
Why engineers make great CEOs - Navarajan
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-opportunities/why-engineers-make-great-ceos/article5984318.ece
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dworin
I've found that many organizations tend to have a 'dominant function', and
CEOs tend to come from that function. So if engineering calls the shots in
your company, or is the main driver of success, the CEO tends to come from
engineering. If the company is driven by sales, the CEO tends to come from
sales.

That's why you see so many oil company CEOs who are geologists or engineers,
tech company CEOs who are developers, and CPG CEOs who are marketers.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
There are national trends too - the UK will draw from finance more than many
countries, Germany from Engineering. If I had to guess I'd imagine that the US
was more likely than many countries to have CEOs with a marketing or product
background.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
US seems to draw heavily from the "Law" function, with equal parts MBA.

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derekjobst
Perhaps this is not indicative of a rise of engineers who become interested in
management, but individuals already interested in management (or are of that
mindset) choosing to get a degree in engineering instead of Business. Given
the tremendous value of an engineering degree, especially as a guaranteed high
level of income, it makes sense practically minded managers would prefer such
a safety net.

~~~
weland
> Given the tremendous value of an engineering degree, especially as a
> guaranteed high level of income, it makes sense practically minded managers
> would prefer such a safety net.

Practical experience (of a practicing engineer) shows that the value of an
engineering degree outweighs that of one's work only in the first couple of
months, or even weeks, on a job. The skills of incompetent engineers are in
significantly less demand than that of incompetent managers (sadly). Unlike an
MBA, the engineering diploma isn't worth the paper it's written on the moment
people realize you're clueless. It's not a very good safety net :-).

~~~
judk
That level of basic incompetence is not in scope for a discussion of CEO
candidates.

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JoeAltmaier
Engineers think the world would be a better place if only Engineers were in
charge. Marketing types think a good customer sense is critical to the top
job.

Its like government - military men think a military leader is needed; business
wants a businessman etc.

I think the best leader would be - a leader. Someone who gets competent
advisors, makes decisions and inspires the crew to do their best.

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Disruptive_Dave
"They’re detail-oriented, analytical and trained in systematic problem-
solving. Engineers’ basic qualities make them good candidates for the top."

There's a significant element missing in this line of thought and it involves
emotions/people. By this reasoning, a robot might also make a damn good CEO.

~~~
this_user
I'd argue that being too detail-oriented may be a bad quality for the average
CEO. The CEO's job is first and foremost to see the big picture, develop the
grand vision and general roadmap and then hire the right people to delegate
implementing the details to. There are people who can do both and those are
the truly great CEOs. But unless your name is Jobs or Bezos, you probably
shouldn't try to do it.

~~~
ScottBurson
I was with you until the last sentence. Great CEOs may not be found on every
street corner, but there are a lot more of them in the world than two.

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collyw
"the life of an engineer, it seems, is not as rosy as originally anticipated".

Ok this affects me at the moment. Why? Because I have two incompetent bosses.
Basically I have junior / intermediate level programmers telling me what to do
(and getting paid more than me for it). They took the promotion for the money.
I do the "smart" work and make the technical decisions (when they make
technical decisions they are often poor choices, basically from lack of
experience).

Its at the point that I am going to take the next management position that
comes up.

~~~
romanovcode
> I do the "smart" work and make the technical decisions (when they make
> technical decisions they are often poor choices, basically from lack of
> experience).

I believe everyone thinks they're the only one smart, special snowflake.

~~~
collyw
My team leaders suggest options and they are usually either very poor design
decisions (like I would have made in my first couple of years of coding). Or
they just don't know.

Maybe I sound arrogant, but when you have to override 75% of their decisions
for something better, then I think I am more experienced than them.

Then there was having to dig onto code written and commented by them.

    
    
       # open file 
       file.open(filename)
    

It honestly looked like one of the blog articles about how not to write
comments.

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Aaronontheweb
Engineer-turned-CEO here.

