On the job, Leonard Martinez, left, and DOE undersecretary Gen John Gordon look over neutron generator components.

J Leonard Martinez developed his management skills at work, most recently at Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, NM). Now his management ability is also put to use to help children. “I stand for engineers with a heart,” he says.

Martinez is Sandia’s VP of manufacturing systems, science and technology. Sandia designs all the non-nuclear parts of nuclear weapons. Its 7,900 employees also pursue a wide range of science and engineering projects that contribute to the national security.

Sandia’s $1.9 billion budget comes primarily from the Department of Energy. The lab, which has a second location in California, is managed by Lockheed Martin Corp.

Martinez’ responsibilities include producing what may be the most complicated component of today’s nuclear weapons arsenal: the neutron generator. It’s essentially a linear particle accelerator. Such accelerators usually occupy a building half a mile long, but the one in the nuclear device is sized to fit in the palm of your hand. A steady supply of new generators is needed because the materials in them decay over time.

Sandia also manufactures complex components for use in devices from satellites to robots in the area now known as emerging threats. “We’re able to build unique, small volume, ultra-high reliability kinds of components for those applications,” Martinez says.

“My definition of innovation is to take science and get it into applications,” Martinez declares. “That’s where manufacturing plays a role. We’re in a technology-rich environment.”

Martinez joined Sandia in 1995 as director of production integration. At the time, Sandia was moving the production of neutron generators into the lab from another facility. His team developed the new manufacturing capability at Sandia, integrating it into what was formerly a strictly R&D lab.

Spanish, Ute and Navajo
Martinez grew up in Pagosa Springs in southern Colorado, a mountain community between the reservations of the Southern Utes and the Jicarilla Apaches. His family genealogy traces back to the first Spanish inhabitants. “We married into the Utes and the Navajos to get our beautiful color,” he says.

His father broke with the family sheep-herding tradition to become a barber. Martinez went even farther away from the family roots. He showed talent in math and got a scholarship to Adams State College (Alamosa, CO).

But Adams, with its 5,000 students, was just too vast for the kid from Pagosa Springs. A teacher suggested that DeVry University’s Phoenix, AZ campus might suit him better, and he thought so, too.

He arrived in Phoenix without much in his pocket, but it worked out very well. “I got into a community where we were all in the same boat,” he says. “We helped each other out with nickels and dimes and made it through.”

He found a job one step up from a janitor, which gave him a place to live, and another job at a hospital gave him living money. He also fell in love and got married. “My wife has become an absolute beacon in my life,” he says.

A career at Digital
Martinez graduated from DeVry in 1975 as an electronics technician. He joined Digital Equipment Corp, which had just opened a computer, component and software manufacturing facility in Phoenix. He found his own special niche, working with customer returns, testing and repairing equipment and keeping the customers happy. “I began to organize my own little field service group,” he says. “It put me on the supervisory track.”

It was seat-of-the-pants engineering, with secret raids on the manufacturing floor to get what was needed to fix the equipment. Soon he also began to address the manufacturing failures that were causing the problems. “Sometimes you learn from the bad things,” he says.

A couple of senior managers noticed Martinez and began to encourage his talents. One manager got authorization for Martinez to form a troubleshooting team. Another helped remove obstacles to Martinez’ advancement. Over the next ten years Martinez went through a sort of informal rotation, working in every area of the company and learning the business.

As an entry-level production manager, he created a new software production approach that was a forerunner of the just-in-time manufacturing concept. By taking orders during the day and producing the software at night, the company was able to meet customers’ needs and cope with rapidly changing designs. The system worked so well it was also initiated at Digital’s Northboro, MA, plant.

Martinez was made western distribution technology manager following that achievement. His own personal mission was developing, too. He began working with Arizona Bridge to Independent Living, a group that uses technology to help people with disabilities work in mainstream jobs. Digital was willing to give them a chance. “Many couldn’t read, so we set up a system of color coding,” Martinez says. “They came through fine; we never had a single failure in six months.”

Off to Mexico
At this point Martinez was put in charge of a plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. The facility hadn't made money for a decade, but Martinez got it up to its five-year-plan goals in three years.

He went on to six years as general manager of the Digital plant in Mexico City. While there, he and his wife adopted two girls and a boy, and in 1994 the family was transferred to Albuquerque, so Martinez could take over as ops manager of a troubled facility there.

A few months later the company decided to close the plant. Martinez had the task of completing $1.3 billion worth of orders, disposing of $100 million of inventory and $35 million of capital assets. He also wanted to help find jobs for the 500 people who would be put out of work by the plant closing, which he accomplished by holding job fairs onsite.

A career at Sandia
All this activity put Martinez in the news, and a Sandia executive invited him over to talk about Sandia’s new manufacturing facility. In the end, the Digital plant closed January 6, 1995, and by the end of the month Martinez was working at Sandia, with plans to start Sandia’s One Year on Campus program at Stanford University in the summer. He completed his MS in management in 1996; he had already earned a BS in business and taken special courses in international business while working at Digital.

In 1998 Martinez was honored with the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference award in executive excellence. He is now active on HENAAC’s board of directors. He’s also involved with students from grade school through college, filling the technical pipeline.

The human dimension
At home, the kids are now teenagers. They help out with the foster children Martinez and his wife care for as part of their participation in Heal the Children, a program that brings sick kids to the U.S. for the sophisticated medical treatment they need.

Children have come from Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras for help. “It’s my wife’s work, and we all support her,” says Martinez.

Martinez’ humanitarian vision operates in the workplace as well as at home. “You have to make sure people know how important they are,” he says. “My belief is that we do better science and better technology when engineers take the time to understand the human dimension.”

D/C

– Kate Colborn & Christine Willard