http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/11/15/nasa.chief.ap/index.html
Good or bad? Do we need a cost cutter to save a troubled program (such as the ISS) or do we need a visionary to spur more & better programs?
Does this guy even like space?
When you want beans counted, it makes sense to put a bean counter in charge.
Squink is right.
My brother worked for Hughes Aircraft for awhile before his part got closed and he lost his job. When I asked what happened he said they kept promoting senior engineers and researchers to management and administrative positions. Thing is, an excellent engineer does not necessarily make a good manager or administrator. To hear my brother tell it the two skills are mutually exclusive…they were all miserable failures and eventually everything tanked.
Moral of the story? Leave engineering to the engineers, leave research to the researchers and leave bean counting to the bean counters.
I can agree with that. But isn’t the job of the administrator also to set the tone for NASA’s programs? I hope that new & innovative ideas won’t be sacrificed to maintain a safe budget for the status quo. Mission to Pluto? Why bother, it’s so insignificant compared to Mars. New space telescope? Why bother, we already have the Hubble. (being sarcastic here)
But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. NASA is trying to do a lot with a tight budget. Maybe his skills can help save programs.
A co-worker of mine used to work for NASA (well, a NASA contractor) at Goddard. His thoughts are that all of Bush’s big contributors will end up winning all the big NASA contracts now that one of his appointees is in charge. He also thought there will be an eventual war between the engineer/scientific types and the money manager types who control costs. His scenario is that something bad will happen (think Challenger disaster) and that the engineers/technicians will go to the press and blame all the bean counters for cutting costs at the expense of safty. This, of course is based on nothing but personal opinion but the guy knows NASA politics from the inside.
NP: Danzig III - How the Gods Kill
The Bean Counters took over GM in the Eighties and almost immediately thereafter GM’s marketshare took a drastic plunge. Why? Because the Bean Counters tried to do things like sell Cavalier’s rebadged as Cadillacs, which almost no one bought. The Bean Counters effectively destroyed GMs image as a producer of beautiful and high quality automobiles, all to save a few bucks. Most of the automotive world’s reporting on GM in the past couple of years has been a constant screaming of, “WTF do these guys think they’re doing?” This is only now starting to change. GM has hired Lutz from Chrysler to take things over and the impression the automotive press is giving is that Lutz has his work cut out for him, if he hopes to turn GM around. (Mind you, the increase of GMs sales of late can be traced directly to the fact that they were the first automaker to offer 0% financing.)
Engineers might not be the best guys to run NASA, but NASA isn’t about cost vs. return on investments, NASA is about pushing humanity forward. You cannot put a price tag on that. We need someone with vision, with a dream running NASA for that reason. Someone who is only interested how much something costs isn’t going to be willing to make that bold leap which could yield a bigger payoff than anyone ever expected. It wasn’t Bean Counters that got us to the Moon, it was a visionary.
Of course they will. Just look at the fight over 30 million for the Kuiper belt mission. 30 million is less than the cost of two fighter aircraft, and the senate needs to ram the appropriation down the administration’s throat like a flabby piece of pork ? The space program looks to be headed for some very rough times in the next few years.
And somebody’s gotta do the hard-sell in Congress on the ISS. Don’t they understand that the station is practically useless without a Hab module & escape vehicle to accomodate 7 crewmembers? Some congressman said that we should already have a full station for what we’ve paid. Well, maybe we should, but we don’t. And you’re gonna have to cough up a bit more dough to make it worthwhile, 'cause right now it’s a half-station.
Or maybe the international cooperation thing is the way to go. Transnational space exploration, anyone? A U.N. Space directorate?
On the other hand, having a bean counter in charge might have prevented the huge cost overruns with the ISS and shuttle that diverted all the funds away from the core exploratory missions in NASA. The ISS budget ballooned by about 15 billion dollars, while NASA’s overall budget stayed pretty much static. Just think of all the programs that got killed because of that.
And the new guy wants to accelerate privatization of the shuttle, which a long-overdue and much needed reform. NASA needs to get out of the space truck business and get back to breaking new ground. Instead, we get a cancelled X-33 and a bloated shuttle budget. That’s not good for those of us who want some real advances in space technology.
Look…
Running a business is tough. You need to bean count while being progressive and willing to take risks. If it was an easy job guys like these couldn’t command big $$$ salaries.
You need to keep costs under control while encouraging innovation and vision at the same time. Those ideas aren’t quite mutually exclusive but they are close. The guys who can do that are worth their weight in gold. Unfortunately they are few and far between.
That said I make no comment on the future of Sean O’Keefe as head of NASA. Frankly I’m not encouraged by any Bush nominee as I’m always afraid they are somehow beholden to the Bush administration rather than the job they are appointed for. Maybe it’s unfair to vilify Bush for this as political appointments as payoffs aren’t unique. Still, I’ll give Mr. O’Keefe the benefit of the doubt till proven otherwise. He’s gotten this far so he must have some skills in something…let’s just hope it’s for the good of NASA and science and exploration.
I worked at the NASA/Glenn Research Center in Cleveland for over 12 years. I was involved with projects relating to the Space Station, planetary missions, Space Shuttle, Satellite Communications, and jet engine research. No accountant can make an informed decision regarding the relative merits of such an array of programs. To be effective in its mission of substantially contributing to man’s knowledge of the earth and universe, and to engage in programs having a significant probability of producting valuable technical spinoffs that can be utilized by industry, NASA needs a pragmatic visionary with profound technical insights at the helm. What they have is a bean-counter, appointed by a bean-brain.
You don’t need a technical man to run a technical organization. Jack Welch is perhaps the most successful CEO of all time, and he turned GE from an old-world appliance company into a high-technology giant. And almost everything GE does now is highly technical. Aerospace, Jet engines, medical imaging scanners, industrial automation…
Jack Welch is not a scientist.
