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Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading Edge Engineering from the 1996 NAE Symposium on Frontiers of Engineering (1997) / Chapter Skim
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Institutional Cultures and Individual Careers
Pages 97-106

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From page 97...
... downsizing, of funding cuts threatened for many fields of academic science and engineering, and of pressure of many kinds on the federally supported national laboratory structure. Our institutions are living through troubling times.
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From page 98...
... The current stress on our RD&E infrastructure poses individual as well as national issues. It is important to keep in mind that institutional cultures not only support us, they also constrain the choices we feel free to make.
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From page 99...
... Something similar happened to me later at IBM Research. After 18 years of doing research, and then managing successively larger groups of researchers until I was reporting directly to the Director of Research, I decided to leave research and transfer to one of our product development labs, where I would manage about 650 engineers doing advanced bipolar process and circuit development.
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From page 100...
... (I am not claiming they are necessarily happier places.) The industrial labs are in better shape precisely because they have already had to engage in a thorough and ongoing reexamination of their past effectiveness and their present relevance to corporate goals, and they have faced the task of reassessing the portfolio of those research and engineering fields that are good bets to give the corporation an advantage in the future (which is, after all, why companies do research and advanced engineering in the first place)
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From page 101...
... Nevertheless, recent changes in corporate basic research get a wildly disproportionate share of public attention and worrying. These are the views of outsiders; insiders know that since basic research is such a small part of the whole, the most significant weaknesses in industrial RD&E will be found elsewhere.
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From page 102...
... Large, complex industrial organizations also suffer from the universal tendency of people to identify too closely with their local unit and to view other parts of the same company as rivals. The wonderful book, written by the just-retired Chairman of the NAE, Norm Augustine, CEO of Lockheed Martin, called Augustine's Laws has several chapters on this destructive form of internal rivalry.
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From page 103...
... ~ ' 'I 'I ' 'lthe key thing Is that senior faculty have the moral responsibility to draw their remuneration from funds in the retirement pool, thus freeing up endowment funds for young people. Large, complex organizations, including research universities, require effective management.
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From page 104...
... One of the career options each of you has to explore, in one way or another, is whether you have both sets of talent and therefore fall into the very small set whose duty to your institution is to spend part of your career in a leadership, management position. By the way, mature, successful organizations try to make it possible for their members to explore management and, if they are not suited to it, to return without stigma to a purely professional role.
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From page 105...
... As a former vice-president of an R&D organization, my principal complaint about overspecialization is that it produces graduates with a very narrow set of career expectations, low intellectual self-confidence, and a reluctance to strike out themselves in ways that are intellectually adventurous. Our companies need highly trained engineers, of course, but they also need engineers who are confident in their ability to master new areas and to strike out on their own across traditional boundaries.
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Key Terms

  • institutional cultures
  • pecking order
  • university culture
  • industrial labs
  • moral responsibility

  • individual careers
  • low esteem
  • disciplinary boundaries
  • own careers
  • personal experience

  • help stamp
  • hard times
  • recent changes
  • senior faculty
  • grand space

  • doing advanced
  • circuit development
  • improve opportunities
  • culture views
  • otherwise mystifying

  • tenured professors
  • norm augustine
  • executive management
  • careers stifled
  • reporting directly

  • actually responsible
  • research culture
  • intellectually stimulating
  • management structures
  • observers deplore


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