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Technology, Policy and Education: Leaders in Technology and Policy

Moderator: Dr. Frank R. Field III '78, SM '81, PhD '85
Nicholas Mabey SM '93 Jessica Stern SM '88 Bryan Moser '87, SM '89: June 8, 2006; Running Time: 1:32:33

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

This panel offers three perspectives on life after TPP, with a consensus among the speakers that this MIT program has had a powerful impact on their careers.

Nicholas Mabey boasts a unique resume, in spite of claims that it’s “a lesson in the Zen of career planning, the career of no career.” He’s built power stations, campaigned on environmental issues, and worked in the British prime minister’s “strategy unit.” Through all these turns, he’s been animated by the “spirit of curiosity” acquired at TPP. His new brief is sustainable development, informed by years of hammering out policy within government bureaucracies, often in the face of fractious interest groups. TPP’s approach to complexity has served him well, he says. Some guidelines: “Policy making is design…. Invest in analyzing systems, even though it’s incredibly hard work. Manage risk and uncertainty, even though it’s quite frightening; do politics with the policy.”

Jessica Stern, one of the world’s top experts on terrorism, credits her TPP time with making her “feel deeply uncomfortable” -- a “pretty critical lesson.” She learned “to ask questions that make you squirm,” and subsequently diverged from the normal route for academics, delving not just into intelligence, but seeking out the most dangerous terrorists, and getting to know them. Her work has helped create more insightful profiles of terrorists, and suggest alternative approaches to dealing with them. Poverty and lack of democratic structures do not create terrorists, she says, nor does lack of education. There are “more promising risk factors,” such as high male to female violence, inadequate education for women, substandard health care, and “youth bulges.” There’s also a correlation between an engineering education and support for terrorism. Ultimately, terrorism arises around “the spread of a powerfully bad idea in a vulnerable population who feel dissed, or feel vicarious humiliation with a group they strongly identify with.”

Bryan Moser entered the corporate world from TPP, and found in factory after factory, “ways of working and thinking that were so entrenched, and core assumptions unchanged in a century.” As these organizations expanded globally, becoming more complex in production and communication, management thinking remained centralized and mechanical. So Moser decided to help firms face the chaos and uncertainty inevitable with growth. He develops design strategies, for instance, to assist corporations in executing international, multiyear initiatives. When you “bring complexity as a natural phenomenon into the business world, they have real problems with it.”

Lecture Details

Location: E51-345

About the Speakers

Moderator: Dr. Frank R. Field III '78, SM '81, PhD '85

Associate Director, Technology and Policy Program
Senior Research Engineer, MIT Center for Technology, Policy & Industrial Development

Frank Field is a researcher in the area of materials systems analysis, a field in which economic and operations research methods are applied to problems in materials and materials processing. He received his S.B. and S.M. in Nuclear Engineering, and an S.M. in Technology & Policy Management from MIT. He earned a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary studies also from MIT, in 1985.

Recently, Field was honored with the first annual Joseph Nemec ESD Educational Excellence Award.

Nicholas Mabey SM '93

Chief Executive, E3G

Until December 2005, Nicholas Mabey was a senior advisor in the British Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, leading work on a variety of policy areas, including energy, fisheries, unstable states and organised crime. Mabey was previously Head of Sustainable Development in the British Foreign and Commonewealth Office’s Environment Policy department.

Before he joined government, Mabey was Head of Economics and Development at World Wildlife Fund-UK. He came to WWF from academic research at London Business School on the economics of climate change, published in the book, Argument in the Greenhouse. This followed research at MIT into energy system planning and a period in the energy industry working for PowerGen and GEC Alsthom. Mabey trained as a mechanical engineer at Bristol University, specialising in energy systems, and holds a masters degree in Technology and Policy from MIT.

Jessica Stern SM '88

Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Fellow, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

From 1994 to 1995, Jessica Stern served as Director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council, where she was responsible for national security policy toward Russia and the former Soviet states and for policies to reduce the threat of nuclear smuggling and terrorism. Stern earlier worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

From 1998 to 1999, Stern was the superterrorism Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and from 1995 to 1996, she was a national Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Stern is a member of the Trilateral Commission. She is the author of Terror in the Name of God (HarperCollins, 2003), The Ultimate Terrorists (Harvard University Press, 1999), and numerous articles on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. She received a bachelor's degree from Barnard College in chemistry, a master's of science degree from MIT, and a doctorate in public policy from Harvard.

Bryan Moser '87, SM '89

CEO, Global Project Design

Bryan Moser founded Global Project Design (GPD) in 1999 to bring collaborative design methods to businesses struggling with complex initiatives and programs.

In 1995, Moser was invited as a visiting researcher in the Precision Machinery Engineering Department at the University of Tokyo, where he is currently a doctoral candidate. With colleagues at MIT, the University of Connecticut and the University of Tokyo, he launched a research group focused on theory, method, case validation and tools for the coordination of globally distributed teams. United Technologies Corporation (UTC) hired Moser in 1991 to develop a strategy for UTC research presence in Asia. Previously, in 1989, he was one of the first foreign engineers at the Basic Scientific Laboratory of Nissan in Japan.

Moser earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering in 1987 and a master’s degree in technology and policy in 1989, both from MIT. While at MIT, Bryan received the Karl Taylor Compton Award, Hugh Hampton Young Fellowship, and the Alumni Award for Excellence in Technology and Policy.