4 • The Engineer Entrepreneur

were governments unto themselves with all the executive and judicial
authorities to control the activities of its employees, the “citizens” of the cor-
poration. The creative engineer had to make sure his creativity fit within the
administrative rules of the corporation; otherwise, no matter how good the
idea, it would never see the light of day as actuality. In fact, lots of creative
energy was by necessity transferred into how to get around the rules if the
technical idea didn’t fit. Companies acted like governments do today. Pater-
nalism made for a sense of security for those who felt comfortable within its
confines. The opposite was true for those who did not. Those who fit in had
good secure jobs for life. Those who didn’t were the rebel outcasts who did
unusual things like starting entrepreneurial companies of their own at least
2 decades before economic necessity made it the thing to do.
An interesting aside: the modern entrepreneur startup of today probably
owes its popularity to the initial downsizing of these monolithic vertically
integrated companies of the 1960s and 1970s. The initial downsizing of these
companies disbanded many of the support groups, the engineering think
tanks. These people had to find work where opportunities were being cur-
tailed; hence, they used their expert knowledge to launch new companies
and new products. Also, these new products came into being sooner than
would have been the case if the downsizing had not occurred and the mono-
liths maintained their total control of the technologies. If that had been the
case, any new product would have had to fit the business strategy of the
monolith to see the light of day.
Back to the situation of the 1960s and 1970s. The point to be made is that
the engineer in industry had vast resources to draw from to get virtually any
answer he needed to solve a technical problem. This was the glory years of
large project undertakings being able to be commanded by single entities.
This was a time when engineers could and did specialize in nitches and
could expect to enjoy an entire career within a narrow specialty. All the sup-
port and resources were there; all one had to do was make use of them. It
meant that an engineer in one discipline could be almost totally ignorant of
the technologies managed by other disciplines. The lines could be drawn
between mechanical, industrial, civil, and electrical, for example. Aside from
knowing where that line was, the project manager of the time only needed to
know when another discipline had to be brought in. Projects in that era
needed lots of different engineers to complete because cross-discipline train-
ing, to say nothing of experience, was not a common commodity. And so it
went until the era of globalization forced significant downsizing of industrial
organizations. This trend started in the 1980s and continues today. It totally
changed the nature of engineering work.

THE CHANGE IN THE 1980S

The oil shock of the mid to late 1970s led to the demise of the large mono-
lithic industrial organization. Suddenly energy became more expensive and
managing cash flow more intensive. We discovered that energy cost directly

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