first doctoral student, who happened to be from Taiwan, and he told me later he was scared to death — he had come in to have me tell him exactly what he was supposed to do. I didn't realize — my culture was, hey, this is the problem we got a contract for, these are some of the things I'd do. He was scared to death, he went over and talked to another professor. I learned that — it'd be easier to recognize the culture they're coming from.
Another story: one of my next students from Taiwan, Mark, had done a master's thesis for me and he'd done a good job on it. But with a master's student, I kind of gave him a little more guidance, because they had to finish in about a year. The doctoral student was all open-ended. He came to me after his master's thesis and said, well, what problem do you want me to solve? And I gave him a problem, and he came back three weeks later and said, Professor Eagar — he still called me Professor Eagar after a year and a half, because he couldn't bring himself to call me Tom, it was his culture. He comes in, he says, I've looked through every book in the library, I can't find the solution to the problem. I said, Mark, if there was a solution, you're not doing a doctoral thesis. If there was a solution out there, I wouldn't have told you to solve that problem. You're supposed to be doing something new.
We had a discussion about that, and he kind of learned, and I gave him some ideas of how he might go about solving it. He did an excellent doctoral thesis. I used to have a habit of taking every doctoral student after they finished their exam, sometime during the next week, I'd take him over, usually to Legal Seafood or somewhere, one-on-one, and we just kind of talked about things, because no longer was I their supervisor, I was their colleague. They had a doctoral degree too, and I could then ask them how they would change things in the lab. Mark had been working on a welding problem, which is a sort of fluid flow problem. It was a complex problem, but he'd done an excellent job. And he had gotten his job to do finite element analysis of plastic injection molding, which had nothing to do with anything he had learned.
And here was someone who, two and a half years before, thought that everything he was going to work on was found in a textbook. I said, Mark, how could you get this job? He was going to RCA, the Sarnoff Lab. He was going to be doing viscoelastic flow of polymers and modeling of it by finite element analysis. We didn't do finite element in my lab at that time. It was completely different. I said, Mark, how did you get that job? He says, well, you taught me I can do anything. And that was the best success story I can ever tell you — he said he had learned that he could do anything.
And that's what you need to learn at MIT. Forget the professors, forget the Institute — you have to learn that you can do anything by yourself. When you do that, that's when you've really earned your doctorate. Doesn't matter what problem anyone ever gives you, you can go out and solve it.
§9. Nibley on managers, mediocrity, and corruption [38:35]
So Nibley goes on. "For the manager, the idea of equality is repugnant and even counterproductive, when promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game. All in reverence, for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men where" — he's a little sexist, this is thirty-year-old language — "where would managers be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over the habits and attitudes that gratify the stockholders and satisfied security."
Nibley doesn't like managers. "Do not promote individuals whose competence might threaten their own position, and so as the power of management spreads ever wider, the quality deteriorates, if that's possible. In short, while management shuns equality, it feeds on mediocrity. On the other hand, leadership is an escape from mediocrity. The leader being simply the one who sets the highest example. True leaders are inspiring because they are inspired, caught up in a higher purpose, devoid of personal ambition, idealistic and incorruptible." Believe me, most managers I have found to be quite corruptible. Money talks in many of those cases. So that's Nibley's take on managers versus leaders.
I can tell you, I agree one hundred percent with Nibley about the two types of people. First of all, there's a basic asymmetry here — who rises to the top? Managers. That's their goal, to rise up to the next level. When I was department head, I can't tell you how many times I came back from Engineering Council — we'd have all the department heads and the deans — and I'd go into Jodo C [?], who is the administrative officer in the department. When you're department head, there's not a lot of faculty you can talk to frankly about things, because you're the boss, no one wants to talk to the boss and tell them how they really think. So I'd go into our administrative officer, who graduated from this department — he had a master's degree from the department, but he was basically the administrative officer, and he and I had very similar views. And I'd go in and I'd say, Joe, how come people are making decisions and doing things trying to get their next job rather than doing the job they're in?
