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Or you can essentially get fresh water out of pumped water storage electric system, electrical systems. And he's gone through a lot of this analysis and it shows you some of the complexity of engineering. So there is a read-ahead assignment there. Professor Slocum is one of the three brightest people I've ever known, okay. Another one is Bob Langer, and other one is someone who graduated from MIT with his bachelor's degree, master's degree, and doctoral degree in six years total. Had to sit on his doctoral degree for two months because we have a two-year residency requirement. He basically finished his doctoral thesis in about nine months after finishing his master's. But anyway, he lives in Florida now.

But in any case, the last time I talked, I kind of sermonized on various topics about leadership and how to manage things. And I told you the story about the MADD [MADD officer]. Did anyone stop to think about why the MADD would do something like he was doing? It's not even a very pleasant thing to think about, you know, what he was doing. Why would someone do that? It's outrageous. But he felt so frustrated with the system, okay. I always say I don't think anybody goes home at the end of the day saying "I did a really bad job at work today." But a lot of people have jobs where they go home and say "it was terrible at work today, I had to do this, that, and the other thing because the system made me do it." And in fact a lot of times that's true, it's not just an excuse. The system does make you do certain things that are completely frustrating, you know, they're counterproductive. But you have a boss or rules from the organization that say you must do X, and many times you're powerless to go against that.

That's why I enjoy being at a university where I have tenure, okay. I used to say when I got tenure — this is not too long after Love Story. Anybody ever seen the movie, the Love Story? And where they said — Love is about a woman who had cancer and a real romance, and the woman contracted a very rapid form of cancer and was dying. And the key line of the movie was "love means never having to say you're sorry." So I transferred that to tenure means never having to say you're sorry, okay. My other quote about tenure is tenure means never having to write the first draft.

But anyway, I was going to talk a little bit more, and some people will say what does this have to do with what is engineering. I told you engineering means you have to solve the problem, and it might be complex, ambiguous, uncertain, and then you have to solve everything else. If the problem is an accounting problem, you may not know anything about accounting, but you better go out and figure out how to solve that problem, okay. So I was going to give you some more examples about managing your boss.

So one time back in the early 80s, I — Don Sadoway and I were both untenured associate professors. We got a new department head, and somewhat surprisingly he made Professor Sadoway the chair of the undergraduate committee. You don't usually put an untenured professor in as chair of one of the departmental committees. And he made me chair of the Graduate Admissions Committee, and you certainly don't put anything less than a fairly strong full professor in as chairman of the Graduate Admissions Committee, because other faculty will come to that person and try to twist their arm to admit some student that they want to get in or something. So you have to have someone who's willing to say no. Well, I was willing to say no, and he knew that.

In any case, we got together one time in his office and we worked out a plan. I don't remember what the plan was, but I was responsible for carrying it out. Now this department head was very unsure of himself. He had never been department head, he didn't know if he could do the job, and that led to several character traits. One is he became a micromanager. I — Don Sadoway and I were good friends and would speak every day. I'd go down to his office or whatever, and we'd chat. And we'd be chatting, and the department head would call up and ask him about what's going on with the undergraduate committee, virtually every day, okay. And I just had to start smiling about this, Sadoway is being micromanaged by the department head.

Anyway, so the department head sits down with me, and he had — I mean, he'd known me longer than he'd known Sadoway, he'd been my sophomore advisor so far as that goes. And so he gave me this assignment, and about three days later he calls me up and he asked me how the assignment's going. I said, Merton, do you want to do this or do you want me to do it? He says, what do you mean? Said, well, I told you I would do it and I will, but if you're going to take the time to call me up, why don't you just go ahead and do it, you know, I won't have to do it. Oh, okay Tom. And a couple of things came out of that. One is I had then made a commitment that I would always fulfill any assignment he gave me, okay. Because I basically just stood him down on the phone about don't bug me. I don't want the Sadoway daily phone calls. I mean, I didn't say that, but that meant that I had to fulfill every assignment I was given and do it on time. And he sort of — he learned, okay. I taught him not to — I was managing him, teaching him not to micromanage me. I hate micromanagers.

