Today's Engineer conducted an interview with Mr. Robert A. Lutz, former president and vice chairman of Chrysler Corporation and recently appointed chairman, CEO, and president of Exide Corporation. Mr. Lutz's book, GUTS, was published recently by John Wiley & Sons, and is on the list of Business Week's best-selling business books.

TE:: Everyone knows that engineers have to have technical competence. But that's only half the equation. There are other competencies, presumably, that engineers need to have in their goody bag to perform effectively. What competencies beyond technical competence should today's engineer have?

LUTZ: Engineers need to be, like anybody else in business, proactive and somewhat outgoing. And they need to reach outside specific technical areas. Mainly, engineers need to be good communicators, because there is no point in achieving an engineering breakthrough, having a new idea, or coming up with a new material, if you can't get your colleagues excited about it.

A totally left-brained engineer is going to have a very tough time, because he or she will be mired in quantitative analysis. It's only right-brain balance that makes engineers more creative and permits them to leapfrog to solutions, as opposed to pursuing a completely linear path to a solution.

Right-brain creativity, the ability to interact with others, and the ability to share and sell ideas all make today's engineer far more effective at bringing his or her work to the marketplace. And by "marketplace," I don't mean the economic marketplace, but the marketplace of ideas inside the company.

TE: The two key skills that I'm hearing are necessary are a heavy dose of right-brain creativity and the ability to communicate ideas persuasively.

LUTZ: Yes, and they are both linked.

TE: One other follow-up question: The stereotype of an engineer is the antithesis of a people person. What about the ability to manage people -- and also to get the best, out of even those people the engineer doesn't manage...?

LUTZ: The person who is skillful at managing people is always going to be more effective, since nobody works in isolation. Or, if they do work in isolation, they'd better be an absolute genius!

TE: Are engineers, in your experience, genetically incapable of good people skills?

LUTZ: I don't think so. In the engineering schools and universities, students are taught things. They are taught engineering skills the same way that MBA students are taught individual business skills. But what everybody neglects -- except the military -- are leadership skills.

People skills really mean leadership skills. Leadership skills are so vital for any profession. I don't think that engineers are congenitally incapable of effectively motivating and managing the human side of an enterprise, as the stereotype says they are. I don't think they are, by nature, any less skilled at personal relationships than are MBAs, doctors, or lawyers.

TE: You wrote in your bestseller, GUTS, "We need more nerds. We need to put engineers on a pedestal." If you were to advise an engineer on how to get on that pedestal, what one attribute, action, or word of advice would you give so that engineers could merit being put there?

LUTZ: Be creative and know your field -- really, really know your field. Make a significant contribution in your field, and be enthusiastic about it. I've seen too many guys in the car companies who can't wait to get out of engineering. They get an MBA so they can say, "Yes, I was an engineer, but I am really an MBA." And I'd say, "No, no, no." At Chrysler we started encouraging engineers not to become MBAs. We said, "If you want an advanced degree, that's fine. Go get an advanced engineering degree." I would say, "To thine own self be true." If you are an engineer, rather than try to disguise yourself as an MBA, go for that advanced engineering degree and become outstanding at what you do, rather than trying to become something else.

TE: You've worked with engineers most of your life. How would you evaluate the average engineer's performance relative to making a significant contribution to the organization?

LUTZ: I think you have to look at the bell-shaped curve. You're going to have the 10 percent who are absolutely outstanding, who make huge contributions. And, you're going to have the 10 percent at the other end, where you wonder why you employ them. Then, there are 80 percent at that camel's hump in the middle. It's the same bell-shaped curve you have with finance people, marketing people, or public relations people. It doesn't matter what kind of people, you are always going to have that bell-shaped curve. Above average and outstanding engineers, of course, make a monumental contribution. Chrysler's return to prosperity was engineering driven.

TE: In your book, you write about the balkanization of engineering departments at Chrysler. What specifically do you mean by that, and why are engineering departments so fragmented? Is it a security blanket, a comfort zone?

