An Ineffable Knack: Before Consulting

After about twenty years of salaried employment I decided that if I was going to work for an idiot, that idiot might as well be me - and by that time I had acquired, I thought, sufficient experience and skill to be of some value.

So what had I learned? That all grass is green, I thought. My first employer, Walton Radar Systems (with whom I spent twelve years after graduating), was, in hindsight a small miracle of a company.

A Quality Education — High Quality

Despite being only about a dozen-strong when I joined in 1982, it was already qualified to Def. Stan. 05-21 - the highest qualification that the UK Ministry of Defence had for the design and manufacture of equipment. Quality Assurance (processes, methodologies, etc. for ensuring design and development is to the required standards) and Quality Control (processes etc. for evaluating the results) were of paramount importance.

Detailed logbooks were maintained for all design work; all ideas were recorded, along with their evaluations — experimental or theoretical — along with any other considerations in design decisions.Test methods and scenarios were developed by independent engineers. All changes — to specifications, tolerances, drawings, etc. — were scrupulously recorded.

The basic idea was that whatever was built, it not only did exactly what it was supposed to do, it could — if necessary — be rebuilt from scratch at any future time. Generally though all the systems were unique: every job was an entirely new set of challenges.

But, in addition to delivering assured quality levels Walton was also dedicated to delivering high quality products and services. It is a common mistake to think that Quality Assurance standards such as ISO 9000, 9001 etc. are guarantees of high quality — they are not: they are guarantees of defined quality. If a company's products are designed to last one year and they do that, they meet their quality requirements; designing a product to last two, three, four years is to set a different quality level. Certified quality assurance is no guarantee of reliability or performance or suitability... one must look to the specifications for that.

For Walton, high quality — and the corporate and engineering attitudes required to deliver it — was essential: when your equipment really is "mission critical" and the mission is itself vital (data storage and display systems for nuclear power station reactor control rooms mistakes, radar data recording for air traffic control systems, etc.) are an unaffordable luxury.

The Business of Business — Know Your Business

Being a small company there was no such thing as being an ivory-tower specialist within Walton: the engineering core of the company drafted specifications, costed and wrote bids, negotiated contracts, designed hardware and wrote software — and engineers wrote the manuals, developed training courses... and then delivered the courses.

Being involved in every aspect of operations ensured one was aware of the broad impact of everything one did, because if it was not obvious a priori someone would very quickly let you know how obvious it should have been a posteriori; there was always too much to and therefore a constant hunger for efficiency.

And since the borderline between efficiency and laziness is rather hazy, rather a lot of effort was spent on ensuring designs were modular, reusable, extensible - and that a design didn't have to be expensively reworked under a fixed price contract.

Walton developed and maintained an enviable reputation for solving impossible problems with systems that were delivered on time, to specification, worked first time and then remained completely reliable (often too reliable - it's hard to justify maintenance contracts when systems just work, and people forget the equipment in the corner that uncomplainingly does what it's supposed to)

Went There, Did That

In the course of my twelve years, having started as an unworldly new graduate, I progressed from test Engineer, to Design Engineer, to Systems Architect, to Sales & Marketing Director and finally (the beginning of the end) Business Development Director of what was then much larger company; but in addition to the specific experiences of each role, there was always continued involvement in the essential areas of business management, quality, etc. etc. etc.

As the business grew, business took me further and further afield: Europe, the Middle East,the Far East, Australia & New Zealand & America. (I did once circumnavigate the globe in 8 days).

The World Beyond Walton — The horror... the horror.

In my naiveté I thought that every other successful organisation must work as efficiently, productively, diligently and effectively as Walton. I was in for a rude shock. I was unused to mere lip-service to "teamwork" and both shocked and baffled by the politicking, infighting and incompetence I encountered.

Being somewhat wiser now it is obvious in hindsight that competitive businesses necessarily thrive on competitive people — the question (which I shall tackle elsewhere) is how to maximise the competitiveness, efficiency, profitability etc. of the organisation despite the inefficiencies introduced by internal competition, and in such a way that those who are good at competing without necessarily being particularly good at their jobs do not end up managing those who are good at their jobs but less ruthless/sociopathic.

Internal competition can be turned to advantage, but in order to do that one must attend to some ideas of Complexity Theory — about which more another time.

I also learned a lot from the clients: Walton's client base was blue chip - governments, multinationals and major institutions.

Here's a list of some of the organisations that Walton worked with. Many references are now historical curiosities; names and organisational structures change, companies merge & fold — many MoD establishments such as ASWE, AUWE, etc. have since been subsumed into other entities; utilities have been privatised. But here's the list, for old-times' sake.

Blue Chip companies — IBM, Raytheon, Thomson-CSF (now Thales), Alenia
Central Electricity Generating Board — mostly systems for the computers and control rooms of nuclear power stations (Heysham, Hartlepool, Dungeness, Dounreay)
UK Ministry of Defence — Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment, Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, HMS Mercury, Royal Navy, Royal Air Force, British Army [radar recording and other data acquisition systems]
Other defence Organisations — The navies of the USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore
Other — The Transport & Road Research Laboratory, UK Civil Aviation Authority