Engineers Becoming Managers 12+

📗 This book rests on three cultures: applied science, engineering, and management. While these plainly overlap to a degree, a person cannot move from success in one to success in another without considerable effort, dedication and talent. Clearly, an understanding of these cultural differences is essential to engineers whose career goal is to evolve into top-level managers. The first step in gaining such understanding is to admit that these three cultures are quite distinct. The applied science culture is typified by the engineering school; the engineering culture is typified by the company engineering design office; and the management culture is typified by the senior management team and the boardroom. The older one gets, the more one realizes the enormous importance of "culture" to almost every important human issue, and the topic of engineers becoming managers is certainly no exception. The culture of a group is the set of all common traits, responses, values, beliefs, priorities, attitudes and behaviors which characterize that group. A group's culture is usually not codified but is passed on, from older group members to younger ones by a thousand subtle messages, most being nonverbal. Part I of This BookHaving briefly established in Chapter 1 the inseparability of engineering and management, we then look at the students who enter an engineering school intending to graduate and become employed as young engineers. Although they go to their first classes reasonably...