To overcome this ingrained way of thinking, Collins executive management had to attack the issue from two directions. First, it had to launch business and management training for Collins managers to sharpen their business skills and acumen. This training was aimed at improving the company's internal decision-making process from a business perspective. Second, Collins had to strengthen the engineering process discipline of its engineers. Traceability of product designs, for example, was too often weak, leading to unnecessary rework and production delays.

Addressing these two issues together as one let Collins executive management lessen or erase sources of program surprises. They also improved the program capture ratio, improved manufacturing and production, streamlined the product design process and the designs and, ultimately, increased Collins revenue and profitability.

Collins hired a former marine named Brian Wright to bring discipline to engineering processes and to create an engineering cultural shift that got engineers to worry about the business end of their work. Wright had been doing something similar as the vice president of engineering at ITT's Aerospace Communications Division where, because of the merger of two ITT divisions, he had to create a new cohesive organization.

Wright started to look at how Collins could tie its management-of-risk efforts to an engineering risk management process. Next he introduced project risk registers to capture project risks for formal assessment, ranking and management.

He sparked a cultural transformation of Collins's engineering process disciplines in the government business, with increasingly greater emphasis on risk management in decision making as its major feature. Next he continued the transformation by deploying a common Collins product development process to key strategic projects across the whole company. Wright was also under orders to aggressively communicate and deploy best practices in the operating divisions for Collins product development and then transition these to all Collins operations.

Because of his senior management position, corporate orders and personal interests, Wright quickly leveraged his risk management team to best effect for the company. He twisted the top-down, management-of-risk thread and the bottom-up, risk management thread together into a "strong cable that could pull the company collectively into using an integrated, proactive approach to attacking risk".

The result is an organization that has become a "world-class manager of enterprise risk" and one Forbes magazine labelled the best-managed company in their business sector two out of the past three years.

The company has continued to strengthen its management-of-risk and risk management threads and continues today to wind them into an ever-stronger decision-making cable, Charette says. It analyzed its strategic risks to decide its core value stream for its future. Senior leaders "quietly conspired" to create organizational pull for acceptable risk management, which they then pushed through a scoring system and further enabled by direct coaching to the programs.

It also targeted the project and program arena, then logically expanded risk management across the program life cycle into new business pursuit, into production and warranty, into IT/IS, and into decision processes and corporate functions. Now every potential endeavour must satisfy key questions and requirements at each phase gate. For instance, at decision point "A", the question is: "Does the concept fit Collins's strategy and markets?" If it does, you go to decision point "B". The question then becomes: "Do we know enough technically and commercially to support a market study [that is, Is there a market?]?"

At the final decision point the question becomes: "Given that the product line is no longer viable and that very few customers are still operating the product, can we now also discontinue its support in the field?" The phase-gate decision process rules a business idea from the earliest consideration to its final resolution - "from lust to dust", in Collins terminology.

Equally bold measures addressed financial risk. In 1996, a post-merger integration (PMI) initiative brought together the two separate halves of Rockwell Collins into an integrated company. This heightened operational efficiency and decision making, but did little to improve the management of financial risks. The disparate Collins business units had separate financial systems that could not share information easily, if at all. Even individual business units ran separate financial systems. All up, more than 450 different systems ran more than 1200 software applications producing management and financially related information.