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Leaders Aren't Being Made At Tech Firms
theodp writes "In this article Vivek Wadhwa laments that short shrift is paid to management training these days at many high-tech firms. You can't be born with the skills needed to plan projects, adhere to EEOC guidelines, prepare budgets and manage finances, or to know the intricacies of business and IP law, says Wadhwa. All this has to be learned. Stepping up to address the problems of 'engineering without leadership,' which may include morale problems, missed deadlines, customer-support disasters, and high turnover, are programs like UC Berkeley's Engineering Leadership Program and Duke's Masters of Engineering Management Program, which aim to teach product management, entrepreneurial thinking, leadership, finance, team building, business management, and motivation to techies."
Wasn't this what MBA's were originally intended for? Training engineers to be managers?
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Sociopathy ftw!
Why should a company care? Someone else in your position is going to grad school right now and can fill it when needed.
Leaders! pft! My place is like a Dilbert comic
Actually those 11% are too busy trying to figure out how to loot the Picasso from their office without people noticing before crashing the entire business and collecting a gold parachute to send the jobs overseas to care about corporate leadership.
My God, how did we ever survive, much less built some amazing technology before this great mind discovered we are not "making leaders" today. We are not making leaders, or are the leaders focused in the wrong direction. IBM, HP, Wang, Dec, Microsoft, Apple, yes even Google started small and grew because their "leaders" did not focus on the next month, the next quarter, but on a long term vision of what they wanted their company to be in the market. In my thirty years in this IT industry I know of only two managers that understand that if you manage the people, they will manage the project. The rest managed the budget, the project and never took time to understand the resources they had. Whet these new classes should re-teach is the art of managing people so they become a positive, motived work force and not indentured labor.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
adhere to EEOC guidelines, prepare budgets and manage finances, or to know the intricacies of business and IP law
That's not leadership. That's memorizing a bunch of artificially imposed minituae that is not very interesting. That is a role suited for an assistant trained in law.
The budget part is relevant, but only to the extent that every human being ought to know how to manage their resources. The rest is suited for an assistant trained in accounting.
Once again, I'm seeing a focus on technical competence, and the usual ragging on managers who don't know anything that way. And also on competence in the technical aspects of business such as budgeting and knowing the ropes of IP law.
Managers and financial wizards are worse than useless if they are damned fools and aren't honest. They think they're telling little white lies that don't cause any harm when they mislead investors and employees. And they have funny ideas about how to motivate people. They want everyone on hot seats, all the time, thinking that's how to get the most out of people. They prowl around with the micromanagement, thinking that's how they're going to ferret out the slackers, and making it so the rest won't dare slack. They treat underlings like mushrooms, in an insulting, patronizing manner, not seeing how that can be self-fulfilling, and how it can blow back at them. As if that's not bad enough, they gratuitously indulge their fears, jealousies, petty spitefulnesses, bullying ways, and dominance gaming on the employees they've done all they can to make captive.
Where is the "leadership" training that covers such issues? Are people just supposed to instinctively know not to treat with their fellows so? I've seen enough of that kind of foolishness in RL to know it cannot be just swept under the rug.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
It's a _NON_THESIS_ (as in you don't have to write a big difficult paper) "Masters" degree. The "highly ranked" schools of business within college XYZ that run these programs are may have more challenging entry requirements but even then there's a level of name recognition & ass kissing that sets students up to play the "it's not what you know, it's who you know" game for the rest of their lives. It's not like the course material is SOOO much better at B-School Ivy vs. B-School State, it a questions of which alumni are associated and what doors will open for you.
And as far as not getting an MBA because you're a "jock", I call bullshit. The way the "high end" of the business world works, it's all about popularity & networking. Have you been paying attention to the corporate corruption & insane salary levels in the news for the past decade or two? That shit doesn't happen to an entire so-called profession by accident - it's fucking structural! There's a few bits of some simple subjects to learn compared to real Masters programs (where they make you write a REAL master's thesis, by the way, but otherwise - yes. It is EXACTLY like fucking high school. That's why when we honest, hard-working engineering students were grinding through Comp. Sci. & Electrical Engineering going to study groups 5 days a week we'd go past Greek row and see the frats stocked with the "let's skate through life on our good looks & connections" types partying while we studied our asses off since 90% of them were there for either Business or Communications degrees.
