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Originally Posted by JayUtah
The article raises some good points, but they're lost in the gallons of hogwash.
Von Braun's "management style" was characterized by a dirty-hands approach to management and a conservative approach to engineering. The lack of dirty-hands management in NASA today is seen as the greatest single impediment to its success. Managers have become bureaucrats separated from the actual engineering.
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How true that is. And how it was spotlighted by O'Keefe's pompous pronouncements about
"foamologists", which crow he later had to eat (although I don't recall his ever retracting or apologizing for any of those haughty statements).
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Originally Posted by JayUtah
Von Braun, on the other hand, understood what his engineers faced because he was there facing it with them. His conservative "margin for margin's sake" style of engineering is appropriate for manned and experimental space flight, whereas the military's "don't fix it if it ain't broke" approach to rocketry works for ICBMs but not space exploration. Much of what is wrong with space exploration today can be attributed to von Braun's management approach having "gone out of style."
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Right on the mark again. A good part of my work over the last few decades in manufacturing engineering and quality has been the recalibration of MechEs, etc., fresh out of school who have no idea what a tolerance is, think that since it's drawn on paper or the computer screen, 99% of the job is done, and who would rather quit than get their hands dirty.
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Originally Posted by JayUtah
He was not "overruled" on key Apollo technology. He simply required the merits to be shown to him before he accepted them. This is part of the conservative approach, and was an attitude shared by many in the Apollo program. The problem with a lot of engineering management today is the immediate acceptance of "whiz-bang" ideas without proper design studies. So you see companies dump a couple million dollars and two years down the crapper just because one person got the boss excited about some buzzword that turns out to be a turkey.
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I think GE's *******ization of the Six Sigma program is in part responsible for this. The brainstorming sessions required by this approach give all ideas equal value, and from that point forward someone who opposes an idea due only to its lack if technical merit is looked upon as not being a "team player". Plus GE turned Six Sigma, which originally was concerned with quality improvements, into a cost cutting program which is now a darling and pet program of more executives than I care to mention.
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Originally Posted by JayUtah
It seems this article's author chooses to completely disregard the political aspect of why certain technology and methods persisted and why others fell by the wayside.
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How many times has engineering been told to "take off your engineering hats and put on your management hats", while management took off their management hats and put on their political hats? It's a big number.