Dr. Michael Pennotti, PhD

Education

Ph.D. – Polytechnic Institute of New York (Electrical Engineering)
M.S. – Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (Electrical Engineering)
B.E.E. – Manhattan College (Electrical Engineering)

Research

Organizational Systems
Intersection of Software and Systems Engineering
Quality Management and Improvement
Applications of Complexity Theory to Systems Engineering and Architecting

General Information

Dr. Pennotti joined Stevens following thirty-one years of systems engineering leadership at Bell Laboratories, AT&T, Lucent Technologies, and Avaya. At Bell Labs, he designed, analyzed, and improved the operational performance of three generations of anti-submarine warfare systems for the United States Navy. From 1984 to 1990 he was Director of Advanced ASW Concepts. Over the next ten years, he applied the same principles and practices to solve business problems, while serving on the senior leadership teams of three different businesses.
As Quality Director for AT&T Business Communications Systems, he led the unit to a Baldrige site visit.
As Human Resources Vice President for Lucent’s Enterprise Networks, he helped develop and execute people strategies to support the doubling of that business in three years.
As VP Quality for Avaya, he established the initial business processes for an $8B Lucent spin-off.
In addition to his position at Stevens, Mike regularly consults with industry, applying system engineering principles to businesses improvement. He is a past member of the faculty of the Center for Management Development at Rutgers University, where he delivered and taught a workshop entitled “Strategeic Dimensions of Supervision and Team Leadership.”.

Honors & Awards

Henry Morton Distinguished Teaching Professor (2006)

Professional Societies

Dr. Pennotti is a Fellow of the International Council on Systems Engineering, a senior member of both the IEEE and the American Society for Quality, and a former trustee of Caldwell College.
He is also a graduate of the AEA/Stanford Executive Institute for Technology Executives.

ABSTRACT

Answering the call for Technical Leaders

Systems engineers are called to lead! Solving the problems of today’s increasingly complex world demands the skills we have and of which we are most proud. Our experience has taught us the importance of understanding not only a problem, but also its context; not only individual elements, but also the relationships between them; not only immediate outcomes, but also long term impacts. But what we know will not be enough. We must also develop new skills and be willing to set aside many of the approaches and much of the language that have served us well in addressing the complicated problems of the past. We need to continue to grow if we are to provide the leadership the world so desperately needs from us.

Systems engineering is usually described as a process. And a process, according to Merriam Webster, is “a series of actions or operations leading to a desirable end.” Indeed, over the years we systems engineers have defined many processes: processes for eliciting and managing requirements; processes for designing and evaluating architectures; processes for defining and controlling interfaces, processes for verifying and validating what we develop. But leadership is not a process in that sense. Leadership is the act of influencing another and this cannot be accomplished through a specified series of steps. Leadership is about people – it is about the leaders themselves and about those they aspire to lead.

As systems engineers, our leadership will emerge not from the processes we have developed but from the thought process through which we developed them. As identified by the INCOSE Institute for Technical Leadership, the critical attributes of technical leadership are holding a vision, thinking strategically, fostering collaboration, communicating effectively and demonstrating emotional intelligence. These attributes are all grounded in systems thinking. Indeed, they are individual elements of a leadership system. Given our skills and experience, they are attributes that we can certainly develop. While doing so may require us to stretch in ways we have not stretched before, the payoff will certainly be worth the effort!

Dr. Michael Pennotti, PhD