Anyway, so a few years later I had gone off on my sabbatical mid-80s. He was still department head, and I went in to see him about something about the graduate admissions committee again. And actually I saw him a couple of times, and I was a little irritated that I hadn't been put up for full professor. I had tenure then but I thought I should have been put up for full professor. But there was another professor who was sort of overseeing me, and he was a stodgy old person — I mentioned him once before — and he thought that, well, I'd taken a sabbatical for a year over in Japan and it wasn't clear if I was loyal to MIT. And so he thought that I had to wait another year to get my promotion, okay.

So anyway, the department head and I had a few little run-ins about that, because I didn't see why I had to wait because I took a sabbatical. But in any case this other person did. Anyway, so we had some little run-in, and he threw me out of his office basically. Well, it turns out everybody got thrown out of his office. He wasn't treating me special. It was — he was insecure as a manager, and when he was frustrated he would just get upset with people and throw them out of his office, okay. So this had happened a couple of times after I got back, and I thought this is not going to help things. And so I decided — I promised myself I would avoid him at all costs. I would not say anything to him for a year, is what I decided.

Now, as chairman of the Graduate Committee, I had to report to him. So after about three months I wrote him a one-page memo of what was going on. And I got some little, you know, copy of it back, said "thanks," okay. And a couple of months later I wrote him another memo of what was going on. And then after about nine months he wanted to discuss things with me. And so I had to go up to his office. Even though I said I was going to avoid him for a year, then nine months I came in, and he was as nice as could be. No arguments. All he wanted to know was what was going on. He was unsure of himself as a manager of the department, and he needed to know he had people he could rely on, and he needed to know what was going on in the department. And so for the next five or six years, whenever he wanted to know what was going on in the department, he would call me and say what's going on. Because I'll tell you, when you're a department head, no one will tell you what's going on. Everyone's afraid to tell the boss what's going on. And you'll be the boss someday, and remember, people are not going to bring bad news to the boss, okay.

So you have to learn to manage your boss. You have to be willing to bring bad news. And depending on the boss, it can be a different type of personality. So far as different personalities, there is a book I can recommend, although I'm not giving away copies because this is $27 some dollars. But it's called New Personalities [Personality Self-Portrait]. Oops, what happened to — money, did I never have that thing on, it was on right, what happened? Oh, you have to plug it in over here. Let's see if it comes back. Yeah, okay.

So Why You Think, Work, Love and Act the Way You Do, okay. I didn't get this until about 12 years ago. My son-in-law, who's a social worker basically, has it. He works with whacked-out teenagers — I mean basically he works with youth who were disturbed for various reasons. Anyway, he gave it to me, and frankly I didn't believe much in most things that I'd looked at in psychology, but this is a little different. And in fact I found it referenced a number of places.

It turns out — has anyone ever heard of DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual? What's that? Exactly right. And so do you know any of the history of DSM, do you know something about it? You don't have to know the history, I mean, they update it. In fact I think we're in DSM 6 now [DSM-5 was current in 2015]. The original DSM-1 basically looked at personality disorders, okay. Why is someone schizophrenic, okay, why is someone obsessive-compulsive or narcissistic. Well, DSM-2 — and the original DSM was in the 1960s — DSM-2 said wait a second, wait a second, these are merely excessive personality traits that someone has. What are the normal traits that we all have that lead to these when you get these in abundance? And so they mapped 14 — I think there's 14 of these. Conscientious — someone who's conscientious can in an extreme become obsessive-compulsive, okay. Someone who's vigilant can become paranoid, afraid of everything around. Someone who's solitary becomes schizoid, okay. Anyway, you could go through these. I'll probably have Jerry post it. Oh yeah, oh well, you have to read what passive-aggressive is, okay. But anyway, you have to read about these things.

But, well, I might as well tell the story, since people like stories. So there was a faculty member in our department when I was department head, and she's passed away now. But she was very aggressive, okay. She worked very hard, and she got tenure. She — I think she may have been the first tenured woman in the department, and she got tenure while I was there. I presented her tenure case. But she was very demanding, okay. She wanted — she thought we should have one TA for every two students in the lab course, she thought. And I said well, I don't know that we have a budget for that. Well, you're the department head, you should come up with a budget, okay.

