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."
MBA's (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasn't this what MBA's were originally intended for? Training engineers to be managers?
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You're making a case here that MBAs are actually supposed to have a purpose besides attempting to further their own career and screwing over anyone and everyone in their path to do so. Said case does not exist. An MBA for training focuses almost entirely on skills required for those two above goals, there is no technical skill imparted and no technical skills tested. Therefore your MBA's come out of their programs with very little value for actually knowing something about the jobs of the people they are ma
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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?
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Judging by the number of MBAs hired by apple [cnn.com], I would say MBA's are pretty darn prevalent.
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That's not a list of MBAs hired but a list of companies where MBA students say they'd most like to work.
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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.
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I'm going to guess that you're a useless MBA trying real hard to justify your existence from the sound of your post.
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Come on now. You really think an MBA could successfully navigate the web, register, read text thats more than a few words long and post a reply on slashdot?
I think you're being generous.
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Why yes, Cheryl will get that for you ASAP! Meanwhile, how would you like to explore the second derivative of the market curve in a mutually beneficial relationship?
(...waits)
The best MBA's find a scary way of having their Mumbo Jumbo actually mean something, then take the best side of the deal before you can wipe away the smoke. In the above example, Tech is an example of a lurching industry that alternates explosive growth and eerie stalls.
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Yes , i recognize that . The scary people is some people actually take them seriously.
Which is hard for me , because i just can't stop laughing when someone goes on like that.
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True , and i have noticed that myself already.
But then i just explain it in simpler terms.
It depends on your goal : do you want to inform people , or do you just want to scare them away so they don't ask questions.
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I think you're being generous.
There's a certain unintentional irony in your comment when you consider the number of people here who post on subjects that they know nothing about, along with the number of moderators who will happily mod those posts right up because they assume the poster has a clue.
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MBA is a masters degree yo. It is something you get after you get your bachelors. If you flunked out of a bunch of stuff during your undergrad, odds are good you wouldn't get admitted in a high-ranking MBA program, nor would you have the desire.
You don't get an MBA because you are a "jock" or are some kind of party person. What is this, high school?
An MBA is a joke... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 o
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It would be appropriate certification for someone who could bullshit their way through high school and college.
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Yea us engineers with our undergrad degrees with are detailed focus on our particular sub component on our product, with minimal human interaction. Makes us that much more qualified to operate a complex organization with many people where we need to look at the big picture and insure the experts in areas are on track.
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You are correct, sir! It just requires a few all-nighters hacking on the org chart, dintchoo know?
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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.
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Why would there be? That's what your first/bachelors degree is for.
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.
Re:MBA's (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Actually a lot of MBA don't flaunt it. I myself worked for an MBA not to help me get promoted per say. But it makes it easier as it says I want to be promoted and I am serious about it and it makes sure I am not just type casted as a techie, but that I have other ambitions in life. There ae a lot of people who don't want to be managers that is fine and good. But how to weed out the ones you should put on a management track and the ones on a different track. Companies of any signigant size finding talent wi
honesty and wisdom (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:honesty and wisdom (Score:5, Insightful)
People tend to follow me for the simple reason that I'm not scared of really anything, but haven't lost my respect for the dangers out there. I'm willing to take responsibility for the people that are following my orders and willing to tell people to screw off when I have the need to do so.
The absolute worst thing that a leader can do is flip flop and fold on a subordinate following orders.
The technical skills can all be taught, pretty much anybody willing to put in the time and effort can learn them, same goes for the laws applicable to the situation.
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Leaders are born, not made? Even if that's so, we should be able to test for desirable behavior, shouldn't we? So that we know who not to put in leadership positions? If that is, we can determine and agree on just what behavior is desirable, and I think that can be done. For instance, most everyone would agree treachery is not wanted in a leader. Then there's the huge difficulty of believing in and then following the recommendations. And in getting proud leadership candidates to submit to the indignit
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In Europe it would be rare to get admitted to any reputable MBA course without at least two years of serious work experience. However in the US the majority of MBA students come straight from their first degree. I believe a one year gap (seems like a token to me) is increasing in popularity - but still rare.
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However in the US the majority of MBA students come straight from their first degree.
Where do you get this from? The MBA programs I've checked will give a class profile, and usually their students are listed as being in their late 20s or in their 30s, or as having five or six years of work experience.
(For reference, this is in Pennsylvania, so I'm talking about schools like Arcadia, Penn State at Great Valley, Villanova, etc.)