And you will see that over and over. The managers, the people who are trying to move up the corporate ladder, will make decisions trying to please their bosses, just like Nibley said, so that they get the next promotion, rather than trying to protect the people that they are supervising from all the quirks in the system that demotivate people. There've been lots of studies about people who don't do a good job at work. These might be union employees or whatever, but I've always said, I don't know anyone who goes home at the end of the day saying, I'm glad I did a lousy job at work today. What they will say is, I've been trying to do my job but my boss won't let me do it.
§10. How to manage your boss — bring solutions, not problems [42:10]
So how do you manage this process of dealing with your boss if your boss is a manager? You have to go back to the question of why did the company hire you. I'm asking it at the most fundamental level — why will someone hire you? This is giving you some counseling on seeking a job and interviewing. Anybody know the answer? They hire you because they think you can help them solve their problems. They have this thing called money, but they have these problems, and they want to make more money — nothing wrong with that — but they have these problems, and they're willing to give you some of their money to help them solve some of their problems. It's important to recognize that's why they hired you. They didn't hire you to hear you come in and whine about what the problems are. They asked you to come and solve the problems.
So I always tell students that if you're a materials engineer, mechanical, chemical engineer, and your boss gives you a problem to solve, and you find out it's an accounting problem, you better solve the accounting problem. Your boss is not going to give you the same problem you did your thesis on, with just the right amount of information, no more or less, like the problems that you got at the university. They're going to say, I got this problem, go solve it. The corollary to all that is, you never bring a problem to your boss. You only bring solutions to your boss. You don't come in and whine that I can't do this — I get this sometimes from some of the internship students, and I'm not very kind about it, I say, look, you've got to solve that problem, because they have to learn to solve some of their own problems.
So how do you come into your boss? You've thought about it, you've determined that there are two or three possible solutions. You go in and say, okay, this is the problem we face, and I think there are these two or these three solutions, which one do you want to pick? And if you're really smart, you've already decided which one you want to do, and you phrase it so that only an idiot would pick anything other than the card you want to play. So you always give your boss a choice, particularly if they're a manager, but you phrase it a way so only an idiot would pick something else. Now, there are some idiot managers out there, so they may pick the wrong one, but nonetheless you tried.
§11. The parking lot test — Hartzell Propeller [44:53]
Now, in all this differentiation between leaders and managers, how can you determine whether you want to work for a company before you walk through the door? If you read my article, you will know the answer to this. No one remembers? Some of you probably read it and just don't remember the answer. You look for the number of assigned spaces in the parking lot. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to people in industry and said this, and they agree with me immediately. Why? Because you can tell whether you're in the hierarchical management type of organization or whether you're a group of leaders. That was in my article, folks.
So there's a story — Hartzell Propeller. I had a case where a propeller had failed, I had to go out to Hartzell in Ohio. The president of Hartzell was an MIT grad, and it turns out he got to work at 6 AM, first one in the parking lot. There were no assigned spaces in the parking lot, but he always parked in the one closest to the door, because he was the first one in the parking lot at 6 AM. Remember what Nibley said, the leader sets the highest example. So one time he had to go to the bank or something, and he didn't get in till ten o'clock. That space was waiting for him, but it wasn't waiting for him because people were afraid of him. It was waiting for him because they respected him. Anyone who needs an assigned name on their parking space is admitting they do not have the respect of their employees, and they're not setting the highest example.
§12. The custodians' Christmas breakfast [47:00]
Did I ever tell you about the Christmas breakfast for the custodians when I became department head? When I became department head, I used to get in about six AM. I used to get in earlier than that when I was fighting for tenure, but I finally got a parking space after twenty years, over here by Building Ten, where the custodians would clock out between six and seven. These are the nighttime custodians.
If you actually read that article on leadership that I gave you, I say that the people who would be most recognized if they had quit working — who are they? I give two groups at the university and in many companies. The people who clean the restrooms and the people who fix the food. If a faculty member quit working, you couldn't tell for five years. There's no motion.
