Leaders Aren't Being Made At Tech Firms 135
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."
Is this really unique to tech? (Score:2, Interesting)
I know several retired engineers who became managers in companies that invested in their training throughout their career. I'd be curious to see statistics on how that's changed over the years. It could be that high-tech companies are just more likely to reflect modern business practices. Perhaps those companies are more likely to feel the effects of hiring people from a "pure management" background because managing complex engineering projects is, you know, complicated.
Lack of Qualified Managers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:MBA's (Score:4, Interesting)
Not for training engineers to be managers. But to make strong full company leaders. What went wrong was most MBAs went into finance or consulting, and not into upper mid level management. Because of this the MBA gets a bad name. Have gone threw an MBA myself at least at my college (that focuses on making professionals and not convince them to go into money grubbing) I found it was actually quite useful. And gives me a wider perpective of the business.
While my MBA class has a lot of engineers and IT people it also has a lot of finance people. These degrees are a little more focused then the MBA which is a good thing too. As a masters is a 2 year degree and not enough time to cover everything.
Companies don't care - but good managers should (Score:5, Interesting)
With the computer skills, I have to learn the new technologies on my own if they aren't being used at work yet. With management/leadership skills (project planning, budgets, IP law...), they are obviously being used at every company and there are more chances to learn (insert bad management joke here).
Most good managers are overworked and there are opportunities for on the job training. Do some research, read some books, and then ask your boss to take one thing off of his plate. Start small and build from there. Note: A bad boss will be unwilling to give up responsibility for fear of you showing him up and taking his job. A good manager/leader will is interested in developing those under him and realizes that you doing a good job reflects well on both of you. A good manager doesn't have to worry about you taking his job. He should be moving up (not sideways) anyway.
Some good places to start training are:
1) Agile development: By definition, SCRUM masters come from the development team, not the business/management team. This is a good intro to management & leadership skills, and the Sprint Demos give you good opportunity to communicate with the business and management teams.
2) Scheduling: In a non agile environment, this means owning the Pert chart. In agile, it might mean helping prioritize the product backlog and contributing to ROM estimates.
3) Customer Satisfaction: Sometimes product maintenance (bug fixes) can involve lots of customer interaction. Making unhappy customers happy is a useful skill that will get you noticed.
4) IP Law: Reviewing existing patents for conflicts is a boring job. Sometimes the legal team creates a huge list of patents where half of them can be dismissed right off the bat. Maybe you can take a first pass at the patent review and just summarize your thoughts in an Excel spreadsheet with High/Medium/Low priorities so that other managers can focus on the high priority ones first. This will give you insight into the whole process and a foot in the door.
5) Interviewing: Any potential candidate should be reviewed by multiple people. Not just the boss. Again, read some books and do some research on good interviewing techniques first. Then see if you can participate in interviewing candidates. This area can be tricky because your interviewing style might conflict with your managers. He may not like your style, but that doesn't mean you are wrong. You will probably handle the interview differently depending on whether you are doing it with your boss or not. I suggest the 5 Why's style here. As a new interviewer, your opinion will matter less. If you use the 5 Why's then you will have much more detailed facts on why the candidate did what he did in a certain situation - your comments will be based less on your opinion and more about what you got the candidate to say. During the candidate review after the interview, someone may bring up a scenario that the candidate discussed and say he did the right thing. You will be able to go 3 levels deeper into the decision process used by the candidate to verify if this is actually true.
These are good places to start. I don't think you will get much finance/budget exposure or deal with any equal opportunity issues if you are not a manager. On the leadership side, there are always changes to exercise your skills as a mentor and leader without having the official title. This is just part of doing your job.
Re:Companies don't care - but good managers should (Score:3, Interesting)
You can take work off your manager's plate, but you can't let it impact your main job. You need to get the same amount of work done with the added responsibilities. This is why you need to start small and learn one skill at a time.
MBAs at Apple. (Score:2, Interesting)
John, what was the background of the good MBAs? Were they originally engineers or scientists by training, who took up management later? Or was their original training in a field like commerce, business or economics?
Also, I know you worked for some time at Apple. Clearly, based on their recent success, Apple is currently a well-managed company. How prevalent are MBAs within the management hierarchy there?
Vivek "the shill" Wadhwa (Score:1, Interesting)
Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic
Good to know this guy couldn't cut it as an entrepreneur, now he's teaching all his best tricks to anybody who is stupid enough to cough up the tuition fees.