Having just completed my MBA, the average age in my class was 28, I think from memory. I estimate the youngest person in the class had four or five years of work exper
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Isn't there a 3 year minimum period of experience required before you will even be considered for an MBA program? Perhaps 3 years isn't enough? Maybe MBAs should be limited to Engineers or a technical field.
Good MBA programs (weekend, part-time and executive) have work requirements (whether you are a nurse, teacher or engineer). And by "work requirements", it is usually meant "x years of work in some form of management or team lead position." I would suspect these are aligned to the original spirit of what the MBA program was supposed to be. The best MBA holders have had 5+ years of experience in engineering management (on top of God knows how many other years of engineering.)
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Who's "we"? There are millions of companies - find one that works the way you want it to. If you don't, start one.
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Which is sort of the point, a few companies isn't enough to change the inertia of the market, it
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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, st
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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
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Managers, not MBAs [amazon.com] offers a good insight into the MBA program and into all the things wrong with it today. The thing
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Have gone threw an MBA myself at least at my college
Oh yeah? Which college?
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One who doesn't nitpick from a blog response.
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The irony, it burns!
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Wasn't this what MBA's were originally intended for? Training engineers to be managers?
I've never met a good engineer who even wanted to be a manager. I've met many people with engineering degrees who were hoping to be king of the nerd-pen though. MBAs have become essentially meaningless, since you can't be in a tech company and not understand tech, even if you're a suit. This appears to be some way of appealing to that belief.
The problem is the same as always, you can't stay on top of tech if you're not do
It's not necessary (Score:1, Insightful)
Sociopathy ftw!
On your own dime... companies don't care. (Score:2, Insightful)
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This is it. Why promote from within when you can hire someone to be an asshole manager from outside the company?
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The best assholes come from outside. Form small groups. Discuss.
--
Students were told that they could be either assholes or incompetents, but not both; however, every time I repeat this, someone says he has a counterexample.
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.
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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.
Prepare for short shrift here, methinks (Score:2, Informative)
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Really? Huh. Wish I could introduce you to one of my co-workers and recent MBA classmate - we went through the same course together. He happens to have a Master's in Engineering from one of the top engineering schools in the country and several years of work experience in Electrical Engineering working on problems which he gets right or else 50 million people lose power. No, I'm not making that number up.
Never mind - enjoy your cynical little private and inaccurate anecdotal world view. Judging by the comme
CEOs Believe Leadership Is Important (Score:1)
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How to hire competent technical people (Score:1, Informative)
While they're at it, perhaps they can teach managers on how to hire competent technical people.
Technical "Belts" Titles (Score:2)
In some ways it would be nice if tech folk could earn "belts" or titles like in the martial arts world. Much easier to say you have a 3rd Degree Black Belt in Wado Ryu and have folk understand than to say you have a BS in Computer Science and 10 years experience in Perl.
Or maybe I just want to be called a "Script Master" really bad. Careful, I hear that guy "Bashes" really hard!
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
Lack of Qualified Managers (Score:4, Interesting)
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FTFY.
Leaders (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Slashvertisement? (Score:1, Offtopic)
It sure looks like it.
"these days" (Score:2)
Whats this "these days" quote? Confusing "it is and always has been bad" with "it must have been better in the good ole days"?
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.
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How did we survive back then (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Most of it was made in "blue sky" R&D facilities where nerds ran rampant, and/or on open ended military grants in an effort to fight the red menace. Now neither exist any more, and we are left with companies trying to yet again put a new shine on a old ride. Only problem is that it has been polished so many times they risk rubbing the chrome off the fender.
Now all leadership do it attempt to hunt that elusive dream of perpetual 3% annual growth. How the hell do you make anything grow by 3% a year contin
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3% what the heck are you talking about. 10% at least is needed for growth. 3% is staying at an average rate of inflation. A company that grows at 3% is stagnant.
Money isn't a pool that just goes away after you spend it. It is spread to person for good and services. The problem with our economy isn't do to lack of money but the fact it isn't moving fast enough.
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And all the money has been captured by the wealthy, never to be distributed again until they either start spending most of it or it gets re-captured by higher taxes and spent on public projects like our crappy infrastructure.
Not exactly. Even if the wealthy put the money in the bank, the bank loans it out. Unfortunately, recent practice has been for banks to loan the money out for consumption by the non-wealthy instead of for capital for productive enterprises.
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That's happen as mebbe (Score:2)
You're saying that the wealthiest 70% had 10% of the money?