Engineering teaches you a lot of the analytical / architecture skills you need
to build and run organizations, but you won't be ready to lead until you learn
a decent amount of the other business functions that make up just about every
company.

You need to learn how marketing works, but not just the basics - learn what
type of people are good at each role, what are the types of roles you need for
different types of marketing strategies, some of the tactics for each
strategy, etc...

Rinse and repeat for sales, operations, finance, product (different from, but
aligned with engineering), and general strategic stuff like legal, recruiting,
release strategy, fund raising, investor management, and so on.

Here's the good news: you don't need to be an expert in all of these areas
when you get started. You just need to know enough to know which questions to
ask and then surround yourself with advisors who can help answer them.

If you've ever built a new product (doesn't literally need to be a commercial
product) from scratch and actually gotten people to use it, then you're
probably already capable of thinking strategically - that's the first core
ingredient for dealing with the market / product / economic challenges tasked
to CEOs.

The second ingredient is the empathy and people-management part... This means
being able to internalize concepts like e every employee is different, values
different things, and therefore might need / expect different things from you
- some employees might deeply care about working on interesting projects;
others might care about being able to work in a specific time / location so
they can maximize the time they spend with their family; some might care about
money; but in my experience overwhelmingly most employees just care about
feeling like their work is meaningful and appreciated.

Learning how to build an organization out of people who all have different
personal priorities, levels of experience, backgrounds, and personalities is
not trivial. You basically need to develop a high degree of self-awareness
about your own needs and values as an employee first. And once you're able to
do that, it gets a lot easier to recognize and understand what others need.

TL;DR; - there's a big menagerie of different things you have to learn to be a
CEO, and engineering can help you structure the process of learning them but
it's not enough unto itself. Develop a strong sense of self-awareness, a good
advisory board, and the humility to ask for help when you need it.

------
alexc05
Except when they're not.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roth_(businessman)](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roth_\(businessman\))

Roth was an engineer who oversaw stock schemes and false accounting such that
he was able to completely wipe out the company. (Nortel was one of Canada's
largest companies and now its gone)

------
Jugurtha
From all the great Engineers who've ever lived, the author couldn't think of
anyone else but Thomas Edison, Henry Ford...

With all due respect, when I read "engineering's long and glorious history", I
have other names in mind.

------
jasode
A high-profile counterpoint is RIM engineer and (former) CEO Mike Lazaridis.
Even after seeing the Steve Jobs iPhone demo in 2007, his engineering and
logical mindset was convinced that businesses would not adopt a device without
a physical keyboard and that push email was more important than an apps
ecosystem. He didn't see that the consumer engagement with iPhone was so
compelling that the user would do an end run around the corporate IT
departments (by buying the device on their own) and kick off the BYOD
movement.

But setting aside some business missteps, it seems like engineers/CEOs are
better for companies (especially tech growth companies) than MBAs. It was
after all, Lazaridis' background that helped RIM achieve so much success that
they could afford to pay $600 million to NTP in 2006 and also be in the
competition with iPhone.

~~~
collyw
I personally would prefer the physical keyboard option, but we seem to have
touch screens forced upon us. (I know there are a few models out there, but
none were offered on the contract I asked for).

I am unable to answer the phone around 40% of the time (before the caller
hangs up), due to the stupid swipe gesture I need to do. A physical green
button was orders of magnitude more usable and reliable.

~~~
DougWebb
I can't upvote you enough. The only smartphones I've gotten have been in the
Motorola Droid family because of their fullsize slideout keyboards, and like
you I still miss the physical buttons for basic phone functions.

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programminggeek
A lot of engineers would make terrible CEOs because they don't understand the
basic tenants of business. Most software engineers don't like charging
appropriately or spending appropriately on things that make the company money.
There is a huge aversion to sales, marketing, and advertising.

If the CEO doesn't make sure the company makes money, the company will fail. I
see this a lot in smaller companies. Larger companies probably don't let
engineers get to the higher ranks unless they can make the company serious
amounts of money.