Vivek Wadhwa Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University
I'm sure there is no conflict of interests and he is being absolutely objective in his desire to promote his excellent courses.
Re:MBA's (Score:5, Interesting)
Careful with the broad brush, there. I've met MBAs who were well-trained to run a business, and I've met others who just got their ticket punched from a "name brand" school who were somewhat worse than useless.
-jcr
I haven't met any of those people. The good MBAs that I HAVE seen have an MBA pretty much as an afterthought. They were already good managers that came up from a different background. Engineering, IT, something like that.
The rest can often negotiate well and make decent business decisions but the majority of the problem with them is they think management is everything and that they don't have to listen to their employees, even when the employees are saying "Listen, theres a bridge up ahead thats only half done. At the rate you're going, when you get to it, you're going to smash into the cliff wall on the opposite side of the gap"
Often the MBAs will feel their authority is being threatened by something like that as well because in a good amount of cases their underlings are smarter than they are, if not as well trained in powerpoint. In this case the MBA over reacts to something small that someone brings to their attention, and next time it just doesn't get brought to their attention, then the MBA blames worker X and moves up the ranks.
I've met an MBA who moved up the ranks at a fairly large corporation this way, he wasn't at the top at that point, but very close to it and by all indicators going to get it when the opportunity arose. He knew almost nothing about his companies product. I don't mean knowing technical details, though at that point he should have been able to answer a few technical questions well enough to at least satisfy the average joe, but basic functions of the product.
The CEO of that company on the other hand had a technical background and could answer almost anything you wanted to know, and that is largely responsible for its success. I'm shorting stock in the company if I hear he's leaving.
There are outliers of course, I think I may have met one a year or so ago but its too early in his career to tell. The SNR is just so bad that I haven't met the folks you are talking about.
No, it actually was better. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you were born after 1970, which you likely were, you probably don't realize how much better life and work actually was in America during the 1950s and 1960s. Things were significantly better back then.
The wage gap between executives, managers and the people actually doing the real work was minimal. It wasn't unusual for a CEO to make a salary that was only twice as much as the salary of the lowest-paid employee. This is what allowed America's middle class to become so strong and wealthy after WWII.
The general attitude was different, as well. With the standard of living increasing so dramatically for so many people due to hard work, people would go out of their way to do well at their job. Truly good work, rather than bullshitting and deflecting blame, was the key to career advancement. Indeed, successful managers and executives put in a huge amount of effort growing businesses by providing top-notch products and services, while doing what was best for the community as a whole.
Things really started to tank in the early 1970s. That's when manufacturing started being sent off-shore, mainly to Japan at first, but eventually to Taiwan and then China. Now we see India and Mexico getting involved. The end result was that many people were put out of work, management became more about fucking people over rather than doing a good job or doing the right thing, the quality of manufactured goods became extremely shitty, and the American economy's real growth has stagnated for the past 30 to 40 years.
Re:How did we survive back then (Score:3, Interesting)
It is often when a company goes public. And must answer to the mindless mass called shareholders. After a few years after going public and with technology you will need to change direction. The share holders get nervious and move their money somewhere else. That is why these companies fail.
When you are small you can focus on one thing. That doesn't take much leadership but when you grow you need leaders especially as your core compenance becomes antiquated like in the tech industry. Why don't we hear much about Wang, Dec, Prime etc. Because they didn't adapt to the new market. Due to poor leadership
Re:How did we survive back then (Score:0, Interesting)
This is complete bollocks. Truly ignorant nonsense. Dave Packard, for instance, was well known for reaming out his managers if they didn't stay on top of things like inventory management. Making a profit was built explicitly into the HP Way - number 2 on Bill and Dave's list. They placed it ahead of getting good people and trusting them to get on with it. They were consistently profitable from the get go.
How did we survive? Because we've had people capable of simultaneously looking at the long and short term, and not indulging in your kind of shoddy thinking where we can focus on one and just trust the other to happen on its own account.
You might have noticed if you read the summary (not even the article, not to much to ask is it?) that things like team building and motivation are already on the syllabus for these new classes. So really, you're not adding anything of value at all, in fact you're destroying some.
But hey, don't the facts get in the way of a good rant. I'm sure your thirty years in IT have made you a much better businessman than the giants of Silicon Valley.