Eeee, we used to dream of having mathematically impossible Gini coefficients. Uphill, both ways. In the snow.
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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
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GP didn't include natural resources, so why did you? If these were taken away from their current owners (as in didn't belong to anybody) then they'd belong to everybody. People could create assets the way they were originally created - by killing bears and banging rocks and all that stuff.
The air is a natural resource. If that was take
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http://wag.myzen.co.uk/thepolytechnic/?p=269 [myzen.co.uk]
"Three percent compound growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades)."
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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 a
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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
Waste of Talent (Score:2)
I can think of no faster way to doom a company than using engineers for salesmen, managers etc.. Engineering a product and the packaging that contains it is an endless task when done at its best level. Worse yet, keeping engineers up to date on machinery used in production and fabrication methods, tools, jigs etc. is a crushing burden. What often happens is that engineers get pushed into public relations, sales, and all kinds of nonsense and every tiny bit of that takes away from the job that they
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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.
Leadership? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Isn't that the exact same complaint developers and IT folk have about management? That the senior execs don't know C# the language from C# the note?
What you are saying is that management doesn't need to worry about those scum in accounting—they can treat accounting like a black box were magic goes in and magically record gro
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We're not talking about knowledge, we're talking about leadership. Any schmuck can acquire knowledge. Leaders are born. Yet the skill must be honed and validated in business school. Otherwise, how can you tell the real leaders from those claiming to be leaders?
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Any schmuck can acquire knowledge.
There's a lot of "any schmucks" out there that provide evidence otherwise. Some, but not all, have MBAs.
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"Otherwise, how can you tell the real leaders from those claiming to be leaders?"
But that's obvious, my friend! If someone tells you he is a leader and you believe him, he *is* a leader.
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"'adhere to EEOC guidelines'" is not leadership because it's "memorizing a bunch of artificially imposed minutia that is not very interesting"?
Well, you're right. Leadership that promotes objectivity and fairness regardless of gender, race, childbearing status or age will simply not have to worry about adherence to EEOC guidelines--because the leader will have made it very clear how people are to be treated and evaluated by both their peers, their reports, and by management.
Instead of playing "divide and co
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Huh? Particularly Latinas? Speaking as a neutral, white male observer, African-Americans, particularly African-American men, have it a hell of a lot harder than any of the other groups you just mentioned.
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You're absolutely right. There's a difference between management and leadership, and the skills are generally mutually exclusive. Force a leader to take on management tasks and he will likely be unhappy and not do well. Force a manager to be a leader and you'll end up with a lot of unhappy subordinates.
Well (Score:2)
How to motivate engineers : (Score:2)
Don't be a total bonehead. Listen to them. Let them do their job.
Ok, the tongue is in the cheek a little there, but nothing saps my motivation more than being told to do something really stupid. Like the project I'm on ; the code is some amateur coders PhD project, the code quality is utterly excretional, and EVERY engineer working on it that I've asked agrees that we could have thrown the whole thing away and written something superior inside of 6 months.
Management were told, almost as soon as the external
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
A related problem.. (Score:1)
I've seen that in the giant service houses like Accenture, Infosys, Cognizant and so on, almost every damn programmer dreams of becoming a 'team lead' or 'assistant project manager' as soon as they've put in 4-5 years in the company. This trend has become all-pervasive and people who really love technical stuff and who want to just keep coding are considered losers. Most of these companies just don't offer growth opportunities in a purely technical sense. Even your manager will tell you, "Congratulations, y
Too much education and not enough common sense! (Score:2)
It's a lack of understanding what is leadership (Score:2)
Leaders are advoca
Re:It's a lack of understanding what is leadership (Score:4, Insightful)
Leader != Manager (Score:2)
A leader leads, provides "vision," leads by example, has new ideas, defines strategy. People naturally follow leaders.
A manager produces charts of business statistics, facilitates communication, makes sure that people are behaving, getting to work on time etc. and that the holiday requests are spread out sufficiently to make sure that enough people are working on the project at all times. Managers dish out the work between staff and provide a channel for communication with other teams.
Managers should not
Yes they are! (Score:2)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/science/05robots.html?hp [nytimes.com]
The Boss Is Robotic, and Rolling Up Behind You
By JOHN MARKOFF
Mobile robots have been used for years by the military and law enforcement, but with falling costs, the next frontiers are the office, the hospital and the home.
Oh come on.... (Score:2, Funny)