Engineering Department
Your engineering department has written and unwritten policies, ground rules, capabilities, limitations, and controlling personalities. It has offices, laboratories, fabricating shops, computer systems, and staffs of both hardware- and paper-making technicians. There are standard drafting conventions, paper sizes, and dimensional units. The United States is in the process of partial metrication, but the degree varies from company to company and within companies. You will save yourself a lot of trouble by conforming to the practices of your company unless you care to generate feuds and crusades. Save your energy for those crusades that you carefully select to be worth waging.
Manufacturing Department
Even more varied than the policies, capabilities, and personalities of your engineering department are those of your manufacturing department. Life will be easier for you and more of your work will be accepted if you design products which can be made in your own factory by techniques it already practices.
It is a matter of judgment how far you compromise what you feel is an optimum design in order to conform to your own plant's capabilities and preferences. (Remember that you have judgments and other people have prejudices.) You should properly pioneer new manufacturing technology and the use of vendors with specialized technology that your company does not have, but you should do so only when you cannot adapt your designs to your factory without serious loss of design value.
This is more important in some plants than in others. Some companies make very complex products with almost no capital equipment by buying all fabrication from outside vendors and doing only assembly in house. Others feel strongly that they want to produce their own products in house, either for the feeling of control or for other reasons or feelings. You will be a more effective and productive designer if you understand the manufacturing policies of your company and work to accommodate them.
Here again you are always free to start a crusade, but the energy in waging crusades is energy taken from your design career.
Marketing Department
Your organization sells something to get the money which pays you. It may sell grants, research projects and reports, computer software, small quantities of specially designed hardware, standard capital equipment, or mass-produced consumer products. The reasons for its choice of marketing arena in which to sell may be historical, rational or irrational, or the personal taste of managers whether with good reasons or with bad. Sometimes an organization, such as a military products company deciding that it would like to enter a commercial market, is in transition.
There is a very high probability that different people in the organization have different opinions about the market it should be in. Conflicts may arise of which you should try to be aware and in which you may participate, voluntarily or not.
Your product proposals and designs should be appropriate for the market to which they will be addressed. A coffee maker for a long-range bombing plane should be different from a coffee maker sold in a low-price department store, and both should be different from a coffee maker sold in a high-price gourmet specialty shop.
Note that the marketing policies of your company are based at least in part on the marketing capabilities of your company. (The relationship is chicken-and-egg.) If your company now sells research contracts to the government and you have a great idea for a mass-distribution product for consumers, be aware that setting up the salespeople, representatives, supervisors, warehousing, advertising, credit system, and so on for your proposed product is not a trivial undertaking. Your marketing department also is made up of personalities with their own motives and prejudices, which they may not clearly announce for all to understand even if they really understand them themselves. (You know that only engineers make rational judgments undistorted by emotion.)
Unwritten Ground Rules
There are other aspects of your company which you should try to find out. There may be unwritten and sometimes unspoken ground rules:
- "We like to make our products of metal and not of plastic."
- "We like to make our products of plastic and not of metal."
- "We like easily maintained products."
- "We like disposable products."
- "We like products which can be maintained only by our own service organization so that we can sell maintenance contracts."
- "We like products which require a certain manufacturing process which is available only from the president's brother-in-law."
- "We have a department in the factory which must be supported because we want to maintain jobs for certain people."
- "We have a troublesome department in the factory which we would like to close down."
Company Culture
The phrase "company culture" refers to the complex of unwritten ground rules within which the employees are accustomed and expected to operate. It may vary from complete indifference to anything except doing assigned work to a complex set of unwritten rules which may include dress codes, manners, who associates with whom, and the like. The military is a limiting case in the spectrum of company cultures. You should consciously learn what your company culture is, decide whether you are willing to live with it, adapt your own practices for success in that culture, or else start looking around.
Attitudes toward innovation
A most important aspect of your company culture is the attitude toward innovation of the different managers. If you are working for people with low II rankings, don't frustrate yourself and get a bad name by bothering them with a lot of "crazy new ideas." If you are working for people with high II ratings and if you enjoy and are good at invention, you will have a wonderful time and a warm reception by showing your ideas to your managers.
Your company or your immediate part of it may have any of several attitudes toward the strictness with which your time is spent as assigned. There are organizations with the "anyhow theory of economics," which says that the engineers get paid anyhow, so it doesn't very much matter what they do but that discretionary expenditures of real cash money must be kept very low.
Sources of Information
A source of information about your company is the annual report it sends to the stockholders. In it your company president and board of directors explain to their bosses what they think the company is all about, how well it is doing, and what they hope to do. (Remember that they are defending their jobs and also selling stock, so use a grain of salt in your reading.) You will probably be more successful if your designs and proposals match the thinking expressed in the report. (Don't be embarrassed to ask for a copy; the officers are usually proud of it and want it spread around. If you are anxious anyway, ask stockbrokers to get it for you. They will be glad to do so because they might get to sell you some stock and they have no need to mention your name when they ask for the report.)
If you work for a public company (one whose stock is held by the public and can be freely traded), there is a great deal of information about the company, its officers, and its industry in reference books called Moody's and Standard & Poor's. You will find these in brokers' offices (just walk in and ask) and in your public library. These books are written primarily for investors but are just as useful for you.
If you buy a few shares of your company's stock for a few hundred dollars (any stockbroker will serve you), the company will send you a copy of the annual report every year without your asking, and further-more you will be invited to its annual stockholders' meeting, where you can see the top brass report and defend themselves to people they can't discipline or fire. If you have the guts, you can address them directly yourself.
Many brokerage companies have analysts who study companies and write reports which are used by the brokers to encourage their clients to buy or sell the corresponding stocks. These reports are usually open to the public in the brokers' offices.
When your company first went public and whenever it goes back to the public to sell more stock or bonds, it must file a very detailed report (typically form SI) with the SEC. The officers and auditors are subject to severe penalties if the report is incomplete or misleading. (The annual report must also be filed, under similar rules.) These reports are bulky and not easily found except in an SEC office. However, a condensed version of the report is the "prospectus," which a broker must give to each prospective first buyer of the new stock or bond is-sue. Ask any broker for the last prospectus.
Other sources of information about your company are its organization charts (some of which may not be easy to get), its commercial advertising in both trade and financial journals (the two kinds of ads are different), and the sales brochures and catalogs it sends to its customers.
Every company management sends messages to its employees through:
- House organs (company newspapers)
- Meetings and talks by managers
- Printed announcements
- Company socials (picnics, Christmas parties, and the like) in which managers mix and talk with others than the adjacent names on the organization chart
- Unofficial social life (dinner parties, etc.) in which employees associate
- The more you know about your company, the more successful you will be operating within it.