Well anyway, I went to — I had to sit down with the deans to talk about the raises I had proposed that year. And I was talking about this particular person, I was a little worried about him — about her — because I thought they'd gone a little bit over the deep end on some things. And, you know, if they went all the way over the deep end I could lose them as a worthwhile, thriving faculty member. And the dean's — Vicki, the assistant dean — says, well Tom, why don't you go see the psychiatrist? I said, Vicki, I'm not the one in need, this person is. No no, she says, the head psychiatrist over at the medical department is essentially on call for department heads. I didn't know — whoever told me this — to go and talk about people who have problems in his department. So I had my secretary make an appointment. I went over there and spoke to him for 40 minutes, I described this person's behavior, and he says well, I haven't met with this person, but what you're describing is someone who's narcissistic, okay.

Well, I didn't — I kind of knew it, but I didn't really know what narcissistic meant. Someone who's self-confident? She was self-confident, no question about that. But she also thought the world should revolve around her, okay, which is narcissistic. So I came back and told my secretary, and Kathy went out and bought me four or five books on personality disorders. Not this one, okay, unfortunately, but some others. And so I started reading about personality disorders of the faculty of my department, okay. And that was — that was 1999, I was sitting at the kitchen table one Saturday morning reading about personality disorders, and I could pick out the faculty. I knew exactly who fit which box, okay. A lot of them are wacko, okay.

And I asked my wife who was washing dishes at the time — and my wife was an occupational therapist and had studied something — I said, well what do you think about these boxes they put people in? She says, well they're probably useful for the psychologists to analyze things, but some people just have bad behavior. And I decided my wife was right, some people just have bad behavior. That was the moment I decided I was going to step down as department head, okay. I did not become department head to be an amateur psychologist for a bunch of egocentric — okay, but so far as that goes.

But then later I was telling that story to my son-in-law and he sent me this book about these self-portraits. And there's a little quiz in here, it takes about two hours to go through and it takes a while to evaluate. But you answer like 118 questions yes, no, and maybe. And then you have to form your own personality self-portrait graph, okay. And I thought the Fortune piece they used to have some good — anyway — of the graphs. And you don't have just one personality trait. It ranks you on all 14 traits, whether you're strong or weak. I wish I had had that before I was department head, because I could now see why I couldn't get along with this particular professor. Because the book goes through and tells you, this person with this dominant personality trait doesn't get along with this one or vice versa. And I could see why people I'd been clashing with all the time — it's right there in the book.

And this actually — this book is not just one or two people. This is the world — psychologists. We're now into DSM-6, I think okay, Diagnostic — this is not the DSM manual, the fairy thing is huge like an encyclopedia. But the last DSM — and these things run for about ten years — it was commissioned by the head of the National Institute of Mental Health and the World Health Organization. So this is pretty high-level people setting up committees to evaluate this stuff. This is as good as science gets in psychology. So I can recommend that.

So I told you about him trying to micromanage me, and being argumentative, and my just sort of avoiding him, and we ended up becoming fast friends for a number of years. Let's see, what else have I told you about. Oh, the candy jar, okay. Because I took over from that department head, and he had thrown everyone out of his office. And in fact for him, headquarters was his office, and he didn't want anybody messing it up. And so the faculty were not really welcomed at headquarters, and that's why they got thrown out. And they learned, okay, people learn — if you got thrown out the last time, you have less tendency to go there again. And I — that was sort of what he wanted, because he was threatened by them. They would come in with some suggestion or proposal, and they're just adding problems to his plate.

Did I tell you why someone hires you? Okay, well, this is a worthwhile digression. I often asked is, why did someone hire you? And no one ever figures out the answer. And so then I tell them, and the answer is, people hire you to help them solve their problems, okay. Why is someone going to take their hard-earned cash and give some of it to you if all you're going to do is create problems for them, okay? That's sort of dysfunctional. They want you to help them solve the problems. If you think about it that way, you realize you never bring a problem to your boss, okay. This is an important lesson. You only bring solutions.

Now, if you're smart, if there's something you need to get around — and I was having dinner last night with a guy who's a research fellow with a multi-billion dollar company, and he runs the research labs. And he's got two MBAs in another city halfway across the country, three-quarters the way across the country, micromanaging him. And he spends twenty-five percent of his time, he told me, filling out spreadsheets for these two MBAs. It started out — he asked me what do you think of MBAs. I said I used to not like them, and then I started working with the people at Sloan through the LGO program, and I started to like them, and now I don't like them again, okay. There's some very good people, but many MBAs are managers and not leaders.