NASA is not a business. NASA is charged with accruing knowledge about the universe and developing revolutionary new technologies. There is a huge difference between an individual skilled in the craft of spotting trends in consumer products, knowing a good “buy” to diversify one’s corporation, and knowing which experts to hire to round out new product development.
NASA is composed of several disparate facilities involving the study of a wide array of sciences. Extensive pure research is conducted with a view to expanding knowledge and developing advanced technologies that are not likely to be financed by purely commercial interests. The skills required to manage such an organization and assess the appropriate development areas in which to allocate limited resources are very different from a business wizzard.
NASA has a far broader and far more sophisticated role than any commercial enterprise. Running NASA does not entail forecasting the best business acquisitions and funding areas of development that promise quick turn-arounds. NASA is not inteneded to be diversified for the purpose of maximizing profit. It is intended as an organization to expand knowledge in a reasonably efficient fashion, including research and testing that could lead to business opportunities for American companies. The leader of NASA must certainly have good business and management sense in order to see that the organization and its programs are run efficiently. But the director of NASA must also be a technical visionary who is able to distill a wide array of diverse technical programs into a practical plan for advancing knowledge and technology.
Also, they’ve been numerous examples in business where someone who was a success in one industry totally bombed in another one. Packard, back in the 1950’s hired James C. Nance to be CEO because of his track record with Hot Point. They figured that if he could take a then obscure appliance company and make it a household name, he’d be able to do the same for them. He wasn’t able to. (It wasn’t entirely his fault that the company failed, I’ll admit.)
Remember “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap? He did a great job turning around a couple of corporations and became a darling of the media. He flamed out after one of his turn around jobs soured and hasn’t been heard from since.
Welch has done a great job at GE, but would he have been able to do the same at another company? Possibly, but not necessarily so.
Let’s look at this thing in another way. Suppose you had to go in for open-heart surgery and you had a choice between two top surgeons in the field. One became a doctor because he/she genuinely felt passionate about treating people. The other became a doctor because he/she knew that they could make a lot of money as a heart surgeon. Both are equally skilled, with the same number of years experience behind them. Which one would you want? Me, personally, I’d want the one who was doing the job because they wanted to help people, because I’d like to think that if something went wrong while I was under the knife they’d put a little extra “something” into trying to save me.
Sam Stone: Jack Welch is perhaps the most successful CEO of all time…
Well, that depends on what criteria you’re using. He’s certainly the profit leader, but many critics have claimed that a lot of his success is due to pursuing financial success with no regard to corporate responsibilities to workers, the environment, or consumers. As this review of Thomas O’Boyle’s book At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric and the Pursuit of Profit (Knopf, 1998) points out:
(Not to mention GE’s huge PR campaign to get out of cleaning up the PCB’s that they dumped in the Hudson River, a task which will cost them a bunch of money if they end up having to do it.) I’m sure that Welch, whatever else he may be, is indeed a very smart businessman. But there’s quite a bit of evidence that his success as a CEO is due not just to his business smarts, but also to plain old-fashioned unscrupulousness and corner-cutting. I’m not sure we’d want somebody like that at the head of NASA, scientist or not.
PhD., Chemical Engineering, University of Illinois, 1960.
Your before-and-after assessments of GE also reflect ignorance of facts. All the divisions you named were there long before him. He got rid of Aerospace along the way, while letting Capital account for half of all the company’s income. GE is now basically a bank that owns some industrial businesses on the side, and has made a great effort to avoid being portrayed that way in the outside business world.
But it’s all dollars and profit growth rates in the GE system.
Oh, and I wholeheartedly second HairyPotter’s statements. Like many of my colleagues, I got into aerospace engineering precisely because I was inspired by the space race of the '60’s. The conditions that created it will probably not be seen again, but the spirit of adventure and innovation it aroused should be more nourished than it is today. Instead, we’re seeing more and more good people leave it for other areas where challenges still exist, and very few enter it. The cost-cutters have practically destroyed the innovation that its future depends on.
Goldin may have ruffled a few feathers along the way, but he always seemed to me to understand the long-term as well as short-term needs of the world for the space program. He should get zinged for de-emphasizing aero in favor of astro, but not for keeping long-term, high-payoff, inspiring programs going. O’Keefe looks like he’s simply going to squeeze out more blood, in the recent tradition of the commercial side of aerospace.
EL: GE is now basically a bank that owns some industrial businesses on the side…
Not to mention NBC.
Forgot about Jack’s Ph.D. But I’m relatively qualified to talk about how GE treats high technology, because I happen to work for GE Industrial Systems, as a software developer in industrial automation (one of our products helps control the crawler that hauls the Space Shuttle out to the pad). GE runs its technology businesses extremely well. GE is a champion of ‘Six Sigma’ quality control, which uses a lot of the techniques developed at NASA, like Quality Function Deployment and FMEA’s.
I maintain that it’s important to run NASA like a business. Sure, it’d be great if the administrator were both technologically savvy and a good businessman, but if I had to choose between excellent technological skills and excellent business skills, I’d pick the latter every time for a CEO or an administrator.
I actually liked Dan Goldin, and I think he had a good attitude, but you have to admit that NASA has really been screwed up for the last ten years. Major, avoidable failures in the Mars missions, an ISS budget that almost doubled, a questionable choice in choosing the X-33 (and then an even more questionable cancellation), etc. All of those problems are the earmarks of administration failures, not technical failures.
Why limit the screw up to the last ten years when the whole ISS budget fiasco was the product of an earlier generation’s idealistic enthusiasm ?