EDITORIAL
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Adjusting to Being Managed ast month, we took a rather “cosmic” view of the factors that lead L to effective scientific and technological innovation. It seems in order, therefore, to have a look at the process from the personal side. The newly minted technical man, with the intellectual rigor of academia as the major aspect of his experience, often has a great deal of difficulty adapting to the very different criteria of industrial technical success. The driving need to move fast, to ignore the temptation to try to close observed gaps in the understanding of operative phenomena, to get the job done rather than to follow interesting byways in pursuit of knowledge or understanding-all these forces seem incompatible with the criteria and values with which the young person enters the profession. I t takes time for one to recognize that the apparent conflict between professional standards and industrial pressures is not a real conflict but is the result of looking at the same thing from two different points of view. The body technical does not exist for any single purpose; it has many functions. I t offers avenues for lonely inquiry into the nature of things. I t offers a means for creating useful commercial products. I t offers means of social progress, of getting rich or famous, or of providing for national survival. But it is in the nature of the inexperienced to feel that the world is made up of absolutes. One should not be surprised when people feel that the activity they know well is the only activity meriting the highest position in the pecking order of status, freedom, pay, or what have you. Only exposure to other views of reality can change these attitudes. We usually call this exposure the maturing process. Hence some of the frictions involved in managing technical people in industry. In any body of technical people, there will be a spectrum of maturity and a spectrum of willingness to modify established attitudes to accommodate the needs of the current environment. Further, semantics complicates the issue ; words such as basic, applied, developmental, creative, innovative, and the like must be used to describe both methods and objectives, and yet they mean differentusually mutually exclusive-things to different members of the group. Many different approaches are used in industry to cope with these realities. Some companies bring their new scientists first into “basic” research, but carefully and unobtrusively lead them into areas of inquiry intended to benefit the employer. This approach exposes the discipline-oriented scientist to the value of usable results. Others throw their new people at once into highly directed work, taking the chance that the many will adjust while the few who do not can be sacrificed. Still others try to classify their people as to their relative “maturity” and place them accordingly, moving them around as their views take shape. A few wrecks along the road notwithstanding, all these approaches work to some extent, A part of the price is loud wails of anguish; one of the rewards is a happy majority of industrially employed scientists and engineers. But one of the inescapable conclusions is that nothing pure ever accomplishes anything; every effective act in this imperfect world results from compromise among competing factors.
VOL. 5 9
NO. 1
JANUARY 1967
5