Anybody remember the difference between a leader and a manager? Manager seeks to control others, leader seeks to help others. Another way to think about it is a manager is always looking at the people ahead of them and trying to please them so they'll get promoted. A leader looks at the people that work for them and says how can I help them, how can I protect them from these people up above so they can get their job done, okay. So someone who's looking downward trying to help people is a leader, and someone who's looking up and trying to get the next job is a manager.

I can't tell you how many times I came back from engineering council in the five years I was department head, and I said to Joe Doe-see, our administrative officer who was one of the few people I could talk to — because none of the faculty would tell me the truth, I was the department head, right, and I'd go, Joe, and he could tell me the truth — and I'd come back and say, Joe, why are these people making decisions based on the next job they hope to have rather than the job they're in? Why don't they do the job they're in, as opposed to sucking up to the administration, you know, people above them, in hopes of getting — pleasing them and getting the next job? And in fact they were doing a bad job for the people, the faculty in their departments, in some of the decisions they were making, because they were trying to please the dean, okay.

Another thing about managers — they'll reorganize the system to make things easier for them. And my advice to this guy Bob, the one I was talking to last night, was, have them fill out the spreadsheets, it's their job. Why are you filling in the spreadsheet form? They're the ones who have to report to the CEO on what's happening in your research department, so why are you doing their job for them? I find that the consulting firms, you know, McKinsey for example, I have a former doctoral student who's a partner at McKinsey, and he's actually — he's very good, he's very capable. But he tells all the other consultants, call Tom Eagar, if it's anything with a materials problem call Tom Eagar. So they call me, they pump me for information for an hour — which is about all I'm worth — and I charge them a slightly higher rate. But they never want me to do anything else, going deeper, because my rate's too high, because they've got to double it when they charge to their client.

So one time I gave the thing to one of my engineers. I said, why don't you take this? I don't like dealing with McKinsey, all they do is pump me for information. And anyway, so he took it. And he was at less than half my rate. And they asked him to do some other things after the conversation, and he did those other things. And they thought that was pretty good, they asked him to do some more. He made tens of thousands of dollars on this. Eventually they had him doing the PowerPoint presentation for the customer. What were they doing? Nothing. They didn't know the technology. It was a materials technology. He was drawing the conclusions, passing them on, and they said, won't you write up our presentation? What good is this? Why are they there, okay? They're middlemen, yeah, they're making the money.

Okay, so anyway — so I told you, one of the problems I had as department head was to change the attitude about — this was being a chauvinistic department. But another problem was this attitude of don't come to headquarters, it's an unfriendly place. And I told the staff the first day I was there, I said, look, I want headquarters to be a place where people can come and where we will try to help them, okay. Sort of like the MADD, you know, the student went there, David Donuts, asked them how can I help you, picked off some of the low-hanging fruit and solved it, and everyone was happy, okay. You don't have to solve all the problems. No one expects you to be able to solve every problem, but they expect you to at least try, okay.

So the first thing I did, I said, I want you to go around to the glass lab and buy me a bowl. This is the bowl. 1995, came out of the glass lab, and I started filling it up with candy and leaving it in front of my secretaries right before you got into my office. So there was free candy. What I quickly learned is they all take the chocolate and everyone leaves the hard candy, okay. Within a year I was spending two thousand dollars a year on Hershey's miniatures. I would go to Costco and buy a case or two at a time, okay. So take whatever you like, okay, it's lighter. If I take it back empty I put some of both in. I should have counted to see how many chocolates I didn't put in equals — I didn't have time, because — thinking about doing the experiment.

Oh, well, I would say that's your one way to get your fat, okay, it's made with real cream, okay. But you can take more than one, you can pass it around. Again, that's a page — Hazel Grove glass lab — sort of a valuable thing nowadays. But I still have that. And people were coming in the middle of the afternoon every day just to get their chocolate fix, okay. I would be in a meeting and I stored the extras in my office, and people, as soon as I opened the door and the person would leave, Kathy would come rushing in to get another bag to fill it up, because people were waiting for their chocolates, okay. So it doesn't take a whole lot to change some things.