I don't think engineers are, by nature, any less skilled at personal relationships than MBAs, doctors, or lawyers.

LUTZ: Yes, it is. The platform-team approach is the opposite of being balkanized. Platform teams are task oriented. All the engineering disciplines are integrated to work on a vehicle. In a typical balkanized automobile environment, you have a brake department, and the brake department has to focus on brakes on every single vehicle. Then you've got the electrical department, and they do the electrical work on every single car that goes through. Then you've got locks, handles, and mechanisms, and every single project has to pass through locks, handles, and mechanisms.

It's all highly sequential. And if you have several projects coming through at once, each one of these departments hits its manpower limit. So, managers in the balkanized environment typically find themselves either asking for more heads, or saying, "Put it in the in-basket and we'll get to it."

TE: Why is fragmentation so comforting?

LUTZ: Such an environment provides a comfort zone -- because guys could spend their whole career in locks, handles, and mechanisms, and rise to the top of the locks, handles, and mechanisms department working for some old bull of the woods. A new kid on the block may say, "By god, if I just stick around here long enough and keep the old guy satisfied -- when he retires I will become head of locks, handles, and mechanisms, and then I can be the guy who tells the program managers to get lost, because unless they kiss my butt, their program goes to the back of the line."

TE: How do you cut through that factionalization and have a more coherent approach?

LUTZ: By blowing it up. Sure, it's hugely unpopular to do so. That's what caused all the anonymous letters to Lee Iaccoca, saying that I and several others absolutely had to be fired, because we had destroyed the world's finest engineering organization. But we went ahead and blew it up.

For example, we created the LH platform team. We broke up the engine group and several engine guys were put on the LH platform team, some guys were put on the minivan platform team, and some guys went to the Neon platform team.

We did the same thing with electrical. We busted up the department and gave each one of the platform teams a portion of what had been the old electrical group.

Locks, handles, and mechanisms -- blew it up and gave each platform team some of the old locks, handles, and mechanisms guys.

In engines, they made the argument that we only had one piston specialist in the whole organization -- only one guy who has this deep understanding of pistons. What are you going to do? You can't split him four or five ways. The answer was that a company doesn't necessarily need a piston guy. If you need piston expertise, talk to your suppliers. Maybe you can outsource it. The only way to get rid of this balkanization is to create a platform approach and just blow the old way up.

TE: Isn't there a danger that a TNT approach to change can cripple an organization? How do you avoid that? What's the one thing you learned when you went to platform teams at Chrysler that enabled you to keep the revolution a productive, positive one?

LUTZ: You don't change all the platform teams at once. We changed them sequentially.

TE: So, there was an evolutionary approach to change?

LUTZ: Yes, but you still have to decide that you're going to blow things up. Then, you have to create your first platform team, where you draw on all of these little balkanized departments to populate that platform team.

Then you have to set yourself up for three or four months of moaning, rending of garments, and gloom-and-doom scenarios predicting that the world will come to an end. You have to put up with that, and then the minute it becomes obvious -- say, after four or five months -- that the first platform team is working well and really making progress, then you move on to establish the next one. You make the little balkanized departments progressively even smaller. Finally, when they are all small enough, you sweep up what's left and put them into the last platform team.

TE: Your stories in GUTS about quality being the Holy Grail; the rebuilding of the 1950 Dodge pickup; Ford's problem of overcoated anti-corrosion lug nuts coming loose; and the Rolls Royce's hydromatic problem are all examples of either overzealous engineering or plain stupidity. There are probably millions of such examples. What's the solution?

Be creative and know your field...make a significant contribution...and be enthusiastic about it.

LUTZ: There is no pat solution. The only solution is the application of common sense and sound judgment. I don't think there is a cookbook recipe, except teaching people to think outside of their narrow box.

What is it you're really trying to achieve with quality? What you're really trying to achieve with the drive for quality is absolute customer satisfaction, customer delight. But the pursuit of quality becomes dangerous when you focus on quality for quality's sake -- when you lose sight of whether or not it has any customer benefit. That's when quality becomes dangerous.