Yes, you could flunk a bunch of stuff in your undergrad and still get into an MBA school (since there's so fucking many of them). They'll be happy to take your money so you can skate through another two or even only _ONE_ year (there are "5 year MBA programs": google it.). Will it open as many doors? Probably not. But you probably also won't starve and (as with most college degrees) the dirty little secret is that after you've gone out and done something 10 years later, nobody cares about your GPA or what college you went to any more than you high school teachers cared about your finger painting and what kindergarten you went to. So long as there's a degree on your resume, you'll generally pass the corporate HR bullshit - but then again, nobody in their right mind goes through the front door hiring process if they can help it, so you're back to "who you know".
I'm in my 40s, as a kid I grew up watching my dad & other male relatives build furniture out of wood, decorate houses, build brick walls, mend washing machines, etc. etc.
I grew up in a house where I had enough free reign to take stuff apart to see how it worked and try and fix it - yes, sometimes I broke it for good or couldn't get it back together again.
Then when I got into my teens, I built electronic circuits, learnt to program Z80 CPUs in assembly and took bicycles or mower engines apart to clean and fix them - again, sometimes what I did made it worse.
Since then, I've spent 30 years in telecoms, computers and IT and done a good job over those years. Not once have I considered entering management, the closest I've ever got is writing and presenting training courses, along with some technical mentoring as necessary.
It's impossible to be trained as an expert in every piece of hardware, operating system, telecoms principle, etc. that I come across but most of the time I get by using my engineering brain and knowing my limits - so if I need to know something more about something, I ask someone or go read a book. I'm not afraid to tell anyone "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer but give me a day or two and I think I can find one."
In IT especially, there are a lot of people who are afraid to admit their limitations or even believe themselves to always be right - and on some occasions, I've taken great joy in taking them down a step or two.
The point is that logic, intuition and self-motivation are disappearing in business - sorry, but as I'm over here in the UK I blame it entirely on American-style management techniques (although we're not blameless for accepting it so readily) where everything is performance and statistically based, and as long as you achieve your targets, it doesn't matter if you can think outside the box or not.
I know that being a good engineer is not about necessarily having the answer there and then but knowing how to get towards getting the answer in a logical fashion. That is a skill that comes from real-world experience, it cannot be trained into you.
And whilst I lack management skills, I expect that the same is true for a good manager - leadership & motivation skills are not something you can be taught, they're skills you pick up as you progress through life.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Agreed! I had a boss who was General Manager of a Boston radio station. He didn't know much about engineering or sales-but he was a great judge of people-and creative people WANTED to work for him! He hired the best people, gave them the tools they needed to do their jobs and then LET THEM! He didn't micromange. He knew that creative people occasionally pushed the barriers and let them-but was always there to pull back gently on their leashes if necessary. I enjoyed working for him-and let me assure you it was hard work. BUT you felt like you were part of a team-and he also shared the credit/spoils with all of the people who worked for him. One summer week the Tall Ships were coming to Boston, and it was my job to not only facilitate a weeks broadcasts from a pier on the waterfront, but also make sure the talent got there for their broadcasts-when half the streets were closed down. So I hired a reliable friend as station driver for the week-dressed in his best suit and with a daily freshly washed and cleaned station Jeep just to drive talent, clients and management back and forth. He had full press credentials so he could drive everywhere and since he kneew the area (and knew how to make friends with the Boston Police officers) got priority treatment from them. At the end of the week my boss told me: "when you came up with this idea I didn't like it, but decided to give you a shot-and it turned out it was one of the best ideas you have ever had". THAT'S the kind of boss he was-he made you feel great!