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working hard and was a living example. He showed me how important it was to really care about other people and learn their lives and try to help them. He helped me to figure out how to measure success on an incremental, consistent basis to quantify abstract goals into dollars by determining the failure rate of a product and evaluating that in terms of the cost, including opportunity and indirect as well as direct cost.”
“He taught me that enthusiasm is essential, and to throw out lots of ideas while realizing that many will be unusable.”
“I learned that when things get bogged down because of indecision…force a decision, even if it creates a crisis, by selecting one of the alternatives as a straw man, but making it clear to others that the matter is open to objections.”
“I also learned that no job is too small, and sweeping a floor when it’s needed shows others that a willingness to do menial work is not above anyone.”
“I learned to do nothing illegal and not to cheat anyone, nor to squander resources.”
“I learned the discipline to make crucial decisions using scientific methods and melding that into a long-term vision to attain goals.”
“I learned to use Moore’s law, the learning curve and price elasticity to set competitive prices and to get the contract at any cost and figure a way to add more bells and whistles to the product and make it profitable.”
“I learned the value of worrying about your customer’s career and of making your customer’s problems your problems as soon as possible, and to deliver lousy news immediately and talk to your customers early in the morning before they get tired or distracted.”
“Converting cash to other resources is very important. People, processes, market position, products and property should be the standard order of resource importance. People’s value on a project changes as the project evolves. Move people off a project where they are no longer suited to the task by getting them excited about a new opportunity.”
“I learned a lot from George.”
Graves’s first project at Teledyne was to write a proposal for an air-to-air radar test station for Rockwell International. Teledyne won the job, and Graves designed, built and delivered the product. It comprised using an analog computer that generated a differential equation-based function. Graves used operational amplifiers, which required 200-volt power supplies that shocked him a few times during the checkout phase of the prototype; despite this, it worked well.
Graves’s Interaction with Dr. Henry Singleton, Teledyne
“When I first went to work at Teledyne, we were all in the old Amelco building, and all the engineers were in one large room. Singleton came by my desk and asked what I was doing. I was trying to design a sin/cosine computer using two vacuum-tube amplifiers with capacitor feedback so that the output of each amplifier was the integral of the input. I was then looping the output of each amplifier back to the input of the other. This created a cyclical sin-wave function. Henry was fascinated by the idea but pointed out that temperature required stringent and tight control because of the capacitor’s high sensitivity to temperature and the possibility of the function drifting off.
“About two months later, Henry called me into his office for a meeting with a young semiconductor engineer who worked for us. We then proceeded to invent the computer that went on most of the helicopters used in Vietnam while sitting there in his office. He would ask us if we understood different things. I would jump in and answer everything he asked. He eventually said, ‘Shut up, Gordon, I know you know the answer. I want to see if he knows the answer.’ The design we came up with used microcircuit flip flops and switches to perform the tasks I had been trying to accomplish with vacuum-tube amplifiers. Taking the value in a register of flip flops (V) and adding that value to another register (B) at some fixed-rate (dt) gave a solution B = the integral of Vdt.
“A few years later, shortly after field-effect transistors came out, Henry came into my office and asked what I was doing. I told him I was trying to figure out how they worked. He said he was interested in that, and sat down. We figured out that it was akin to a vacuum-tube diode except that the blocking accumulation of electrons was in the metal at the junction of the metal with the silicon rather than in the vacuum of a tube. Henry later ended up making most of Teledyne’s semiconductor computer elements out of field-effect transistors.”
It was during this time that Graves learned how to complete a project on time. A good project manager, Graves reasoned, should first identify all the major tasks required to achieve a result and make sure someone accepts the responsibility of accomplishing those assigned tasks, completing them on time and within budget, and then make sure everyone is meeting their goals. The most important job of a project manager is to help people understand that barriers should not become excuses. Graves felt that project management was the best possible work experience for learning how to run a company. The good project manager, Graves believes, learns about contracts, purchasing, budgeting, negotiating, design, production, customer relations and all the other critical disciplines involved in running a corporate operation.
When the Rockwell project ended, Graves became responsible for an airborne navigation computer project called ASN-13A, designed for specialized aircraft used for antisubmarine warfare. Three hundred of the units went to the Naval Avionics Facility (NAFI) in Indianapolis and performed well.
Graves then headed up a project to design and build a shipboard missile-tracking signal converter for the US Navy Bureau of Ships. The project never worked as it should, as the power semiconductors that drove the gear train kept blowing up. Graves, Art Cencel, and Art’s boss, Joe Smead, set up test systems around the factory to find a fix. Graves said when he thought he had found one, and wanted to talk to Art or Joe about it, he would look across the room for wherever smoke was swirling to locate them. The team finally got the system through acceptance testing, but it never worked correctly. Nevertheless, Teledyne eventually made money by selling spare power semiconductors. Graves said he never felt good about the project, but that was the way things worked out sometimes in the military-industrial complex.
That was shortly after Shapiro returned to Litton, and Graves started working for Art Cencel, who Graves said was the most brilliant boss he ever had. Working closely together, Cencel and Graves won a research and development contract from Max Lipscomb to build the smallest gimbaled floating gyroscope inertial system that had ever existed. Gordon took the first test model to Holloman Air Force Base to test it, and it was very successful.
Gordon then started writing proposals with Art, who had a wonderful mind and blessed with the ability to develop simple mental models of complicated physics or engineering processes in a way that was both powerful and effective.
Art had graduated first in his class at Purdue and had been a radar technician in the Navy before going to college to be a radar engineer. Art claimed his mother had enrolled him in Purdue without his knowledge. He had just gotten out of the Navy and had moved back to Colorado, where his parents lived. He was carousing all night and sleeping all day. One day, his mother asked him to take a ride with her. She drove him down to the train depot, told him to get out, opened the trunk, removed his packed luggage, handed him tickets to Indiana, kissed him on the cheek, and told him she had enrolled him at Purdue.
When Art got out of college, he accepted a job with Autonetics, which was part of what is now Rockwell. He was supposed to go to work in the radar division. Art claims that when he got to Downey, all the hundreds of new college graduates Autonetics had hired were reporting for work, and there was a great deal of confusion. Art got in the wrong line and ended up working in the gyroscope lab. That was really a joke because Autonetics had over-hired for the radar division.
The Integrated Helicopter Avionics System (IHAS) came along in 1969. Tech Wilson, the best technical salesman Graves had worked with, said that the Navy was going to design a new avionics system for the CH-53 helicopter, the IHAS, and Teledyne should go after the development contract—and it did. At the time, annual sales for all of Teledyne was $7 million a year, and they were competing against Hughes, Burroughs, CDC, Texas Instruments, Litton, Northrup, IBM, Autonetics, and a few others.