Let's see, I had a couple of others. Oh, another thing that came up often at engineering council was a typical management ploy — when someone doesn't know what to do is to say why don't we do a study, and we'll ask every department head to survey the department and measure X, and we'll have the data and we can look at the data. And to me this was just a make-work assignment, you have most of the time. And I would used to say — and I didn't exactly endear friends on engineering council for some of this behavior — but I would say wait a second, before we go off and have our staff spend several hours collecting this information and bothering the faculty, you know, with things, to collect this information, assume you have the data. Tell me what you're going to do with it. And usually there was silence, because this was just a ploy. They didn't want the data. They just were tired of talking about this problem, and they were substituting something else — going off and doing a survey — for actually doing something of value, okay. So be aware of that, okay.

There's also one other thing I wanted to discuss or talk to you about, and that's something I learned from a vice president at United Technologies. And he told a story about the critical mass of management. The story goes like this. In World War Two the Germans had a factory built underground, and they were making ball bearings. And there was a tunnel that led to the office, and there was a colonel who was very good at managing this factory making ball bearings, and he was in charge of everything. Well, then Hitler had a burned-out general from the Russian front and he decided, well, he would send him there to help the colonel run his office. And initially they had the office and the factory like before. But the colonel found the general's staff mixed in with his staff, where they were going directly into the factory and screwing everything up, okay, in terms of managing the factory.

So he decided he would build another office for the general in the tunnel. And so now his staff gets to sort of control the flow of the general's staff into the factory, and that works pretty well. They had some control again over the factory until Hitler had another burned-out general, in which case he decided he would build a second office. And it's starting to look like some Mickey Mouse or something, but anyway, he built another office, and the general's staffs were going through his office and his staff's office, and it was just a disaster. So he decided that he would solve the problem by building a conference room, okay. And this was the critical mass of management, because now the two general's staffs could meet in the conference room, figure out how to run the factory, and in the meantime the colonel could have his staff actually running the factory. And this was what this vice president called the critical mass of management. You had enough people talking to themselves, thinking they were doing something, and in fact all the colonel was doing is keeping them out of the factory.

Well, the story goes on that the Allies discovered the factory, bombed it, and the first message to Berlin by the generals was, send us a money to rebuild the conference room so we can get this factory back in operation, okay. And it might all sound pretty pejorative — it is — but in fact that is the way a lot of management both at universities and in other places works. And you should be on the lookout. And one of the things to look out is the person seeking to help others — and mostly these people at lower levels — or is the manager — is the first — a manager seeking to control others.

One time, my predecessor as department head was away, couldn't make a trip. And it turns out the senior executive vice president at 3M in Minneapolis wanted to give some fellowships to three departments at MIT, and he wanted to increase the interaction and have MIT leaders meet with 3M's leadership. And so he invited us all to get on a corporate jet and fly to Minneapolis one day in the morning and fly home in the afternoon. Since my department head wasn't available, it turns out that I was asked to go to represent the department, and I did. And another guy, Bob Armstrong, who — I don't remember why Bob went, he later became head of chemical engineering, but at the time the head of chemical engineering was Bob Brown, who later became dean of engineering. And Bob — I remember on that trip Bob would not talk to anyone. This is when I first noticed he would not talk to anyone that he considered beneath him. He was there to work with the people that he was moving up, right. And he had — did move up. He's president of Boston University. He had become president — provost at MIT. Bob is a manager, okay. I learned it when I saw that he would not talk to us underlings, even on the plane. You know, he'd find a seat that was away from us, the lower than the low, right? No help, can't. So you can actually start to spot these people if you're careful.

So I gave this article on leadership management education MIT. This was my take 20 years ago on what a leader is. I'd read something by Peter Drucker, who's a management consultant — a leader gets the right things done, okay. So I read that one night, and I was sitting in a meeting — I hate meetings, but I was sitting in a meeting the next day, and it was pretty boring, so I started writing down some other bullet points of what, okay, I thought a leader would do. And you can — if you got on the web and say find what is leadership, you'll find 50 different things. There's whole books — I've looked at the books, I've read them, and they're in my opinion mostly garbage. But Peter Drucker's right, the leader gets the right things done. The problem with that is half of what we do is completely unnecessary. The problem with that is that we don't know which half it is, okay. This is not going to lead to useful output in the long run.

But anyway, the leader gets the right things done. They work on things that are important, not filling out spreadsheets for some MBA who's just going to use it to report to the management. That's not really advancing the research ball at the research labs. They do more than is required, okay, without being asked, which takes initiative. At the bottom, one of the most important things is balanced professional and personal responsibilities.

