Manage Or Innovate? One Man's Solutions To A Classic Quandary

First ‘superchemist’ Ed Engler threw corporate hierarchy to the winds, then IBM promoted him for it None of his IBM colleagues would have ever guessed that Edward Engler was about to turn his career upside-down on that February day in 1987. But looking back on it, the signs were there. Everyone knew this about Engler: The 39-year-old chemist was moving smartly along Big Blue’s management track. Already a second-tier manager, he had four laboratory directors reporting to him and was well liked by both his bosses and the scientific staff. Everyone also knew that there was something a bit different about Engler as a manager. Unlike many of his peers, as he stepped up the corporate ladder he had never quite lost his hankering for the bench. Every now and again, Engler would feel the old urge to tinker, and when it got the better of him, he would just wander into one of the labs and, as he himself puts it, “fiddle in a low-key way.” Still, succumbing to an urge to fiddle is one thing demoting yourself is another. On that late February day, Ed Engler stepped out from behind his walnut desk, removed his tie and jacket, opened that top button on his IBM blue shirt, and strolled into Paul Grant’s lab, saying, “I’ll work on the team for a while.” The team he was referring to was a group of 15 scientists and technicians who were in hot pursuit of new higher-temperature superconducting materials. Since Grant and his team reported to Engler, what Engler was effectively announcing that day was that he wanted to go to work for his subordinate. Why did he do-it? It’s a question that Engler himself is still grappling with. But to an outside observer, the clues—at least, some of them clearly lie in his biography. “From as early as I can imagine, I knew what I wanted to do: chemistry,” Engler reminisces. “I used to have smoke coming out of my room and acid burns on the blankets around my bed.” From then on, he recalls, “It was always easy, always fun.” Easy to get his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Princeton. Fun to join IBM’s research center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. And easy to distinguish himself with work on organic materials that behaved like metals—there was speculation then that some of those materials might be superconductors, but the field moved slowly. Not Engler. He published early and often. IBM’s hierarchy increasingly noticed the excellence of his work. And then, one day in 1979, Engler was rewarded for his research accomplishments in the classic manner. He was selected for a year-long management training appointment at IBM headquarters. Especially exhilarating was the fact that he was being asked to serve as assistant to IBM’s chief scientist, Lewis Branscomb. Engler was eager to accept the temporary position; he knew his job in the lab would be waiting for him when the year was up, and he was anxious to learn what the larger world of Big Blue was all about. “I got a crash course in all aspects of IBM,” he says, recalling that this was his first exposure to what he calls “the larger issues.” It waan’t all a picnic. Engler remembers being forced to acquaint himself with IBM research outside his own field. “I was learning how the checks and balances occur in a large corporation, learning how the long-term planning is done. It was like boot camp.” At the end of a year-and-a-half with Branscomb, Engler was offered a second-line manager position at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose. For the first time he would have to confront the dilemma of success: to take the promotion, or return to his first love—the lab. His decision to formally move into management was not, he reports, without ambivalence. “I knew that once I made that step I was really moving myself out of the lab. I sort of felt that I was sacrificing my personal advancement technically for the people in my area,” Engler says. By that he means that both he and IBM felt that, as talented a scientist as he was, he could do more for his colleagues as a nurturer than he could as their partner. Another factor was the experience ha had gained working with Branscomb, which had given him a global view of the company. He wanted to put that to use. “I thought I could put in place programs that would support what the product engineers were doing. I’d be in the back orchestrating things rather than at a lab bench, but I thought that was a nice challenge.” Insignificant in Engler’s decision to try management was salary. At IBM, he explains, “it is not at all impossible for people doing outstanding research to be paid comparably to those in management. There are no perks just because you’re a manager” So Engler accepted the San Jose assignment purely for the challenges it posed. But when he got there, he discovered that his first challenge was simply getting to his new office—at the end of a wing of chemistry labs. “It’s very hard to walk by all the labs without poking your head in to see what’s going on or even trying something,” he says But Engler largely resisted the temptation—until he got bitten by the superconductivity bug. It was a late Friday afternoo in February 1987. Paul Grant, the head of IBM’s superconductivity group, approached his boss—Ed Engler—with a problem: The world had recently learned that team working with Paul Chu of the University of Houston claimed to have discovered an yttrium