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Home » Useful White Papers » Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: What I Learned from Max Faget and Joe Allen |
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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: What I Learned from Max Faget and Joe Allen
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October 19, 2004
-- Galadriel, the Fellowship of the Ring
The story of my connection to Max began in the spring of 1988,
when I left Boston, a rather brash young man fresh out of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a doctorate in
aeronautical and astronautical engineering and little experience
working out in the real world. My first job out of college was
something almost unimaginably exceptional... a chance to work
with Max and Dr. Joe Allen at a company called Space Industries
in Houston, Texas. Joe Allen was a physicist who was one of the
original scientist-astronauts selected during the Apollo era.
Joe didn't fly on Apollo, but he later flew into space twice on
the Space Shuttle. The first time was on the STS-5 Shuttle
flight, which was the first fully operational Shuttle mission,
and the second time was on the STS-51A Shuttle flight, in which
Joe successfully completed the first space salvage attempt in
history, retrieving for return to Earth the Palapa B-2 and
Westar VI communications satellites.
I was the thirty-third person to join Space Industries, recruited
through the connections of a fellow named George Whittinghill, a
former M.I.T. Space Systems Lab colleague who had headed to
Houston a couple of years ahead of me, with a shared dream of
finding a ride into space. When George started working at Space
Industries, he immediately began encouraging me to come join him
when I completed my degree, and it really didn't take much
convincing--despite the fact that my offer from Space Industries
was financially a good bit less rewarding that what I was offered
elsewhere, the opportunity to work with Max and Joe building an
innovative space platform called the Industrial Space Facility
was something I couldn't possibly pass up.
My training at M.I.T. had taught me well all the nuts and bolts I
needed to do my job... I knew how to plan orbital trajectories
and create mission plans... I knew much about how to engineer a
spacecraft and analyze its components... but, with the exception
of one excellent course provided by M.I.T. in engineering
management, it didn't teach me anything about how to grow and
market a successful company, or of the numerous difficulties
involved in building a motivated staff and a healthy and
profitable business organization. And so, from the moment I
joined Space Industries, I became a sponge... sticking my nose
into every aspect of the business that I could, learning
everything I could absorb, while also never hesitating to
challenge decisions which I thought were dubious, even if my
experience on which to base such assessments was rather limited.
Often my interests took me well outside of the scope of
activities for which I was asked to perform. Looking back on
those days now I know I must have been at times an incredible
pain in the arse... but Max and Joe were not just tolerant of
me, they often encouraged me.
One learns from both successes and failures, and my time working
with Max, Joe and my other colleagues at Space Industries taught
me a number of very important lessons. I'll try to share with
you ten of the most important lessons that I learned in this
edition of the Apogee:
I also learned that you need to staff your organization with an
appropriate balance of individuals who are dreamers, builders,
and realists. These are very different personality types, and
you can easily test employees and job candidates to see which
category they fall into. Realists are very practical, and have
a talent for taking a vision and exploiting it. Dreamers are
great at creating vision--they like to stray from the beaten
path, and often see things that others can't. Builders (which
is the category that testing indicates that I evidently fall
into) see in a 360-degree fashion what others miss in the gap
between the realist's practical point of view and the dreamer's
vision--they are the peacemakers and symphony conductors, and
often the creative ringleaders. Putting together teams of people
from each of the three categories can be a very effective
strategy. But you have to maintain balance overall, and in an
engineering company an optimal mix is most likely going to have
the majority of the staff being realists, augmented with a
smaller number of builders and just a few dreamers.
In 1993, the senior management of Space Industries (which had
about 110 employees at the time) went out and did something
quite radical... they acquired a 2700 person engineering
services company that was not in the space industry. Over time,
and through additional mergers and acquisitions, the company
shifted its focus to information systems security technology,
and eventually went public with a successful IPO under the name
Veridian. Veridian was subsequently acquired by General Dynamics
in 2003 for one-and-a-half billion dollars. Max Faget stepped
out of his role in running the company when these changes
occurred, while Joe Allen and David Langstaff, who had been
Space Industries' Chief Operating Officer during my tenure at
the company, continued to run Veridian right up until its
acquisition by General Dynamics. Joe was a physicist and David
was an MBA and financier--to the best of my recollection,
neither of them had any appreciable background or love for
information systems technology... so it took real guts for
these individuals to shift their mindset as the economic climate
changed with time. They used the assets at their disposal to
mold a success story in areas which where likely well outside of
their comfort zone. In doing that, they were able to deliver a
profitable exit to many of those that had invested in their
success along the way.
In late 1993, with a major acquisition just completed and with
senior management of the organization relocating to a new
corporate headquarters in Washington D.C., I came to determine
that my opportunities to keep learning and growing professionally
within the Houston office had become limited. I realized it was
time for radical change of my own, and I spread my wings and used
what I had learned to found Tenagra, the first company of my own
creation. Space Industries was again extraordinarily supportive
of my entrepreneurial efforts, and was a major client of Tenagra
during its first year in business. Again years later, when the
economic climate under which Tenagra's business model had been
based had changed, I looked to my lessons learned from Space
Industries to develop a plan that would take my business
activities to a new level, and thus ADASTRO was founded in early
2003.
Of course, I wasn't ignorant of what was ahead of me... I had
learned well from my mentors, and knew, at an intellectual level,
the difficulties that were in store for anyone attempting to start
their own venture, especially without any substantial financing.
Yet at the same time, I knew that David was absolutely correct--
until you have lived through building a business with it being your
own responsibility, you really don't know what it is like to go
through the struggle of making payroll every two weeks, with
employees and their families lives depending upon their paycheck
to get by. You don't fully appreciate what it is like to have to
lay off a good and loyal employee because there is no way to use
them to bring in the revenue to pay their salary--knowing that if
you don't let them go, the financial drain could cost other
employees their jobs too. Until you have lived it yourself, you
don't know what it is like to have an employee that has been
treated with extraordinary kindness and has been given exceptional
opportunities for growth turn around and engage in wrongful
conduct that harms the organization and their coworkers and
enriches themselves inappropriately. David had lived through all
of those heartaches and knew what I was in store for... and he did
his best to warn me. But in the end, I had to continue to grow as
an individual and was confident in the belief that the course I
was taking was necessary in order to pursue my own path of
learning.
Yet in spite of their diminutive statures, both Max Faget and Joe
Allen were real giants in my life. From them, I learned so many
of life's lessons, including what it is like to really be a rocket
scientist. Isaac Newton once wrote that "If I have seen further it
is by standing on the shoulders of giants." I will always treasure
the fact that, for five years of my life, I truly had a chance to
stand on the shoulders of giants.
P.S. The name "Kurtzman" has German roots and translated into English
literally means "short man." I stand about 5' 8" tall, and am
about the same height as my father, Al Kurtzman, another giant
whose shoulders I was privileged to stand upon so many times
during my years growing up as a child in Los Angeles.
For more about the fascinating life of Max Faget, please see:
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