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.