compound that superconducted at a temperature 68 K higher than the previous record— a claim that had revivified an almost moribund field of research— but despite frantic efforts the IBM group had been unable to reproduce his results. Engler was energized. He spent that Saturday in the laboratory, grinding and mixing chemicals himself. “Chemistry is like gardening, you have to have a green thumb,” he says. “I have a green thumb”" At first Engler was cautious about sticking his thumbs in where they didn’t belong “You have to be careful as a manager that you don’t come into the lab for two days and claim all the credit,” he says. But as he got involved in the work, it became harder and harder to pull away. The problem consumed him “like a moth near a flame,” he says. Paul Grant suddenly found himself supervising his own boss in the lab. “I don’t want to say [Engler] was another one of the boys—because of his extraordinary talent— but you take off your management coat when you go into the lab,” Grant says. “Nobody tries to pull rank in regard to science.” Engler’s broad exposure to IBM through his management experience proved a boon in the lab. He could talk physics as well as chemistry, and the physicists loved him for it. They would hand him a list of specs describing the kind of material they wanted to play with. Better than some other chemists, Engler knew what they wanted, and he would try to make it. The IBM team was soon on track. Within a few days, they had duplicated Chu’s results and had moved on to experiment with newer compounds. They found that processing was critical to the superconducting properties. If compounds were taken out of the oven too fast, they would not be good superconductors; if they were allowed to cool slowly, they would be. “That was the first clue that processing is very important to these materials,” Engler says. Engler’s enthusiasm grew as the team began to gain recognition for its superconductivity research, and the intense media scrutiny given to superconductivity affected him like a drug. “It meant recognition. Most of us labor away in obscurity. And to be all of a sudden in a field that’s on TV, and written up in all the technical journals.... It’s a thing that’s hard to walk away from.” But walk away is just what Heiner Sussner, director of the Storage Systems and Technology Group at Almaden Research Center, wanted Engler to do. In December 1987, Sussner made Engler an offer designed to be irresistible: to become director of worldwide research on optical data storage for IBM. Though Sussner admits that there were concerns about pulling Engler away from the super conductivity group, he points out: “If you want to hire the best people, they’re always doing something relevant, not just sitting at their desks. [Engler] was the best man for the job.” Thus, Engler was forced to make the difficult choice a second time. Management responsibilities, he realized, would keep him away from the international superconductivity research meetings. “I had a full calendar of trips to beautiful locations,” he says. “And here I was being asked to change.” He thought about the long term. “Was I building something or should I just go back to the lab and be another contributor? I’m sure I could have carved out a nice area for myself, but I think I would have been running away from responsibilities I had taken on.” In January of this year, Engler buttoned his collar, tightened his tie, and stepped back into the executive suite. Although Engler claims salary didn’t play a role in his decision, family did. The long hours and frantic pace of the superconductivity race was taking its toil: “I felt I was missing a little bit of my children’s lives,” says Engler. “I think all of us in the lab felt the strain.” In addition, the management job promised a new challenge for Engler. “It was moving me closer to how we take a science and turn it into a product.” It’s an interest he has had since Princeton, and it is one reason he took a job at IBM rather than at a university. In the end, however, Engler made the decision because he thought the management job was a better use of his various talents. “I left superconductivity with some sadness, but IBM’s effort wasn’t going to sink or swim without me,” he says. In the lab, he was part of a team. “If I had a dry spell, somebody would come up with something.” Management is different. “You’re exposed. If it doesn’t go right, it’s a little clearer that you’re the one responsible.” Engler wanted that responsibility. Engler also felt that his enjoyment of the lab work was squandering his management training. “We’re more than just scientists,” he explains. “We have a community we have a responsibility to. Sometimes we have to separate out doing things for fun and doing things we’re trained for. I have a responsibility to IBM and I have a responsibility to myself.” Just as Engler was leaving the lab, Grant announced that the group had set a new high-temperature record for superconductivity. Engler was only one member of a talented team, but Grant gave him a lot of the credit. “We wouldn’t be where we are if it weren’t for him,” says Grant. “He has a fantastic amount of energy. He’s the best boss I’ve ever had at IBM.” Evidently, he’s one of the best employees, as well. Paul Raeburn is a science writer in New York City.

Manage Or Innovate? One Man's Solutions To A Classic Quandary

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