Business Management Engineering

Many years ago I worked in the office of an HVAC Test & Balance firm. (HVAC = Heating / Ventilating / Air Conditioning.) In simple terms, there would be a new building and some company would install all of the equipment and materials necessary to keep the place heated and cooled. Our company would then come in to do the testing and balancing of thoe systems, and produce a report which would essentially say, this building is ready to be occupied.

John, my boss, was a mechanical engineer, and not just your run-of-the-mill mechanical engineer, whatever that might mean. John, back in the 1950s, had graduated top of his engineering class from the University of Illinois, which was arguably the #1 engineering school in the country at the time. As mechanical engineers go, he was a rock star. He probably could have been doing a whole lot of different things. But he chose to run his own small business, located near the old family farm, in Central Illinois.

Jane, his wife, had been a nurse for many years, and then became a nursing professor at Illinois Wesleyan, which is where I had gone to college. The company being small, it was the kind of place where family would work, family would drop in, etc. So I saw Jane around quite a bit.

One day, for a reason I cannot remember at all, I was on campus, and I ran into Jane there. I don’t know how we get to this point in the brief conversation, but she was telling me about some kind of discussion (disagreement? argument?) they had about something, which I don’t even think had to do with the company. And, as close as I can remember, this is what she said that he had said to her:

“If I’ve got a question about health, then I would go to you. If there’s a question about business, then that’s what I know.”

My recollection is that Jane then rolled her eyes so far back into her head that she needed medical attention, which, thankfully, as everyone agreed, she was very well qualified to provide.

Now, this whole thing may have come off as some sort of mansplaining thing. But that’s not quite why I share the story. Rather, I think it’s best to have taken John’s alleged comment at face value. He fully conceded tha Jane knew what Jane knew. But he was insisting that he knew what he knew, and that what he knew was business.

Well.

The thing is, John really was an absolutely brilliant mechanical engineer. But there was nothing intrinsic to being an absolutely brilliant mechanical engineer that necessarily made him into an absolutely brilliant businessman.

Jane knew this. I suspect, on some level, John knew this too. But there was something intangible about this older notion of being a businessman. It was, I think, divorced from the notion of having business acumen, a trait that might be associated with someone whose business was business itself as opposed to engineering or upholstery or laundromats. Maybe not everyone was cut out for the business of business but being cut out for running a business is something more general. John didn’t see himself as an engineer who happened to own and run his own business. He saw himself as an engineer and a businessman, co-equal roles. And I’m not trying to claim he was a terrible businessman! But his success as a businessman was based primarily in his brilliance as an engineer, not in business acumen.

Best as I can put together, I grew up knowing there was a thing called “engineering” but I didn’t know what that meant. Nobody talked about STEM back then. I didn’t know any engineers. I think I understood that bridges required engineering, and that engineers designed machines, but it was just sort of a vague term to me. Kind of like, you know, “business”.

In my mind, my first understanding of “business” came from the distinction between the highways U.S. 20 (a.ka. “Bypass 20”), which runs to the south of Rockford) and U.S. Business 20, which runs mostly along State Street through the middle of Rockford. In the context of highways, a “business” route runs through “business districts”, so when one talked about business, one was essentially talking about “storefronts”.

To the extent that I had any sense of business as a business, I suppose it came from the commercials for Rockford Business College, which wasn’t Rockford College, and wasn’t Rock Valley College, but was instead a college for business, and therefore a place to go if you wanted to go into business, but I don’t think I was consciously aware of anyone who was in business, and so when one talked about business, it had something to do with planning for your future today, per the jingle.

(This may all sound ridiculous, but presumably this isn’t the first META-SPIEL you’ve read, so I imagine you’re aware what you’ve gotten into here.)

Anyway, engineering.

My father was an electronics technician for quite a while, and that meant that he worked with electronics engineers, though I think they were called electrical engineers, but what do I know? I think I sort of understood what my dad did for a living, and what role the engineers played, but because this was all based on my dad’s explanations of everything, which means I might have a perfect understanding of the entire world, and might mean I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about. Who’s to say?

