Strongest NASA Managers - Lanzkron

One of my favorite passages in Thomas Kelly's book, Moon Lander, was
about a certain manager at NASA who galvanized efforts at two major
contractors to shape up their ground support equipment (GSE) programs.
I'm hoping others will share additional information or similar stories.


He only shows up in a few pages, but here are some extracts from _Moon
Lander_, Thomas J. Kelly, Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001, pages
98-100:

"Joe Shea, recognizing that North American Aviation and Grumman were
not coping adequately with the challenge of GSE, assigned one of his
strongest managers, Rolf W. Lanzkron, to be GSE 'czar' for the Apollo
spacecraft. Hard driving, dedicated, and knowledgable, Lanzkron
attacked Apollo's GSE problems like a man possessed."

....

"He was a tough taskmaster... His searching, pointed questions and
comments seldom gave personal offense but shone a relentless spotlight
on our failings and shortcomings."

....

"He held weekly GSE meetings in Bethpage, having just come on the
'red-eye' flight from Los Angeles after a similar meeting at NAA the
day before. His meeting started promptly at 7:00 A.M.; the normal
Grumman starting time of 8:00 was too late for him. ... Lanzkron sat at
the conference table facing them and methodically went through the
status, problems, and corrective actions of every end item. ... These
meetings were long and painful. Lanzkron would not accept waffled
answers to his questions. If the person he was cross-examining
implicated someone else as part of his excuses, Lanzkron insisted that
the third party be brought into the meeting immediately to defend
himself or rebut the charges. ... The meetings frequently continued
until 8:00 or 9:00 P.M. with no break for lunch. When the meeting
began Lanzkron prominently displayed on the table in front of him an
apple and a glass of water, which everyone knew was his lunch."

....

"He demanded strong corrective action from management."

....

"Our LM GSE project engineer ... and the Manufacturing manager ... were
simply no match for Lanzkron, often withering pathetically under his
onslaughts."

....

"Lanzkron was reassigned by Shea to key trouble spots elsewhere on the
program... Although his brand of assistance was painful to endure, it
was effective and contributed substantially to both Grumman's success
and that of the Apollo program."


How do managers such as Lanzkron develop into such a powerful force? I
suspect that it's not just their personal management skills, but also
knowing that they have a strong mandate and a clear vision of their
responsibilities.

I could not find much more information about Lanzkron, just a few small
bits on Google, and little about where he came from or his other
contributions.

If anyone can share information about him or other exceptional managers
involved in our space programs with equally interesting stories, I
would appreciate it.

Brian Mathewson

On 27 Dec 2004 20:56:12 -0800, "
wrote:

How do managers such as Lanzkron develop into such a powerful force? I
suspect that it's not just their personal management skills, but also
knowing that they have a strong mandate and a clear vision of their
responsibilities.

....From my own experience, such managers all possess the following
traits:

1) Under no circumstances do managers such as Lanzkron let upper
management jump the **** of those they manage. If **** rolls downhill,
it has to first go through the manager, who determines whether or not
the **** flowing is heading in the right direction or not.

CIP: Managers at Dell before late 1998 were of Lanzkron's caliber,
which resulted in a happy *and* productive working environemnt where
employees practically -begged- to work overtime because their managers
stuck up for them and made sure that upper management and/or marketing
scum didn't interfere with their progress in any way, shape or form.
After 1998, however, Dell hired a bunch of laid-off IBM managers, who
were far more interested in preserving their own butts than those
under them, and simply acted as "yes men" when two upper managers
convinced a drunken Michael Dell at the '98 Chrisnukkah party that a
major change in how engineering development was focused would result
in major improvements in performance and product output. However, as
the change in methodology was not properly researched with regards to
maintaining lines of development communications between the various
support and development groups - now realigned based on a peripheral
and/or specific commodity focus instead of the previous focus on Lines
of Business - and it became apparent very, VERY quickly that the
process was, quite simply, a major cluster**** without the benefit of
having at least one squirt bottle of Wesson Oil on hand. As a result,
company morale went down the toilet, and productivity went with it.
Evidence for this exists in the fact that the average number of X-revs
for system BIOS design went from an average of 11.5 before the first
A00 rev, to over 80.5, all within the space of three months.

2) Managers like Lanzkrom keep a close eye on what their people are
doing, but do *not* micromanage -unless- it's obvious that something's
going seriously wrong, and step in to lend a hand where/if needed.
Micromanagement is the biggest detriment to the workplace, and is
totally insulting to most if not all employees. After all, if you're
hired to do a job, and you're qualifed for the position, a manager
should just be needed for the occasional input, and not to act as a
slavedriver who nitpicks every single detail.

3) Lanzkrom-class managers keep totally up-to-date with what's going
on in the labs, and get their hands dirty from time to time, even if
their own managers bitch and whine that paperwork isn't getting done
on time. They know full well that getting the product out the door
correctly is *FAR* more important than the paperwork some beancounter
or desk jockey wants to masturbate their stamp of approval on.

4) Managers like Lanzkrom make it clear to their employees that, when
they do good, they'll be backed up 100% and praised accordingly. But
when they **** up, and it's obviously something that they could have
avoided, then they're handed their heads on a platter. At the same
time, however, said managers know that the best thing for total group
morale is to allow said ****ups to at least attempt to make amends.
Again, getting the project completed successfully and the product out
the door is the most important aspect. Quite a few managers forget
this as a side-effect of power tripping, and wind up canning someone
with no qualifed replacement ready to step in and pick up the pieces.

5) Finally, managers such as Lanzkrom do *NOT* adopt NIH methodologies
and/or implement any sort of politically-driven methodologies designed
to keep their subordinates where they are. They encourage and promote
forward thinking and experimentation with the established processes,
and make sure those who come up with something new get the proper
credit for it instead of taking the credit for themselves.

....There's a few other factors, but those are the major ones. Sadly,
you find few managers these days who exhibit even three of the five
listed.

OM

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