Discussion of “Holistic Engineering”

This forum article is a discussion of the article “Holistic Engineering” by Domenico Grasso and David Martinelli. The original article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education on March 16, 2007 ⟨http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i28/28b00801.htm⟩. In this article, the authors argue that engineering education must be broadened to include not just math and science, but an understanding of how the technical work fits within the overall scheme of things. Grasso and Martinelli write:

In engineering, a discipline that purports to design for humanity and improve the quality of life, the unity of knowledge should be a sine qua non that asks engineers to look outward, beyond the fields of math and science, in search of solutions to entire problems. To better serve humanity, engineers must at least attempt to understand the human condition in all its complexity, which requires the study of literature, history, philosophy, psychology, religion, and economics, among other fields.

Following is one of my contributions as part of the overall debate by the ASCE Body of Knowledge (BOK) Committee, which has worked over the last eighteen months for release of a second version of the BOK report. This report offers a detailed outline and description of what is considered to be minimum educational requirements for a practicing civil engineer within the framework of the article.

I couldn’t agree more with the observations by Grasso and Martinelli, and they certainly support the goals of PS 465 and BOK2 [see notes]. I would offer a couple of additional observations.

While what Grasso and Martinelli argue about the need for high-quality, holistic engineers who are primarily educated—and I intentionally use “educated” rather than “trained”—to think like engineers in very broad terms, the cause of America’s declining technological supremacy goes beyond any inadequacy on the part of its engineers or the increasing availability of supposedly cheap foreign engineers. The American economy, which affects the world’s economy to a significant, but declining extent, has for years been the victim of what I call the “MBA Syndrome.”

The MBA Syndrome, in essence, results from a redefinition over the past few decades of what our culture and public policymakers mean by “business.” It includes several elements:Three factors are primary contributors to all this:There are other aspects, of course, including ridiculous liability policies; the unintended consequences of well-intentioned, but inadequately considered regulations; the complete lack of anything that could truly be termed public policies in such vital areas as transportation and energy production/consumption; and an increasing institutional influence on the investment market. I submit, however, that the three factors just listed dominate the field.

Obviously, some companies continue to operate in the maturity phase for long periods, and most of these businesses must continue to invest in internal R&D. However, the primary survival technique these businesses use is cost cutting. MBA Syndrome practitioners frequently ridicule them anyway.

Increasing globalization is throwing an unexpected, and misunderstood, monkey wrench into the paradigm our smug MBA Syndrome proponents embrace. Simply put, others are making investments in their economies based on different criteria. Many of these investors are looking for longer-term returns that can support continuing (and what may ultimately morph into sustainable) economies—an impossibility, by definition, under the MBA Syndrome. Others’ investments in product and service development are countered by our retrenchment into further cost reduction and attempts to limit market access. Ironically, this cost cutting may involve our purchase of the products of this foreign investment to enhance short-term gain, while simultaneously rewarding their long-term investments. The retrenchment of the American automobile industry while Toyota and some other foreign-based manufacturers continue to expand product offerings, production facilities, employment, and market share is, at least to me, a very predictable result of the MBA Syndrome.

What does all this mean to engineers? Well, for one thing, it changes the market for engineering services to a global one, though perhaps less so for civil engineers than for other disciplines that engineer more portable products, devices, and systems. In simple terms, American managers have decided not to develop and make new things anymore. If you’re not going to make new things, you don’t need people (i.e., engineers) who develop and make them. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we have changed into the “Information Economy,” where information has an intrinsic value just because it exists. This, of course, fits very well into the MBA Syndrome concept of real value being “paper” value; thus, s/he who controls the flow of, and access to, information controls value. But I submit that information only has value if it is information about something—the physical aspect of that something—be it the market demand for a product or service, a plant’s production rate, intellectual property, or the incremental cost of making one hundred more widgets. This is the true value that any information only represents. As an illustration, “135,670” is a piece of “information,” but it is valueless unless it represents something tangible, like last week’s sales. At least some foreign business models seem to appreciate this and invest accordingly, producing products and services of value and employing people to create and produce them. In many of these businesses, engineers have leading management roles.

Engineers (and all humans for that matter) are much more than commodities with some lowest-common-denominator value. Why? Because they think, and in doing so create new ideas, things, and processes that offer new opportunities in both existing and new areas. Engineers not only think, but they tend to think in parallel terms, simultaneously applying a wide variety of considerations to defining and solving complicated and complex problems. This may seem to be a trivial statement of the obvious to engineers, but not everyone thinks that way. Many people, perhaps a decided majority of people, prefer to think serially—making one evaluation based on a limited set of criteria at a time, then using that result to make the next evaluation. (For example, the MBA Syndrome tends to focus on finding and serving any business’s one dominant market and forget about minority, or niche, markets. These managers are seemingly incapable of simultaneously allowing more than one business model to operate. Entrepreneurs usually pick up the slack, of course, and operate until some “big boy” acquires the operation and tries to make it fit his/her preconceived model, frequently producing failure, or at least poorer performance.)

My conclusion from all this is that it is past time for the adoption of a new economic model—actually one much closer to the one utilized during the United States’ second century. Our focus needs to be on investing in the ideas, things, processes, and people who can find innovative ways to conceive and implement products and services to improve the lives of people worldwide in a sustainable manner.

History has demonstrated time and again that broadening the capability to create wealth increases the standard of living for almost everyone involved. Accordingly, we engineers must begin to see ourselves as global citizens and servants, and we must market our talents across national borders. (Remember, the political concept of the nation-state itself is a manmade construct that is only two or three centuries old. It is not some fundamental law of nature that must persist.) As Grasso and Martinelli make clear, American engineers can be successful in this and maintain their relatively high level of compensation not by lowering their prices to compete for the same, existing work (MBA Syndrome cost-cutting in a mature business) but rather by offering uniquely creative solutions and adopting a more entrepreneurial role that circumvents the MBA Syndrome paradigm and seeks to grow new businesses into mature and sustainable, but continually innovating, enterprises. This will involve engineers again assuming more managerial roles and taking more control of their own destinies. To do this, they will need just the kind of broadly based education and thinking skills that our BOK2 effort is espousing.