Engineered

How not to lead a team

For those of you who follow SMU football, you know by now that SMU's football head coach Sonny Dykes, in only his fourth year as head coach after a rocky career elsewhere, has decided to jump ship to go to SMU's local arch-rival, TCU. This, in itself, is his own career decision. But he has mishandled the process in an epic manner in letting it affect his coaching and players' performance in away games ever since TCU legendary coach Gary Patterson got fired at the end of October, and yesterday the players learned he was leaving from social media, after he had addressed them earlier this week and refused to say anything about it. It appears that he spent this past week getting some of his top staffers to follow him to TCU.

I can't pretend I understand much about football, but I know something about students, and it rankles me how it looks like a white coach took advantage of his black players and recruits to get a higher salary at a university whose football program is not particularly better than SMU's, apparently fueled by an ego trip (the rumor is that SMU was offering him $4m/year, although the team has collapsed every November). This November there were rumors about his leaving for TCU breaking on the eve of every away game, and sure enough the players uncharacteristically underperformed the day after.

Yesterday the players learned from social media that their head coach, who had made such a show of stating the team was a Great Family, was joining TCU, after he spent the whole week refusing to give a clear answer. Earlier this week five top recruits decommitted from SMU, and it is unlikely to be a coincidence. Apparently he has spent the past week preparing for his move to TCU, while still on rival SMU's payroll, and is taking several of the assistant coaches with him. This is a man who was fired by UC Berkeley and was, as I understand it, without a coaching job when SMU came knocking after Chad Morris left for Arkansas. 

Of course everyone has to do what is best for their career, but the students aren't being treated right in this case, especially the seniors, who have the last game of their collegiate career and most likely their entire career this afternoon and have become embroiled in a great saga fueled by ego, ambition and money. The whole thing is such a mess that even the mayor of Dallas tweeted that it was. How do you help 20-year-olds, many of which come from disadvantaged communities, deal with the realization that the authority figures who are supposed to help them get better and achieve their full potential have thrown them under the proverbial bus, after all this talk of Great Family and SMU being Dallas's university and recruiting from DFW? For quite a few of them (at this university and elsewhere), football is their chance to shine and they have been trying to find an environment that would let them shine since they realized they had a talent in it. And now that's what the coach does? It is a betrayal of the students to have let contract negotiations tarnish the end of those students' football season. No matter how many games the coach later wins (if any), this will remain the biggest takeaway of his career, that he was capable of something like this, treating students from underrepresented communities as disposable objects. Again, I don't care much about football, but I care about not exploiting people who depend on me.

(Let me emphasize again that people change jobs all the time. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is how he has treated students, especially students of color, as pawns in his great chess game to get the best deal for himself. The seniors only have one Senior Day and the gall of the head coach and the coaches going with him who are going to show their face at this game demonstrates a level of hubris that cannot be sustained even for the biggest egomaniacs.)

It is also worth pointing out that if the coach can betray SMU students he can betray TCU students too. And it is also worth pointing out that SMU has a far better academic reputation in Texas and beyond than TCU does. If the head coach wants to take advantage of the commits by making them de-commit from the best university in North Texas, with the alumni network SMU has locally (a university that was once described to me, by someone unaffiliated to SMU, as having the same reputation in North Texas as Stanford has nationally), well, the only reasonable thing that can be said is that hopefully karma is for real, because taking advantage of younger people who have a lot fewer advantages in life to further one's own career is a big low. It's not like he had an extraordinary win record at SMU either.

It is also worth pointing out that SMU is launching a capital campaign with a new football operations center planned, and so the next head coach will have amazing resources at his disposal to lift SMU to new heights. It has always seemed to me that, in its quest for athletic championships, the university was after regaining the respect that vanished after it was struck with a "death penalty" in the 1980s. We are at a great time to cement the respect the team earned back the past few years. We have great programs in place to help student-athletes thrive in their transition after eligibility. We have the best donors and the best alumni. The next head coach is going to be lucky to be here. As for Sonny Dykes and the assistant coaches who left with him for our rival, we can send them postcards detailing the progress of the new football operations center, funded by donors who truly care about SMU football as opposed to wanting to exploit it for their personal benefit as the head coach did. There are thousands of head coaches in the US. When all is said and done, the only thing that history will remember of Sonny Dykes is that he betrayed his SMU players.

Aurelie Thiele is SMU's Faculty Senate Past President.