When I was in my early 40s, I was asked to serve on the board of directors of a company up here in New Hampshire. It was a half-billion-dollar company, been around since 1842. Making — started out making playing cards. They made paper, and they did some other things, coated paper. And we don't have coated paper anymore, but the old stuff, you'd write on one side, it was inked carbonless paper, okay, that kind of broke these little bubbles inside of the paper and it put an image on the paper underneath and stuff. And I remember — well, the CEO who put me on the board, I was recommended to him by this former department head of mine, who knew him through another board that he sat on. And he said — or I met with him the first time before he put me on the board. And I said, well why do you want someone like me? He says, why, I need someone who's young, who knows something about manufacturing, and is independent. Those are the three criteria, okay.

Well, I go to the first board meeting, and he announces that we're going to get a new president and CEO because he's eventually going to step down in a year. Well, that's nice, my, you know, benefactor is now leaving and a new person is coming in. Well, the person who came in was a disaster. He came in from California trying to put Silicon Valley culture into Nashua, New Hampshire. It just didn't quite work. In fact Nashua Corporation in Nashua, New Hampshire, sort of was a key part of the culture of the town. And this new president of Nashua decided to live in Newton, Massachusetts, okay. He really didn't care about being part of the culture of the town. And he tried to run it like it was a Silicon Valley company, and this was a 150-year-old New Hampshire company, where it's live free or die, and you know, it was just a bad match.

And I remember Charlie, who had put me on the board, the old CEO, told the story once about he had interviewed someone for a managerial job in the company. And he said, I should have interviewed the spouse also, okay, because this person had some problems in their home life and they weren't able to function in their professional life when things were going bad at home. So one of the things the leader has to do is you have to take care of personal responsibilities too. You can't just fight to be the best. I have a slide that — I didn't bring — that I used to show students saying if you want to be successful you need to learn to do your job in 40 hours a week, then you can work 80 hours a week and be able to do more than is required. I have seen many cases of people, faculty, pushing — junior faculty pushing for tenure working 80 or 100 hours a week, and then they get tenure, and sort of like the dog who catches the mail truck, now what does he do with it, okay? They can't sustain that level of effort, and then they slip back, and they're not really qualified for the job as they hoped, and they end up becoming a second-class citizen. And it's not good to be a second-class citizen around here, okay. So you need to figure out what your real capabilities are.

We talked about respecting the contributions of everyone, even the custodians, they contribute to the community. That's one of those things this CEO didn't do. He lasted a year and a half. I was one of the reasons for his getting — actually he didn't get — he, you can't fire a CEO or president, you basically have to convince them to move on, okay. And I should have brought my going-away present. For having — he had taken the company from a $500 million a year company, in one year he had made it a $250 million a year company, okay. And he was just a disaster. But at the end they decided to reorganize the board. They brought in these consultants, Korn/Ferry International. And Korn/Ferry reorganized the board, and it was musical chairs, and I didn't have a chair when it was all over.

So at the going away they gave me — I have it in my office — at Steuben glass thing of a cougar about to pounce. It was very symbolic, I was the guy who was about to pounce on this president who was destroying the company, okay. And that's — but it turns out the new CEO who was hired to replace him actually came in independent. He looked at what I had done, and even though I kicked off the board, he put me on as a consultant at the same rate that I was making, and so I didn't even have to go to meetings, they just sent me a check every month, okay. Actually did solve a couple of problems for him. But in any case, he actually — he looked at the whole dynamics, and he had determined that I had saved the company but I was being punished because I had done it in a way that made other people uncomfortable. Well, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Takes initiative. And a very important thing about leadership, you follow others when you're not leading, okay. You can't always be the boss. In fact the guy I was having dinner with last night talked about the CEO who just got bounced from the company a couple of months ago. He only lasted two or three years because he came in to a place and he just wanted to take over everything and start making the decisions and stuff in things where he wasn't competent. Again that's the sign not of a strong leader, of a weak leader, someone who doesn't understand or trust other people to do their job. A micromanager. Someone who thinks they have to be in control of everything.

So this — I may have told you this before, but this is a way to conclude any talk. In fact a lot of what you've gotten is a talk I put together a few years ago on leadership. "Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I'm still confused, but on a higher level." So hopefully now that we've spent a couple of lectures talking about leadership, you're still confused, but on a higher level. Any questions?

