May 5, 2011
A Peek Inside Your CEO’s Head
Insight is valuable. Understanding how the executives in your organizations think is important to understanding if you're aligned to their goals and objectives. And ultimately, that determines a lot in terms of your role and your engineering team's role within the company.
January 26, 2011
Research on CEO’s Priorities: What it Means for Engineering
Ever wanted to know what exactly was running through your CEO's head? Well, you're not alone. Sometimes, it can be a little difficult to discern exactly what you can do best to help the company. And gaining insight into what your CEO is really concerned about sheds some light on that.
Not long ago, I wrote an Introduction to Talent Management post that put that topic in the context of the engineering organization. I followed that up by looking at the question of What's the Importance of Employee Alignment in Engineering? Today I'd like to delve into a issues that is direct related to engineering executives: succession management.
December 30, 2010
Do Engineers Make Good CEOs?
In my experience, I've seen many sales and marketing executives take over the CEO role, but what about technical folks, like engineers, stepping into the CEO role? It certainly can be frequent with startups where a technology visionary builds the company from the ground up. But what about engineers stepping into the role for established manufacturers?
November 30, 2010
Are Engineers and Their Employers Growing More Distant?
It seems that lately there has been a lot of talent management issues in engineering. With that in mind, I came across an interesting article written by Jeffrey Pfeffer over at the Harvard Business Review called Take Care of Yourself First.
Sometimes, it's the simplest questions that are exactly the hardest ones to answer. In a post last week, I wrote about a book I read some time ago called The Goal (wikipedia entry). In it, the main character struggles to identify both the goal, increased profitability, and constraints of that goal, production bottlenecks and sales limitations, in a manufacturing plant he oversees in an effort to save it from being shut down. Based on that premise, I asked what the analogue is to engineering. What exactly is the goal for engineering? What are the constraints keeping engineering from that goal?