I think it's partly an educational process. The Japanese came up with the term "wasteful quality," and the lug nut example and the Rolls's hydromatic example are worse than wasteful. They are actually attempts at quality that turned into disasters.

TE: It's interesting that when I asked for a solution, your first reaction was "think outside the box," but then I recall your interview in Quinn Spitzer's book, Heads,You Win!, where the emphasis was less on thinking outside the box and more on the need for intellectual discipline in problem solving.

LUTZ: You need to ask the right questions and ask them in a certain order. Talk about the kind of dynamic tension between, on the one hand, thinking out of the box -- and on the other, a disciplined approach to solving problems, so that you get to the cause of a deviation fairly rapidly.

Yes, you've got to correct the problem rapidly and zero in on the root cause -- as soon as you find out you have a problem. But, you also have to know there is a problem in the first place.

There are two related but separate issues. When you are asking how to prevent guys from doing stupid things -- like polishing the channels in the valve body of a transmission, versus zeroing in on the bad shifting -- they should have zeroed in on the bad shifting immediately, by using a disciplined problem-solving approach, such as the Kepner-Tregoe methodology. They should have begun their analysis by asking: "What changed? What is it you are now doing to your transmissions that you were not doing previously?" Describe what you do with those transmissions after you get them -- between the time you get them and the time you put them in the vehicles.

Asking a few questions in a logical order will enable you to find the root cause of the problem immediately. But that's fixing a problem after the fact. The real question is: "How do you prevent the kind of overkill thinking that results in wasteful quality or damaging quality?" Ultimately, it's a matter of education about what quality actually means -- and judgment.

TE: You claim that disruptive people are an asset. What advice would you give to mavericks, so they don't step over the line? And what advice would you give to the managers of mavericks, so they can keep creativity flowing, without having a 'bull in the china shop' destroy the unit and organization?

LUTZ: My advice to the manager comes straight out of my book. You've got to determine early on which of the mavericks are constructive and which are destructive.

You can do that by observing them and by knowing their reputation. If you know that someone is a perennial malcontent, is negative in their disruption, and never offers a positive alternative, then they are just a maverick -- and not a constructive one. You are probably better off without destructive mavericks.

If someone is constructive and offers positive solutions, but is disruptive to the point where other people are prevented from doing their job, then they need counseling, and need to be told, "Look, I greatly value your intellectual contribution. You are a bona fide change agent, but I don't want you to self-destruct. Could you please take it just a little bit easier, let me guide you, and slow you down just a little bit, because I think I can make you more effective if you allow me to coach you."

If you are a maverick, ask yourself if you are truly constructive or if you are destructive. If all you are doing is criticizing the work of others and saying, "Oh, those people in marketing are fools, the people in finance are fools, my colleagues are all fools, and I would do it entirely differently," then you're probably not constructive.

The point about constructive mavericks ties into my answer to your first question -- about how engineers should behave. They should push for the right solutions. They should push for what they want. But in any organization or grouping of human beings, there's that fine line between encouraging other people to accept your solution, and going at it too brutally, never letting anybody else win. The latter path is the road to self-destruction.

The bad part about teams is that, unless they are strongly led, they won't move off the dime.

TE: Bob, would you define yourself in your own career, looking back, as a creative maverick?

LUTZ: On balance, I was a creative maverick. But there were times in my career when I was fed up and felt like saying, "Just let me do it; I can do a lot better here." I probably was a little bit on the non-constructive side.

TE: There's been a lot of talk about the importance of teams. How do you maintain that balance between encouraging entrepreneurialism and team spirit?

LUTZ: It's really very easy, provided you have the right person heading the team. If you have a team leader who is an entrepreneur and change agent, then maintaining the balance should be relatively easy. However, leaders must listen to people. They need to find that blend between wanting to get on with the task and working with the team.

