Meet Jack Knuth
Jack Knuth, engineer, has been a senior corporate executive: president of the Bendix Corporations’ Strategic Business Unit, and head of all of Bendix’s Kansas City operations with some 8,000 skilled engineers and technicians.
Speaking with him is a treat. That’s because almost anything you might ask him
brings a pause and then a response that you are convinced has been examined,
analyzed, mulled over and slowly rethought. He takes questions like some men
might taste fine wine.
Recently he was asked to talk about his tenure
as the head of Bendix’s operations that produced not only remarkable production
statistics but also a remarkable reputation of a senior manager who was
genuinely admired by those who worked for him.
It was, he said, a matter of never being
satisfied with what you’ve done.
“Satisfaction is the harbinger of doom,” he
said with all the conviction of knowing that two squared is four.
So, the interviewer asks, how does that relate
to being a good Christian? Ah. Analyze THAT one.
Jack pauses, smiles. Nods. And replies:
“I think I was better at managing people than
being a Christian. I’ll admit that I worked harder at (the former). I think I’m
a good Christian and I’ve supported the church. But I don’t think I’m a good
church worker.”
He explained that he, at times, lacks the
amount of patience he should have with others who might let the minor details
and personality conflicts get in the way doing what a church should be doing.
When it is suggested that few would admit to feeling differently and that his
impatience is hardly a sin, he frowns. An imperfection means something is not
perfect. And Jack Knuth likes perfection. Or at least as close to it as
possible.
If you aren’t improving, you’re wasting away.
Jack admits that he was a “wild and
irresponsible kid” when he graduated from Kansas City’s Southwest High School in
1947 and left for the University of Missouri.
“I went wild and as a result, my grades
suggested that I shouldn’t have been there. I flunked out,” he says. “In those
days, if boys my age weren’t in college they were in the Army. I had a
nondescript Army career but I was a good soldier. I did what I was told and I
grew up.”
When he and Army parted in 1953 he returned to
his parents’ house at 77th and Troost. He secured a lab technician’s job at
Bendix, which was at 95th and Troost. Bendix engineered and manufactured
instruments and components for the nation’s nuclear weapons.
“I recognized that the work the engineers were
doing in my (mechanical testing) lab was far more interesting than what I was
doing,” he recalls. “So I went back to Missouri and a got an engineering degree
(1956).
He also got a girl at Columbia. Her name was
Cynthia. “I was crazy about her and I know she was the girl I wanted to spend my
life with.” They were married in 1955. Cynthia, long a parish volunteer at St.
Peter’s, passed away in August, 2005.
The years passed quickly. He and Cynthia had
three children (Michael, Stephen and Lisa) and in 1961 they joined an Episcopal
church with a new building on Red Bridge Road.
At Bendix Jack rose in the management ranks.
When he became vice president for production operations he had to travel to the
company’s many and varied plants throughout the country.
It might not have been Paul on the road to Damascus, but the experience was an
epiphany, nevertheless.
“I learned a LOT about production management,”
Jack says. “I saw how a lot of people did things. I saw there were many
different ways to do things and how some things worked better for different
situations. When I came back and became president (of the Strategic Business
Unit) in 1985 I saw a company that did a lot of things better than anyone else.
But there were things we could do better and we had to learn from others.
“We thought we were great but we weren’t. We
were complacent and we had to grow and improve. If we didn’t we wouldn’t stay in
business.”
Bendix was delivering on 80 percent of its
government contract requirements which was accepted (by both sides) as,
literally, “good enough for government business.” Jack said that was
unacceptable. When someone boasted at a meeting that his group could deliver 100
percent, Jack replied, somewhat ill-advisedly, that if that group could, he’d
“kiss a duck.”
“I damn well did,” he laughs now. “But,
thankfully, I didn’t say where on the duck.”
They did with “management by walking around.”
“I met with all 8,000 of them,” Jack says. “In
groups of five to eight. We’d listened to them. We never directed them to do
something a certain way. Too often management comes to a problem and tries to
solve it for the people who are working on it. That’s wrong. Management’s job is
not to solve technical problems but to supply the tools, the assets, for the
people who can solve them.”
Bendix hit the 100 percent government delivery target on Jack’s watch.
Today he looks at the corporate suites across
the country and isn’t pleased. He has, in the past, acted as a mentor for “The
Executive Committee,” a for-profit company advising CEOs.
“(Corporate executives) still have that
1980-ish management attitude of ‘do as I tell you’. I found them quite arrogant.
It’s like ‘I got here by doing it this way and by God I’ll continue it this
way.’ They don’t understand that status quo is the recipe for failure. Without
continual improvement and learning, no business can survive.”
Now 80, Jack Knuth is still learning and
improving. His current passion is the Spanish language. He has taken three
courses at Johnson County Community College (“It’s quite a sight, me with all
those kids”). But Jack is still not a happy lad. He thinks his conversational
Spanish is lousy.
It’s not 100 percent.
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