Re:Waste of Talent (Score:2, Interesting)
I can think of a faster way. Take a small established company with a product that people want. Add MBA's until they
outnumber engineers and designers.
Re:How did we survive back then (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How did we survive back then (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the problem is that in IT we're used to building machines, and we build them from parts. Often those parts and the product are software, but it is all the same.
If I want to upgrade 1000 computers I need 1000 sticks of RAM and 1000 CPUs. Therefore, if I want to program 1000 pieces of software I must need 1000 units of programmers.
IT leaders lack the ability to assess what they have and work with it. Indeed, "best practices" almost encourage this mentality. What do you deliver? Well, what do the requirements ask for? Never mind if that is the best use of what you have.
There needs to be a balance - a company needs to have strategic goals, but it also needs to make tactical use of the resources that it has.
A friend of mine expressed it well - suppose you are coaching a football (US) team. Do you just write up a playbook without any regard to the players you have, based on studies on the merits of the plays themselves? Suppose that logic dictates that a passing offense is the best option - so you tell your players to start doing passes. Hey, any NFL player ought to be able to be part of a passing offense, right? Well, suppose you have three of the best running backs in the league, but your receivers are all below par? Is that really a smart move? Sure, they can be generalists, but if you focus on what they're good at you'll get far more out of them.
IT managers focus on the projects, and then fit resources to them. They don't say, "hey, we've got 3 people that are the best in the industry at doing X, so is there any business benefit from doing X even though nobody is asking for it now?"
Now, of course there has to be a balance - a company also has to have strategy and not just tactics, and sometimes strategy tells you to trade your star running back. However, we're far from that problem in most of IT.
Re:MBA's (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish I could +6 you. This is so true. Managers are afraid to promote on merit because it's hard and risks confrontation with the people you have to tell don't make the grade. It's the right thing to do, but they often don't, and are often not rewarded for doing so. As a result, we get corporations who reward measurable things which don't necessarily contribute to the company. Having an MBA by itself should not get you more money or a better title. Consistently applying the information, practices, strategies, etc you SHOULD have learned during your BS, MBA,, PhD, or whatever, yeah, that should get you something. Simply having one is not enough.
Re:How did we survive back then (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MBA's (Score:3, Interesting)
Well , with the appropriate training , they can certainly become good managers.
The idea that your have to be an MBA in order to be able to manage something , is ridiculous.
There are a few management skills you need to learn , but most of it is build up from experience.
You are not defined by your studies . You are defined by what you want to accomplish.
Re:MBA's (Score:3, Interesting)
No MBA or degree program in and of itself is a replacement for industry experience and knowledge
While I tend to agree with you when it comes to technical degrees, the problem with this belief is that it's often accompanied by the belief that managing people, businesses, and projects is a simple process. The fact is that there are a set of accepted practices -- things proven to work over many years. And it's not something that a company can afford to have you pick up along the way with enough time and experience -- they need those skills now, not after a decade of trial and error. And if you come on as a new hire who claims this experience without education, they don't have a way of knowing that you're familiar with that standard baseline.
The fact that businesses so routinely run themselves out of business and do great harm to themselves with ill conceived business strategies ought to be evidence that perhaps something is going horribly, horribly wrong as the status quo at business school.
Any new business has something like a 56% chance of failing within the first five years according to the SBA. While your statement is interesting, there's nothing in those statistics that say whether or not those failed businesses are run by MBAs or high school graduates. Just because a few spectacularly public failures have occurred at the hands of MBAs doesn't really justify painting the rest of them with the same brush. There are undoubtedly a number of quietly successful MBA degree holders for each spectacular failure.
Note: I don't have an MBA (though I may consider getting one at some point).
Re:How did we survive back then (Score:4, Interesting)
I am willing to bet that if you take away everyones money and assets 90% of the people who were rich will be rich again. And 90% who were poor will still be poor.
That's probably a candidate for the stupidest thing I've heard in a decade.
If a magical force suddenly "took away everyone's assets" (I presume you also mean every natural resource on earth, as well) then everybody would have nothing--perpetually. What kind of ridiculous thought experiment is this?
I'll tell you what is true though: By and large, the people who started with a ton of money tend to be the ones who end up with the shit-ton of money, and the people who start with next to nothing end up with next to nothing. That's how capitalism works. That's the whole point to the system!
What's the best predictor of someone's income? Intelligence? Nope. Work ethic? Nope. Abilities? Try again. How about: Father's income