Left to their own devices, teams without a timetable, without a very specific goal to accomplish, and without strong leadership, will deteriorate into eternal committees that just keep covering the same ground -- inevitably arriving at the lowest-common-denominator solution.

Say a team is asked to pick between solution A and solution B, and team members are divided in their opinion about which alternative is best. In the absence of strong leadership, the team will inevitably come back to management and say, "You asked us to pick between A and B. But the only way we could achieve consensus was to recommend A and B."

Management will then say, "I told you to pick between A and B because we can't afford both." The team leader will then explain that A and B was the team's recommendation. Not surprisingly, the senior executive is likely to retort, "Listen, I asked you to lead this team to a decision between A and B. Coming back and saying you'd like to do both is not one of the permissible options. Go off and do it again."

If team leaders aren't strong enough, they should be replaced. Don't misunderstand. Teams are excellent. Teams are superb because they permit instant communication and sharing of information at the level where the sharing of information is necessary. That part of teams is good. The bad part about teams is that, unless they are strongly led, they won't move off the dime.

TE: How do you ensure that consensus building and teamwork aren't merely pooling ignorance?

LUTZ: Senior management has to give the team the "what." It has to tell the team what it wants done and it has to set the ground rules. For instance, using the prior example, the team has to be told very clearly, "Don't come back with A and B because everybody knows that since half of you want A and the other half of you want B, the easy way for you guys to achieve consensus is to come back to management and say you want A and B."

The second requirement is to have an intelligent and strong team leader, one who has moral fortitude and who is able to look half the group in the eye and say, "I hate to do this. I've listened to both sides of the argument. Each side makes a number of valid points, but on balance I'm coming down on the side of B, and here are my reasons. Now, I know that those of you who wanted A are disappointed, and I don't blame you. But, my judgment is that we go back to management and say that, as much as some team members would like to do A, on a forced-choice basis we will take B. Now I expect all of you to get behind the decision." It boils down to leadership.

TE: In GUTS, you emphasize the fact that in competitive organizations there is a real need to maintain a balance between the right and left brain -- between chaos and stasis. What is the most important thing you've learned about maintaining that very difficult and delicate balance?

What you're really trying to achieve with the drive for quality is absolute customer satisfaction.

LUTZ: You must have that balance personally and internalize it. If you haven't internalized that balance -- if you are more left-brain oriented -- if you must tell the troops, "Let's set up everything so we can't possibly make a mistake" -- then you have to surround yourself with people who are of the opposite persuasion, who are more right-brained.

Similarly, if you are more right-brained, which probably describes me, you should do what I do. I always make sure I surround myself with at least one or two people who are much more left-brained than I am, much more analytical, and much more orderly. And I listen to them. I realize that I need that sense of orderliness and discipline, because I don't have as much of that.

TE: The '40s and '50s were the decades characterized by the apotheosis of engineering. Engineers were valued and looked up to. Then, as we moved into the '70s, '80s, and '90s, there was the "nerd" interpretation of engineering. Project into the next century. Are the glory days of engineers over, and, if not, what can engineers and the engineering profession do to reclaim that lost image?

LUTZ: My most important recommendation is for engineers to stay on top of their craft. Don't cop out by getting an MBA, especially if you are truly a gifted engineer. Go for more advanced engineering degrees. Otherwise, we have a situation where the best engineers drop out of their profession and switch to the MBA, and the weaker ones are left behind. For engineers to make a contribution, they should pursue goals in their own field. They don't have to get an MBA to be good managers, because management is really all about leadership.

TE: What you're really saying -- to paraphrase the Biblical injunction -- is, "Seek ye first technical competence and rewards will follow."

LUTZ: Yes, I mean acquire extreme technical competence in your field. In addition, it is essential for today's engineers to develop leadership skills. As leaders, engineers will go beyond serving their organization as effective individual contributors. They will also play a vital role in leveraging the brainpower of others in the organization.

Peter M. Tobia is director of the Business Issues Group of Kepner-Tregoe, Inc., a Princeton, New Jersey management consulting firm. (ptobia@kepner-tregoe.com)

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