It is time to revive this blog! Let's start with a book I read last week, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level by Leander Kahney. This is to prepare for the engineering management course I will be teaching next semester, which is a required course of all engineering undergraduates. This semester I had assigned Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz (former NASA flight director) and I loved it, being an engineering MIT nerd, but some of the students didn't like it as much because they had a hard time seeing how it would be applicable to them (and also they didn't understand why they had to take this course since they don't expect to be managers for a while, and of course since my specialty is optimization and I've never been a manager in industry I was not the best person to make the case they should care). So for the coming iteration of engineering management I am reading a couple of other books to find something more suitable. I wanted something available in paperback for cost reasons, not too long because it is only one element of one course (so I was wary of the Steve Jobs bio by Walter Isaacson, for instance) and hopefully something with a bit of diversity because some of the students who are not straight while males were not enthusiastic about the lack of diversity in the Kranz book (what can I say, in the 1960s you just didn't have many engineering managers who were not straight white males and even fewer who achieved enough to be the topic of a book).

I loved the Tim Cook book for many reasons, which I will try to dump in this post. First, I think Tim Cook is a much better leader than Steve Jobs. Jobs was abrasive and, in my opinion, an egomaniac a little too confident in his genius. Maybe that worked twenty years ago, but those days people won't follow too many leaders with such characteristics. Also, Jobs didn't care about sustainability, and Cook has created a lot of programs to achieve sustainability and climate change. Again, twenty years ago maybe CEOs could get away with not caring about sustainability, but with all the talk about climate change, it is not something visionary leaders can do any longer. Cook has also pioneered new products such as the Apple Watch. I also, of course, like that Cook was educated as an industrial engineer and started his career in operations management. There is also an interesting chapter in the book about the controversy surrounding the FBI's request to Apple to develop a backdoor to the iPhone, which raises valuable questions about data privacy - a hot topic these days. Further, Cook is openly gay following his coming out in an op-ed he wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014, which helps show that CEO positions aren't just for white males, and he has made a strong push toward diversity, for instance on Apple's board. (Of course, challenges remain: while the percentage of underrepresented minorities working at Apple has increased, they tend to be mostly employed in the Apple stores rather than in higher-paying positions as managers.)

Another thing I like is that Harvard Business Publishing Education has many case studies about the events described in the book. This past semester I used the case studies that the previous instructor had been using for years, but the students pointed out that they were too dated (and they were). So I am thinking about also assigning case studies for instance on sustainability, the Apple Watch, etc. Then I would probably also assign some non-Apple cases on related topics so that the entire semester is not about Apple.

Here are a few of the relevant cases on the Harvard Business Publishing Education website:

1. Apple Inc: Managing a Global Supply Chain
2. Apple Inc: Global Supply Chain Management
3. Apple and its Suppliers: Corporate Social Responsibility
4. Apple Pay
5. Apple Watch: Managing Innovation Resistance
6. Financial Policy at Apple (more likely to end up in the engineering finance course)
7. Building a Backdoor to the iPhone: an Ethical Dilemma
8. Apple in China
9. Apple's Future: Apple Watch, Apple TV and/or Apple Car?

Interesting cases would also be:

1. China Moves Up the Value Chain: FoxConn's Dilemma
2. Toyota: The Accelerator Crisis (from 2010)
3. Cisco: Collaborating on New Product Introduction (from 2009 but relevant to new product introduction in engineering management)
4. Lean Process Improvement at Cleveland Clinic (also a little older)
5. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals: Spurring Scientific Creativity with Metrics
6. GlaxoSmithKline: Reorganizing Drug Discovery (from 2005)
7. IDEO: Human-Centered Service Design
8. Vertex Pharmaceuticals: R&D Portfolio Management
9. Ant Financial
10. Implementing LEAN operations at Caesar's Casinos
11. Disruption in Detroit: Ford, Silicon Valley and Beyond
12. Zara: An Integrated Store and Online Model

I only plan to use 12 cases since there are only 13 weeks of the semester after the first introductory week and who knows if we will have a mega-snowstorm again after Texas's continued failure to winterize the electricity grid, so it is best to have one week's worth of margin. This semester I was covering the cases on Thursdays and on Tuesdays we would talk about the assigned book (Failure is not an option this semester) and about another engineering management textbook I liked (I may also change that textbook but that will be the topic of another post.)

I probably should give some thought as to how to keep the course engaging although the sections of the discussion-heavy course are getting stuffed with as many students as there is a classroom of that size, but since leadership seems opposed to opening another section to maintain the quality of the student experience that is a hallmark of education at a private university, I'll take it as a signal that I shouldn't worry about the inability to do small-group discussions in the classroom the course was dumped in next semester or the surge in enrollment over the past year. It is a pity because what the students seemed to like most about the course was to talk with each other about their opinions of the cases and their experiences as summer interns, but there is nothing I can do about it, except taking the students out to hold discussions on the campus lawn, weather permitting. At least I will have tried to make it interesting for me to teach, and hopefully some students will find the material interesting to learn.