Why This Book
The brilliant yet borderline insane poet William Blake once wrote, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” I have always felt that the ability to design, create, and produce useful things that have enhanced the happiness of billions of people, now and far into the future, is a noble calling. It’s the calling of an engineer. Interestingly enough, this calling often extends to engineers taking up the mantle of leadership as well. Since more than 30 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have a degree in engineering, the field is clearly a stepping stone to business leadership at the highest level.
Engineers traditionally grow into leaders, either by exposure to valuable experience outside the engineering profession or through additional training to broaden one’s perspective, such as an MBA.
Gaining valuable experience is a slow process. It can take decades before talented and ambitious engineers rise to the top, especially since classic engineering jobs typically require in-depth mastery of niche subjects. Thus, it may take a long time and a lot of patience before an engineer has the opportunity to broaden his or her experience. In our rapidly changing world, since patience is in short supply, this career pathway will undoubtedly become less attractive in the future.
A typical MBA education, on the other hand, may carry significant downsides as well. Many MBAs apply a kind of cookie-cutter approach to help students grow quickly into business leaders. The assumption is that educational approaches and business insights that work for lawyers, accountants, and sales people will work for professionals with an engineering background as well. It often ignores the fact that leveraging specific strengths of those with an engineering background may be the fastest and most viable pathway to leadership success.
I therefore propose a third approach: By understanding and leveraging the strengths of leaders with engineering experience to achieve ambitious business goals, we may open a faster, smoother, and more enjoyable track to leadership success.
This concept brings me to the main question of this book: How can business leaders with an engineering past apply their strengths to accelerate their leadership career trajectories?
Who Will Benefit Most from This Book
In the past 20 years, my career has covered three stages. I started as a chemical engineer, designing, building, and running big chemical plants all over the world. I then moved into business leadership, with a focus on strategy, innovation, and building a high-performance organization. Currently, as a high-performance leadership expert and a trusted boardroom advisor, I’m in stage three. The insights I share with you in this book are therefore based on personal, practical observations of leadership behaviors and personal, pragmatic application of leadership ideas. I have codified my experience and distilled the most useful and actionable ideas for leadership success.
This book is written for three groups of people. The first group comprises the senior business executives, who are not only looking for ways to improve their own personal performance, but especially the performance of managers with an engineering background in their teams. This book helps develop these managers to gain a broad perspective, look at business through the lens of their bosses and think like senior business leaders. The second group are the managers with an engineering background, looking for ways to rapidly accelerate their business careers. This book provides a practical strategy to quickly create additional business value, which helps set them apart from the competition. The third group are the professionals with engineering backgrounds. The ideas from this book will be useful to develop and show advanced leadership skills and behaviors in their existing jobs to rapidly improve performance.
How This Book Is Organized
Marcus Aurelius, the Roman philosopher and Emperor, observed that the secret of winning lies in the organization of the nonobvious. This book could have been written as a general essay on leadership and goal-achieving. My objective, however, was different. I wanted to find and organize the nonobvious that would be especially relevant for leaders who were former engineers. This endeavor led me to choose a common thread for this book: How can leaders with an engineering background organize their specific skills and unique talents to reach big goals in a nonobvious way?
To answer this question, the book is organized into five parts:
Part I: How the Best Get Better. This section puts business leadership success in perspective. Chapter 1, Big Business Goals, answers the question: How can you maximize your odds of great leadership success in business? Here I will make the case that goal-achieving should be the core mindset of any business leader, including those with an engineering background. I will also argue that the best business leaders get better by a relentless focus on growth goals. Furthermore, it introduces the three building blocks of goal achieving: clarity, focus, and execution.
Part II: Do You Have a Vision, or Are You Just Seeing Things? The second part of the book explores the first building block of goal achieving: clarity. Chapter 2, Perfect Clarity, addresses how a leadership vision can be turned into tangible business goals. It provides a practical approach to how leaders can clarify their most important business growth objectives and make the right connections to make those objectives happen.
Part III: Even Michael Jordan Plays a Lousy Basketball Game in the Dark. The next part of the book is about the second building block of goal achieving: focus. It describes three elements to maintain focus on your goals.
- Chapter 3, Engineering Strengths, explains how engineers can build on their three main strengths—reality-based thinking, process design, and accelerated learning.
- Chapter 4, Overcoming Obstacles, introduces several strategies to use these main strengths to deal with setbacks on the bumpy road toward accomplishing big goals.
- Chapter 5, Effective Leadership Behaviors, explains how any leader can use behavioral distinctions to create language, metaphors, and stories to maintain focus on building a company culture that makes achieving big goals possible.
Part IV: If You Think You’re in Control, You’re Not Going Fast Enough. The fourth part deals with the last building block of goal achieving: execution: How can leaders maintain momentum and continue to move toward their most important goals? This part of the book contains four elements.
- Chapter 6, Strategic Quitting, explains how your ability to strategically quit initiatives equals your ability to succeed. This chapter illustrates how engineers can use their unique strengths to stop unimportant activities. This provides the time, money, and energy to set and achieve new goals.
- Chapter 7, Improving Executive Judgment, deals with the behavioral pitfalls that may sabotage execution power, and how your unique talents as an engineer will help avoid costly mistakes.
- Chapter 8, Eliminating Adverse Habits, explains how a great leader is able to get rid of unhelpful habits, which actually mask strengths and impair goal-achieving abilities. You will find an in-depth discussion of the typical unhelpful habits that actually mask the strengths of leaders with an engineering background.
- Chapter 9, Building Client Connections, is based on the idea that nothing happens unless a sale is made: every executive has to bring in business. To achieve growth goals, the ability to grow a company by expanding the customer base is therefore essential. This chapter shows how to use engineering strengths to design a referral system that creates the relationships necessary to support business growth.
Part V: The Unstoppable Goal Achiever. The final part of this book brings the three building blocks of goal achieving—clarity, focus, and execution—and the three unique strengths of leaders with an engineering background—reality-based thinking, process design, and accelerated learning—together. Chapter 10, Goal-Achieving Blueprint, provides an actionable goal-achieving template to immediately get started with the ideas in this book.
Figure A shows the relationship between all five parts of the book.
Figure A How this book is organized
How to Use This Book
When professionals, such as engineers, are moving to leadership roles, it’s necessary to build additional skills and especially show different behaviors. At various places in this book, I have therefore highlighted actionable leadership skills with short paragraphs, titled Practical Application. Furthermore, by regularly asking how an idea from the book can be implemented by the reader, I have provided actionable leadership insights to show different behaviors. These implementation opportunities are titled Executive Questions. Finally, I have included several interviews with senior business leaders to provide an outside view on how successful engineers become great business leaders. These interviews are titled External Perspective.
Archilochus, the ancient Greek poet, observed that a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one important thing. My hope is that after reading this book, you will act like a fox and think like hedgehog. The big thing is that there is a method to the madness of how successful engineers become great business leaders. It’s up to you to act on the many ideas from this book to make it happen.