This story was originally published in the Johns Hopkins Engineering Magazine.
Engineering education is often about the nuts and bolts of how to make things work. But what happens when they don’t? In Technical Leadership in Times of Crisis, James Bellingham, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of exploration robotics and executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy, aims to expose Hopkins engineering students to possible crisis management scenarios by exploring historical catastrophes. Having spent most of his career outside academia, Bellingham has seen firsthand how companies handle small and large setbacks, and he brings this expertise to the unique first-year seminar.
Key takeaways
Putting ‘what-if’ into practice: Students are presented with a notable real-life occurrence (such as the 1982 Tylenol cyanide poisoning case) and split into three groups— financial, public relations, and executive—to develop crisis management plans, considering ethical practices as well. After the teams make their cases and the executive group decides on a plan of action, Bellingham reveals what actually transpired.
James Bellingham
Being a conscientious employee: In addition to discussing the financial or technical ramifications of their decisions, students also consider how those decisions affect the intangible element of public goodwill.
“For massive companies, their biggest asset is brand trust,” Bellingham says. “Should you be driven by the quarterly report, or should you be thinking in the longer term?”
Words from the wise: The students also hear from people with real-world experience: a doctor who managed an Ebola outbreak, a journalist who had to vet information and determine whether it was true or false, and the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Assigned readings include Principles by hedge fund manager Ray Dialo and a guide to avoiding confirmation bias written by an intelligence analyst.
Quotes from the class
“Later in their careers, engineers often become engineering managers, so I wanted to hear from a leadership perspective”
— Eitan Rosenblatt, mechanical engineering
“I chose it because it looked like it had a lot of interesting historical components. Covering Apollo 13 and Chernobyl was very intriguing”
— Miles Qvale, materials science and engineering
“What kind of company do you want to work for? What values would you be attracted to?”
— Instructor James Bellingham