Well, one day my dad got a different job, and the word “engineer” was part of his job title. And so he was an engineer. His descriptions of what this meant sounded like his job was equal thirds MacGyver, Kafka character, and niche comedian, plus being the guy who ran the annual United Way pledge drive. Come to think of it, I think this means he was 100% a Vonnegut character. And come to think of that, maybe he still is. But I digress.

Point is, he was an (electrical) engineer. And this was at a time when I was working for a (mechanical) engineer. And somewhere along this timeline I met my wife, and her stepfather was a retired engineer. And this meant that approximately 39% of all grown-ups I knew were engineers. That’s a lot of engineers!

And, so, you guessed it: Today, I am an engineer. I think. I mean, my job title for a while was Software Engineer. That’s not my title now, but I do much of the same work I did when it was, so I think I can still call myself one. Though, honestly, aside from the job title proper, nobody actually referred to me as an engineer. My company employs a bunch of engineers, but when we refer to them in aggregate, we call them developers. Except, we really call them devs. (Following the same logic for my wife: She’s a dietitian. But, it’s appropriate to call her work cohort nutritionists. In other words, she and the rest of them are all nuts.)

And so I am pretty sure that I am an engineer. It doesn’t feel like the same sort of thing as designing bridges or designing printed circuit boards or designing bulldozers, but I suppose I do design and build code, so I reckon that all counts.

Alas, my job title isn’t Software Engineer anymore. Instead, it is this: Manager, Client Development. What’s meant by this is that I manage a team of developers whose work is client oriented. At some point, I was given a promotion, ostensibly based on my work performance as an engineer, or maybe because they realized I was a sucker. Not sure.

Let’s see now. Business? Vague. Engineering? Obscure. Management? Well, that seems a little more straightforward. I think I understood from a young age what a manager was. I think I understood this via baseball. The manager doesn’t pitch, but he decides who does. The manager doesn’t bat, but he decides who does. In turn, the general manager doesn’t call for relief pitchers, but he does decide who the manager will be, and he does decide which players will receive contracts. Managers decide and direct and all those sorts of things.

So, I’m an engineer and a manager at the same time. This is even though my MA is in History (20th Century America!) And my BA is in History and Political Science! I did take one computer science class in college. But not a single class in business, or economics, or management, or anything of the sort. (Now, I did take a seminar in graduate school about texts. I recall one day how we were discussing the idea that a brick might qualify as a text. One of my fellow graduate students grew very animated, talking about how if you gave him a brick and said it was from North Carolina, he could tell you from when and where that brick likely originated, what kind of building it was part of, etc. Friends, a brick can tell you so very much! And I don’t know about you, but to me this all seems like an eminently suitable preparation to become Manager, Client Development.)

(I’m just warning you here that you’re read quite a bit but you’re not done yet. This next section is where I make some sort of attempt to get back on the rails. I’m not sure I succeed. That’s okay, though. You’ve got nothing better to do than have me put a lot of words into italics for you.)

To avoid confusion let’s say that the place you work is a firm, and to wildly oversimplify, the firm engages in production and/or provision. If you work at a factory, even if you don’t work on the floor, you’re “producing”. If you work at a hospital, then you’re “providing”. My company does both: we write software (production) and then implement and support that software (provision). Let’s say that production and provision can be grouped together under the term output.

Any firm also necessarily engages in finance. You produce something? You sell it. You provide a service? You sell it. You have a storefront? You rent it. You have employees? You pay them. Okay, maybe, somehow, you operate entirely on the barter system, and money is never involved. More power to you. But one way or another there’s some kind of exchange going on.

Management used to be more closely associated with what I’ll call the acts of output. Managers were more likely to have been “on the floor” themselves. This of course had a lot to do with the average size of a firm being much smaller.

Over time, as firms grew in size, and more and more managers were brought in, management on average became increasingly distanced from output. This meant either being more directly associated with finance (say, a corporate controller), or instead being most closely associated with management in and of itself.

