Forgive me for bragging. Last week we won the esteemed R&D 100 Award for the second time. We got it for the Iceman, a nifty device designed for freon alternatives. It analyzes moisture, which can cause fire extinguishers and air conditioners, among other things, to malfunction. It's the latest in a string of significant firsts we've introduced into our niche market. In fact, since I joined MEECO in 1983, we've garnered six U.S. patents and 21 foreign ones.
Pretty good for a company run by a woman whose technical education ended with high school chemistry. All the same, I'm sure my lack of a technical background hampers MEECO. A year or so after I suddenly became responsible for my ailing father's industrial equipment company, it started to sink in. I don't remember which humiliating episode prompted it, but I recall sitting in tears by my father's bedside. "I can't keep doing it, daddy. I don't know anything!"
By now my father's once hefty self had shriveled to the bone. In a soft whisper only I could make out, he said: "Honey, moisture consists of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule." He went on to explain the electrolytic process, our core technology, in the most basic terms.
LIFELONG AVERSION. It didn't help. When I was a child, my father's perfectionism, impatience, and highly critical manner turned me off technology. That, combined with the "new" math and a distaste for frog dissection, was enough to cause a total eclipse of the mind. My friends, who already found it strange that I was running a factory, were aghast to learn our products were scientific. "You've got all that space," said my best friend after visiting our 16,000-square-foot plant. "Can't you make jewelry or furniture?"
But such diversification was never an option. With no insurance and no savings, my father required an income from the business that only our existing market could provide. Unfortunately, his illness and equally troubled emotional state had caused MEECO to fall behind technically. It lost customers as a result. To keep the business going, we had to find a way to satisfy them -- and fast.
From the beginning, I relied on skills culled from years working as a journalist and political activist, with an added dose of...all right, psychology. As the Black Panthers used to say in a rather different context: "Use what you got to get what you need." Reporters of my generation are accustomed to being thought dumb, asking questions, assimilating information, and communicating their findings. So I began interviewing our customers and learned that they had begged my father to replace our analog readouts with digital ones. "The Doctor wasn't having any part of it," recalls Terry Lasher, a veteran production worker.
In those days, we had no technicians, engineers, or scientists at MEECO, only office and production people. One of the electrical assemblers boasted that he could do the conversion. I said sure. Fast-forward to my first product recall. I personally contacted every purchaser of our new NEP Bravo to apologize, offering to either repair the unit or make a refund. "That's all right, hon, just fix it," was a typical reaction of the oil-patch field-service engineers who used the equipment. At least they knew we were trying.
WHAT SCIENTISTS DO. After we got all our Bravos working, demand for the units continued to grow. But it took two more years for us to hire our first scientist and, even then, our production manager wondered: "What's he going to do 40 hours a week?" Invent, of course. As my father's daughter, I knew something about the ego of male scientists, who, in my observation, can be as childish as they are technically astute. The lucky ones have doting mothers and wives to both nurture their creativity and help them navigate the real world.
Desperately committed to our scientists' success, I became a regular mother of invention. At MEECO, we offered a highly supportive environment where scientists were sheltered from most practicalities and rarely second-guessed. While some novel ideas emerged from this era, I often felt like I was running a day-care center. Worse, I could be easily buffaloed, which led to free rides and exorbitant salaries for more than one PhD (Sometimes, I really long to be in a field where I can readily evaluate performance.)
Fortunately, for the past few years, I've had a strong engineering-dominated team capable of identifying laggards on their own. Sure, we still have scientists, but innovation crops up more and more throughout the organization. This I attribute to our tradition of teamwork, combined with a companywide propensity to share information. Indeed, our most recent patent was issued to one of our production technicians.
CORE TEAM. And the inventors behind the award-winning Iceman? Calvin Krusen, our director of engineering; Bob Augustine, a highly innovative electrical engineer; and Scotty Edwards, our mechanical engineer, a former machinist who retrained after we outsourced our machine shop. This same hardy crew is my secret weapon in our battle to bring our new laser-based technology to market. "We know the real-world problems, not just the technical ones," as Calvin puts it.
This week we achieved our initial objective, which was to exhibit our first unit, the MTO-1000, to much acclaim at Semicon West, the giant semiconductor industry trade show in San Francisco. If we can now get it to market first, it will be a triumph over our government-subsidized competitor who is working with 10 times MEECO's budget and a battery of PhDs.
Still, I can't help thinking how much better we might do if I weren't so technophobic. That's why for over a year I've seen a hypnotherapist to help me overcome my science block. Look out, world -- I'm starting to get those equations.
Before joining MEECO in 1983, Lisa Bergson worked as a business journalist at Business Week and freelanced for many business publications. She
received a Masters in Journalism from New York University and received Columbia University's Walter Bagehot Fellowship for economics and business
journalism. You can visit her company's web site at www.meeco.com, or contact her at lbergson@meeco.com.
Forgive me for bragging. Last week we won the esteemed R&D 100 Award for the second time. We got it for the Iceman, a nifty device designed for freon alternatives. It analyzes moisture, which can cause fire extinguishers and air conditioners, among other things, to malfunction. It's the latest in a string of significant firsts we've introduced into our niche market. In fact, since I joined MEECO in 1983, we've garnered six U.S. patents and 21 foreign ones.
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.