What Corporate America Knows That NASA Doesn't

[Buster's Uncle]

What Corporate America Knows That NASA Doesn't
BusinessWeek
By Ira Sager  January 19, 2015



Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg



Houston, we’ve got a workforce problem.

NASA may be a vanguard of aerospace engineering, but when it comes to management, it lags far behind your typical corporate bureaucracy. Innovation suffers at the U.S. space agency because employees stay in their jobs too long and don’t work well with  colleagues or industry peers, according to an article published (PDF) in Space Policy. What many successful companies have learned to master—the art of collaboration and how to keep their workforce stocked with the fresh ideas that come with eager new recruits—has eluded the space agency.

The article's authors, Loizos Heracleous, a professor of strategy and organization at Coventry (U.K.)-based Warwick Business School, and Steven Gonzalez, a deputy in the Strategic Opportunities & Partnership Development Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center, explain that NASA's workforce has stagnated because younger talent has turned to more exciting opportunities. NASA’s near-monopoly on space travel, the authors point out, has been eroded by competition from such private and government-sponsored organizations as Elon Musk's SpaceX and China's National Space Administration. Employee turnover is down to 1.7 percent a year (minus retirees) from 10 percent to 15 percent during its heyday in the 1960s. Consequently, the workforce has grown older: Some 58 percent of employees are age 45 to 59, up from 38 percent in 1993.

Human resources departments tend to love low employee turnover, taking it as a sign that workers are happy and find their jobs rewarding. Besides, attracting and training new recruits is expensive and time-consuming. But a workforce that's too stable can be a sign that no one wants your employees because they're, well, not that good.

The researchers propose some ways to encourage career mobility and partnerships at the agency—methods that private sector companies use to stay innovative and familiar with cutting-edge technologies. NASA, they suggest, should create job-exchange programs with other high-tech organizations while encouraging scientists to collaborate with companies that have better ideas. 

Some companies and government agencies have made smart efforts to keep workers from languishing in dead-end jobs. At Sandia National Laboratories, employees can leave to start companies or help other organizations, knowing they have a job in case they want to come back. “A NASA scheme like this would allow brilliant scientists to not only accomplish great things in NASA but can facilitate technology transfer and exchange with industry and universities,” the authors write.

An additional organizational advance that appears to have passed NASA by is the emergence of the networked organization, such as Google or Apple, that use a combination of technology and culture to make it easier for units across the company to collaborate, as well as team up with outside organizations. NASA has started moving in this direction by experimenting with open innovation and collaboration with the private sector, the authors say, but its space centers are still too silo-structured. Moreover, any partnerships must be weighed against national security concerns.

Maybe the much-mocked cubicle culture can offer some lessons to rejuvenate an organization that once captured our imagination and inspired generations of scientists and dreamers.


http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2015-01-19/what-cubicle-farms-do-better-than-nasa?campaign_id=yhoo