Reengineering Engineers: Management Philosophies at JPL in the 1990s

Abstract

Reengineering Engineers Management Philosophies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1990s Peter J. Westwick In early 2004, two golf-cart-sized robots roving the surface of Mars captured sometimes breathless media attention, in particular when they found evidence that water once ran on the red planet. The rovers were built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and were only the latest spacecraft launched by the lab, whose engineers have led in the exploration of the solar system. These engineering feats represent not only a considerable national investment of money and brainpower, but also a particular approach to engineering that combined the creative talents of hundreds of technical staff into large-scale collective endeavors. Integrating individual activity with collective goals is the province of management. During the 1980s and 1990s, two management theories swept corporate America: Total Quality Management (TQM) and, a few years later, reengineering.1 Total Quality Management stressed customer satisfaction and employee empowerment; reengineering extended that approach by organizing work not around particular tasks, but around generalized processes. Reengineering is the latest in a long line of managerial theories that includes Taylorism and systems engineering, many of which have attracted the attention of historians of technology and business.2 Both of [End Page 67] these new theories attempted a shift from the classic static hierarchy of the vertically integrated firm to a flexible, nonhierarchical structure. They derived from corporatist theories that reacted in part against scientific management, and they displayed a post-1960s countercultural sensibility—a vocabulary of enabling, nurturing, and partnering and a preference for intuition over knowledge that seemed to reject technoscientific rationalism. But they also sought to preserve a space for individual autonomy against top-down control and thus resonated with the technical community's emphasis on individual creativity.3 These management trends intersected at JPL in the 1990s. This essay examines the results. JPL's leaders seized on new management philosophies as a way to cope with the end of the cold war. For JPL and the many other institutions that owed their origins and continued survival to the cold war, the end of that conflict plunged them into crisis. Historical scholarship is just beginning to grapple with this sea change for American technology. The history of JPL provides an important example. By 1990, JPL was an extensive enterprise, with a staff of about 6,000 and billion-dollar budgets.4 What happened to this vast institution when its primary driver, the cold war, disappeared? How did it steer a course through new and stormy fiscal seas? JPL immediately dropped into a funding trough, followed by a steep dip in staff levels, and Total Quality Management and reengineering were the lab's way to ride out the budget cuts and extract more productivity from its remaining staff. In looking to industry for management solutions, JPL reflected a general commercial turn after the cold war. [End Page 68] JPL was not the only institution to weather the end of the cold war, and it was likewise far from alone in encountering reengineering during the 1990s. Similar motivations drove other National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) centers, the aerospace industry, and universities to embrace it, and the imprint of this embrace still lingers in many places.5 The history of JPL illustrates why and how management philosophies could spread to new institutional contexts. Like other new subscribers to reengineering, however, JPL differed from the Fortune 100 companies that had helped to popularize the movement. First, as an operation owned and funded by the federal government, it operated within a framework distinct from that of private corporations, most notably in its basic requirement of ensuring accountability instead of maximizing profit. Second, it was a university-run research lab, geared not toward manufacturing, but rather advanced research and development (R&D). Theories for managing manufacturing processes proved difficult to transfer to an R&D lab; and despite a quantitative side that emphasized measurable "metrics," their self-described holistic approach...