Then let's start talking about engineering, and engineering dealing with complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty inherently involves trade-offs and decisions. So now we're going to start talking about decisions, and how you make decisions, and how we think about things. Examples of decisions: you have speed versus cost, height versus breadth. I mean, you build a big tall tower, you build a big flat building that's not as obtrusive and doesn't obstruct people's views and stuff. In Japan, you actually — if you're going to build a big tall building in Tokyo and you're going to cast a shadow on another building, you have to pay compensation to the building that's going to have a shadow and doesn't get the sun anymore, okay. It's a tax for tall buildings. Design life versus cost — we could make things last forever, we can choose materials that are very expensive but we can't afford to build very many of them. Aesthetics versus the environment — or you can do anything you want versus something else. But the one exception for an engineer should be there's no compromise on safety, okay.

And I'm giving you — one thing about how we try to understand how we make decisions is based on how we think. And there's a book by Kahneman that I — did I bring? Yeah, alright. Handed out a copy. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize. He's a psychiatrist or psychologist, I can't remember what's the difference. Anyway, there is a difference, I can't remember — oh yeah, one's an MD, one's a PhD, right. Where they still sort of study some of the same things, Kahneman — and I remember when I was a freshman, one of the most popular courses at MIT was introduction to psychology, and Hans-Lukas Teuber was this great brain scientist who had studied a lot of people who had been injured in industrial accidents or wars or whatever, and lost some functioning of the brain, and what deficit it gave them. You know, if you got hit here, you couldn't correlate words with pages or something, or you know. And he studied this and he helped map out the brain, and what area of the brain controls what functions of hearing or sight or things.

And so everybody'd tell me how great this was. So I ordered Psychology Today magazine to read about it, and I saw them asking yes-no questions that had no correlation and relevance, and then graphing the responses of yes-no. I thought, huh, what is this? I mean, this is garbage, okay. I mean, I could make the graph show any shape you want to depending on where I put the questions in, right, okay. So I kind of had a very bad attitude about psychology. Plus it was one of the three courses I got a B in at MIT, you know. I mean, I gave me — even worse.

Well, Kahneman — and another guy who passed away, in fact Kahneman says the other person would have been a joint Nobel laureate with him because they worked together most of their life. But he came up with this book called Thinking, Fast and Slow. And in that, I've given you in the Stellar a couple of examples or synopses of his book. His book is so popular now — it costs less than 10 bucks in paperback — but people write books that are synopses of his book so you don't have to read the whole thing. Yes. And what I've done is I've taken part of this one, have my secretary transcribe the bullet points at the end of each chapter and given it to you. Have a synopsis of the book in case you don't want to read it, okay. I actually have read ninety-five percent of it, and should in the next week finish the other.

And it was recommended to me by this someone, and I actually find it quite interesting. There's a few things I don't necessarily agree with, but he's honest enough to say he doesn't agree with some of the things that he said in his past, things. But he talks about utility theory, which is — he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And he uses a lot of different — he looks at a lot of different things, and he looks at them statistically, and there's some interesting things when he looks at them statistically.

For example, one of the things I came up with — I was just putting yellow highlights in the book, and I know that's another worthwhile thing to talk about. So I had selected quotes from Kahneman. And if we look at — starting around page 109 of Kahneman, he says — this is just one of the examples — "A study of the incidence of kidney cancer in three thousand counties in the United States revealed a remarkable pattern. The counties in which the incidence of kidney cancer is lowest are the most rural, most sparsely populated, and located in traditionally Republican states in the Midwest, the South, and the West." What do you think of this? What can you conclude with all that information? Well, going a little bit further down, he says, "Now consider the counties in which the incidence of kidney cancer is highest. These ailing counties tend to be the most rural, most sparsely populated, and located in traditionally Republican states in the Midwest, the South, and the West." Tongue-in-cheek — Wagner answers Lynn — comment: "It's easy to infer that the higher cancer rate might be directly due to the poverty in the rural lifestyle, no access to good medical care, a high-fat diet, too much alcohol, too much tobacco." Something is wrong, of course. The rural lifestyle cannot explain both very high and very low incidence of kidney cancer, okay.