Ultimately a business is about making money, and the CEO has to make sure that
happens. Otherwise, you aren't much of a CEO.

~~~
thenmar
The flip side, of course, is the non-technical CEO walking down to engineering
and shouting, "We need more money! Double the number of lines of code you are
producing!"

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jokoon
china comes to mind: aren't many chinese leaders former engineers ?

~~~
ttflee
IMHO, it was because the engineering departments of the universities were less
ruined (than humanity/history/law departments, roughly, though they were not
categorized like they are today), during the Great Cultural Revolution between
196x-1976, which were not fully restored until early 1980s.

Although the engineers are broadly parts of the intelligentsia community, they
are kinda 'useful', and it was theorized that the worker-peasant-soldier
students[1] were politically trustworthy, many of those students were sent to
universities to fill in the blanks, and many of them became engineers(, and
career as a worker in an industrial factory, together with residential
records, or Hukou in a city was quite desirable then).

Now that China has been led by people who were born in 1950s or earlier for
years, they were quite likely to be in universities during or after the
Cultural Revolution years. It wouldn't at all be surprised that some of them
were trained as engineer(, but diverted to administrative paths during
career).

[1]
[http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=J5QbQpQTegwC&pg=PA124&lp...](http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=J5QbQpQTegwC&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=worker-
peasant-
soldier+student&source=bl&ots=qoGPl4_zud&sig=fai9CYcr9MZFzUOWsAG2DQSOtjo&hl=zh-
CN&sa=X&ei=tgxqU8KSMIG1lQXgnoHIDg&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=worker-peasant-
soldier%20student&f=false)

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thampiman
Marc Andreessen at SS '11:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9phm2ae0Ss&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9phm2ae0Ss&feature=youtu.be&t=22m25s)

"The engineer who can become an entrepreneur, who can then become a CEO...
there's something magic about that formula"

------
shankysingh
Personally, I feel people make "great" CEO not specifically one group .

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GFK_of_xmaspast
Friendly reminder that Herbert Hoover was an engineer.

~~~
jasonwocky
I can't tell...is this supposed to trigger some sort of a contradictory-to-
the-article emotional response? Look, I don't doubt that there are many
terrible engineer-CEOs, but I wouldn't use Hoover as an example.

First of all, CEO != POTUS.

Secondly, in the words of Harry Truman, "don't you ever cast any aspersions on
Mr. Hoover because he's done some very important things for this country and
the world."

e.g.:

Early in 1946, when large parts of both Europe and Asia were threatened with
famine, Truman made Hoover honorary chairman of a Famine Emergency Committee,
and in that capacity Hoover traveled 35,000 miles to twenty-two countries
threatened with famine. As a result of his recommendations, the United States
in five months shipped more than 6,000,000 tons of bread grains to the people
of hungry nations.

\- _Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman_

Not to mention a lot of successful food relief efforts he drove during and
after the First World War. How do you think the guy got elected President in
the first place?

Hoover did have leadership skills, it seems in particular the problem-solving
kinds that a successful engineer-CEO might bring to the table. His political
policies and the times he lived in just didn't intersect well.

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nbevans
This bodes well for NewMicrosoft and Nadella.

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michaelochurch
I'm of mixed minds about this. On one hand, if your CEO isn't smart enough to
appreciate engineering, R&D, and the cultural needs of high talent, you'll
never get anywhere. The long-term result of having a business-driven technical
organization isn't having a lower talent level. It's losing all the talent.

On the other hand, it's really simplistic to assume that engineers are "the
good guys" and that having an engineer-turned-CEO will guarantee an engineer-
driven organization. There are plenty of self-hating, Benedict Arnold
engineers who'll gladly sell technology out to management. For some reason, a
substantial portion of the engineers who become executives are that kind, and
I don't know why, but it gives the good engineers who move into leadership a
bad name.