So I thought it was important to show some respect for these people, many of whom were rushing to get out at seven o'clock to go to their next forty-hour-week job. These people don't make a lot of money. It's not very highly paid, not particularly respected. They don't like to be called janitors, they'd like to be called sanitary engineer or whatever — they get different types of names because society sort of looks down on them as a lower-paid something.
So when I became department head, I decided it would be a nice gesture — Jodo C and I worked together, we had a kitchenette up on the third floor. Once a year, right before Christmas, between six and seven — I would get permission from the woman who ran physical plant, and she'd let them get off work at six. We would give them scrambled eggs and bacon and sausage and french toast, and we'd fix a breakfast for them and tell them that we appreciated all they did during the year. First of all, one of the first things I learned is they cleaned up after themselves. In a faculty meeting, they're pigs. They just leave their stuff all around for the department head and the secretaries to clean up.
They were very appreciative and very respectful. And I later found that we got great service. We had the best service from physical plant of any department in the Institute, all for one hour a year we actually showed respect to them. That's all they need — someone showing a little bit of gratitude. And then when I stepped down as department head, I used to often get that best spot. For over a year that space was saved for me. I know there were people saying, don't park there, that's for Professor Eagar. After about a couple years when I was no longer department head, they had new people and it kind of went away.
§13. The Honeywell plant turnaround — donuts and the Mad [50:41]
I'll tell you another story on that respect. I had a student working for — it was a small division of what was Honeywell. They bought a little mom-and-pop operation that made plastic sheet. In the LGO program — back then it was LFM — you have to go and visit the site with a student. I had this woman graduate student, and we went down to New Jersey to visit this little facility that she was going to be working at for seven months. We found that the morale was terrible in this plant. Honeywell had bought it a couple of months before, but all the workmen had their toolboxes locked up, and if they left it unlocked, they'd have their tools stolen by some of their colleagues. The management and the engineers and the hourly union workers hated each other, despised each other.
And there's also the problem of the Mad — that's what they called him — some guy would go in the men's room, and he would take his excrement and he would smear it all over the walls. I'm sure he was wearing rubber gloves, but nonetheless he was doing this anonymously, because they probably would beat him to a pulp if they found him. That was the kind of thing this young graduate student was going to walk into. So we learned all these things on our visit, and we could see the people weren't working very hard, the place was sort of sloppy. On the way back to the airport we stopped at Dunkin Donuts or some diner, and I told her, what are you going to do about this? She said, I don't know. I said, I'll tell you what you're going to do. I'm going to give you the money to buy a dozen donuts, or two dozen, every Friday, and you're going to come in and you're going to put the donuts by the coffee machine.
Within a week they were coming up to her, putting their arm around her, showing her how the plant worked, because she had showed respect for them by doing something for them. Within two weeks she could go out and find out what the problems were, she could help solve the problems. I also said, you're going to tell them that you want to know what's bothering them, and you're going to do something — you can't fix everything at once, but you're going to take one of those problems that they tell you, and you're going to fix it. It was her choice which one of the problems they told her she could pick. The low-hanging fruit. But she was going to fix the problem. And she did.
She brought in donuts which showed — here's someone that shows some respect to the people who work under them. Then she asked them what they thought, which also showed respect. And then she acted on it. She turned the plant around. One leader turned the plant around. Not completely, they still were losing money, but that's another problem. But at least they no longer had a Mad. People don't do something like that — why do you think someone's doing that? They're not doing it because they want to, they're doing that because they're completely frustrated. They don't know anything else to do. They've complained and no one hears. They need someone to listen to them. So bring them some donuts, listen to them, do something. They don't expect you to solve all the problems tomorrow. Do something, and you will be successful. And she was.
It's just a matter of respecting other people. But for managers, rank and privilege is everything. Managers want to get above everybody else. I can tell you some people here who were department heads when I was department head, now they're presidents of universities. I'm glad that they're not at MIT and I don't have to deal with them. And I feel sorry for the faculty of those other universities, because these are quintessential managers, rank and privilege and perks are the number one thing for them. So that's what you have to think about when you go out there in the real world. Thanks.