Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!srhqla!quad1!ttidca!sorgatz
From: sorgatz@ttidca.TTI.COM ( Avatar)
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: Challenger Last Words
Summary: do YOU need 3 managers to do your job?
Keywords: decisionmaking, politics, management, disasters, etc.
Message-ID: <10432@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 2 Mar 90 21:37:24 GMT
References: <23146@usc.edu> <610@ksr.UUCP>
Reply-To: sorgatz@ttidcb.tti.com (Erik Sorgatz - Avatar)
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 43

In article <610@ksr.UUCP> clj@ksr.com (Chris Jones) writes:
+non-survivable, and the time spent wondering about the crew's fate is better
+spent on preventing such accidents.  It seems to me that the details of what
+*caused* the accident are sufficiently well known, and I don't feel a need to
+know all the lurid details of the tragedy.

 Chris' point is an exellent one, but unfortunately it is lost on the real
target  group;  namely  the  big-shot, NASA MBA-managers that were all too
willing to let political oneupsmanship superceed crew safety.  The problem
is  not  a  NASA exclusive!  In general American management is technically
incompetent, and unwilling to look  at  the  long-term  effects  of  their
decisions.  They  rely  on  'seat-of-the-pants'  decisionmaking techniques
that are normally driven by short-term gain preceptions.  This  is  what's
killing  business  in  America!..  ..to  say  nothing  of  the  loss  of 7
volunteers.

 Management is always SOOO damn busy tryiny to 'put-the-pickle' to someone
in the next meeting they simply fail to do their advowed task:  MANAGE THE
TALENTS AND RESOURCES IN ORDER TO GET A JOB DONE.  Hence, I  feel  that  a
large  fraction of the multilayered management infrastructure has outlived
it's usefulness...it is obsolete, in a word!

 When a solid propellent engineer tells his manager that a launch  is  not
safe  below  a certain temperature, that manager has ONLY ONE REAL CHOICE,
to scrub the launch.  The idea that politics superceed safety reminds  one
of  the  old joke about the accountant who when interviewing for a job was
asked: "How much is 2 + 2?"..his answer, which got him the job, was:  "How
much  do  you want it to be?".  This is faulty thinking when the sceneario
includes limits in materials science!

 The sooner we (the scientists, engineers, technicians,  etc.)  decide  to
insist  on  decisional-autonomy  in such matters, the sooner we cast-off a
majority of the management "Charm-School" thinking..and the kind of people
that  go  for  such  crap - the sooner will come the day when decisions of
this type are NOT just another political gambit.


 comments welcome, flames from MBA-assholes to /dev/null! '73!
-- 
-Avatar-> (aka: Erik K. Sorgatz) KB6LUY           +-------------------------+
Citicorp(+)TTI                          *----------> panic trap; type = N+1 *
3100 Ocean Park Blvd. Santa Monica, CA  90405     +-------------------------+
{csun,philabs,psivax,pyramid,quad1,rdlvax,retix}!ttidca!sorgatz **