John’s notion of business, I think, was something at the nexus of output, management, and finance. But “business” today seems to try and establish distance between the output function and the management and finance functions. Wall Street seems to want very little to do with output per se; everything instead seems to be about financialization, i.e. business as a business. John saw himself as a libertarian-leaning Republican, and so while I don’t think he had a problem per se with things like financialization - because he figured that people should be able to do whatever - I really don’t think he would regard things like marginal derivative trading as business.

My job now operates close to that nexus of output, management, and finance. I suppose my weird work background sort of led me here. At John’s company I was primarily output, but with some estimating and scheduling. My next job was sort of half finance, half administrative in support of output. Then when I got my first software job, it was mostly output, but one of my specialties was how software handled finance. And although I don’t directly do a lot with finance now, I’m close enough to it.

What occurs to me is that there’s some fourth thing at that nexus, which I have a background understanding of, but which is a little harder to qualify. Part of it might be termed control. Part of it may be the notion of seeing a forest and not just the trees. There’s something about whatever this thing is that’s very caught up in Americanism. It’s also very much caught up in a traditional notion of what the Republican Party is “supposed to be all about”.

As the nature of productivity has increasingly moved away from what I’ll call the traditional location of that nexus, toward something which I think has been warped by management and finance overwhelming output, I also think that whatever that traditional Republican notion might have been has now been warped into something of a monstrosity. I don’t just mean this in a political sense; I also think that so much of what now passes as productivity has so little to do with true output that it reflects a completely warped notion of economy.

I’ve been slowly reading Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap. It’s a dense book and it’s hard to boil it down here, especially since I’m not done with it. But the base premise is that America’s move toward extreme meritocracy has had tremendous negative consequences. Markovits writes about “superordinate” workers who make a whole lot of money by working really hard doing things which require a great deal of skill. This all seems true enough.

But what occurs to me - though it is not something that, so far, I’ve seen Markovits explicitly note - is that a gigantic amount of the productivity of these “superordinate” workers results in no true output. It’s financialization, or corporate law, or high-level management. It’s like meta-work, extracting value through circular provisionary processes. It is, in my mind, contrary to business, like a bizarro version of what I like to think John might have meant by the term.

Over the years, my dad somehow worked for a whole bunch of assholes. His descriptions of some of these people were formative to my own political thought. Some of them may have been mostly self-important. But some of them, based on how he described them, seemed to be in their roles primarily for extractive purposes. These were men - always men - who would lay off 10% of their workforce, meet sales quotas for the quarter anyway (albeit with shoddier work), and then repeat the process. In the end the company would beat projections quarter over quarter for a while, but would be left hollowed out, with a fragment of the original workforce, and no capacity to return to previous levels of productivity. These men were making money by throttling output.

I came to recognize this behavior as intrinsic to Corporate America. When Ralph Nader ran for President in 2000, his critique of Corporate America was what most fully resonated for me. Nader was a man with a thorough understanding of the forces that my dad so often complained about, and through his campaign I became heavily involved in the Green Party.

When I ran for State Representative in 2004, I had a long interview with the local paper, and talked about how my politics were rooted in what I considered to be the traditional conservative views of my grandparents. When they endorsed the incumbent, they took a lot of time to write almost glowingly of me, and cited precisely these points about traditional conservatism.

The company I work for today is sort of small (under 100 employees) and sort of not (the parent corporation is, on the books, the largest software company in Canada, whatever exactly that means.) And now I’m management (or so I’m told) and so this all technically means that I’m a manager in a corporation, which all seems kind of funny, and yet entirely mundane.

Now, I’m not a small business owner like John was, or like my grandparents were. And I do technically belong to a larger corporation. But I’m directly involved in our company’s output. And I’m in management. And I’m at least a little adjacent to finance. I’m sort of at that nexus, and my company isn’t about extractive bullshit or throttling productivity or any of that garbage. I think I have a better understanding today of that “fourth thing” at the nexus. I’m not sure it’s what most people would today call business, but I think it’s what John might have called it.

The upshot seems to be this:

If you’ve got a question about business, well, you can come to me. After all, I’m a manager and an engineer and, somehow, maybe, in spite of my politics and so much else, some kind of businessman.

But please, if you’ve got a question about health… talk to my wife, the nut.