So if you ask the question a certain way, you can start going off in some path that is completely wrong, and your decision will be completely wrong. The real answer is rural counties have small populations, and basically this is the statistics of small numbers. You can predict what will happen if you hit an egg with a hammer, okay. We started off with the fact that calls for a cause. There is no cause here. Kidney cancer is not related to any of these things. It's related to something else. But if you make the presumption that there is a causal effect, you will get the answer that there is a causal effect. It's called circular reasoning, and it's not scientific, okay. The deeper truth is, nothing to explain, okay, about all this. So just a simple little example of Kahneman kind of hitting people right between the eyes with the effects of the way we ask things.

He goes through a lot of the gambles. You ever seen the gambles where people are asked, would they take a bet for — a five percent chance to make $95, or a ninety-five percent chance to make a hundred dollars? Or something — it's an equivalent bet, but in fact people will view it differently, okay. So he goes through a lot of that stuff, which if you're not into that stuff, don't read the book, read the summaries. But a lot of the things he talks about — things like heuristics.

System One of the brain is something that we have that is our intuitive feelings. You have, in one of the synopses — this is the blue book — the highlights of the book are automatic System One and the attentive System Two. System One is quick, impulsive, and intuitive. If I put that up there, you read the word Thursday — you don't stop to think, do I need to read this, you just see Thursday. That's System One of your brain. Your brain tries to figure out efficient ways to do things so you don't have to completely make decisions on everything that's around you. System Two on the other hand is deliberate, cautious, effortful, but it's also lazy in the sense that you don't activate System Two because it's hard work. He gives the example of multiplication. If you do 2 times 2 is equal, you'll do that with System One, and 13 x 37 is really going to have to be done by System Two. You have to take pencil and paper and you're gonna have to think about that and analyze it, because most people can't do that in their head, okay. So more complex things will be done by System Two, but we do most things by System One if we can.

And he gives lots of examples where System One is wrong. One is priming, okay. Priming — I gave you a couple of examples of priming earlier today when I talked about the people who had been thrown out of headquarters didn't want to come back. They had a bad experience there before, so they didn't want to go through another bad experience. So they had been primed to "that's a room I don't want to go to," okay. I was trying to change priming to "here's a place you can get candy for free," okay. So I was trying priming again, okay.

There are heuristics. One heuristic — I think I may have mentioned to you, I don't know if I did, but as department head I had to review 400 resumes every year of people who applied for a faculty position, okay. Well, it started — with me, I would get the stack every morning, six or ten of these things, and I would have to review them. And I didn't have an hour and a half every day to read these in detail, so I developed some heuristics. One heuristic I developed was to look at it and see how long it took the person to get their PhD. If it was less than five years I would read on. If it was more than five years, they went in a stack which I had to give a reason, and I — it was called "age-maturity-accomplishments are not up to par," okay. They might have three or five or six publications after nine years. Well, what do I think they're going to do if they got a faculty slot at MIT and had eight years to get up to 30 or 40 publications? What are the odds they're going to make it, okay? So that was my heuristic, an easy way to sort these out. And let me tell you, a large fraction of the people who took eight or nine years to get their PhD and now were three or four years into their postdoc and hadn't found a job — the reason that I was getting their resume — these guys were unemployable basically, okay. And so you had to find the wheat from the chaff, and that was one way to do it.

Another heuristic I use in my consulting is — so people call me because, well, the weld failed, the weld broke, the part's defective, it's a defective weld. Well, I look at the part and say, well, did the metal bend and deform before the weld broke or not? And many times I see the whole thing has been stretched. Well, if the metal stretched before the weld broke, the weld did its job. No one designs these things to start deforming before the weld would break, okay. And if the weld held until then, but then eventually it was the weld that failed first after the thing had been overloaded terribly, then what's wrong with the weld, okay? I see that at least once or twice a year. And they're experts on the other — so it's our doc, well, I see the weld, it broke, okay. Ball — I see deformed metal. And so if I go a little bit back in the sequence and say what deformed first — it wasn't the weld fracturing, the fracture was a post-event of the deformation in the overload.

And I may give you a story on that next time we get together, which I think is — what is it, I think it may be next Monday — because no, it's this next Friday, it's this Friday. Dr. Bell Mars tomorrow. Alex Slocum will be doing his thing on Thursday, I will just be introducing him. I have to go to a meeting downtown at ten o'clock. And then Friday I think I am the next lecture, okay. It's on Stellar. Dr. Bell Mars pretty good about posting these things.