Article View: sci.space.shuttle
Article #6296Re: Challenger Last Words
From: Avatar
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 1990 21:37
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 1990 21:37
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3082 bytes
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it's usefulness...it is obsolete, in a word!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 **
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!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