#70-8/25/08: AIAA-SF Panel Tells It Like It Is!
AIAA-SF Panel Tells It Like It Is!
“If you do one thing… do this”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, August 25, 2008
Hello everyone!
You’ve been hearing me say for some time that for the typical engineer, management is a new career. You’ve heard me say that the soft skills, the interpersonal people skills make all the difference in your success, long-term.
Well, last Wednesday I moderated a panel discussion at the monthly evening dinner meeting of the San Francisco chapter of the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). We had three panelists. They were, Dorothy McKinney, a Chief Software Architect in Mission Success at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company; Jim Nobel, Global Communication Systems Chief Engineer also at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, and Paul Munninghoff, Executive Director for Export Compliance & Administration at Space Systems/Loral, Incorporated.
The title of the evening’s panel discussion was “What can you expect for your engineering career: engineering or management?”
We had a lively discussion and although we did our best to end the dinner meetings by 9:00 PM the audience kept the discussion going until past 9:30 PM.
The panel discussions covered a lot of topics relating to management and what is necessary to get from engineering to a long-term engineering career or from engineering to management.
Here are some of the most important highlights and conclusions from our three panelists. Some of the same concepts were stated in a variety of ways and so I’ve attempted to capture that flavor.
1. It is very difficult to remain an engineer throughout your career. While it may be possible in some circumstances, it is difficult. Your company and organization will ultimately request that you do more than your technical work. You may not necessarily be requested to be a full-time manager, but you will ultimately be requested to facilitate, integrate, and move beyond your technical work and acquire more people skills.
2. There is significant pressure to move into some form of task or people management as your career advances.
3. The critical successful factor, whether for engineers who want to manage or for engineers who want to stay engineers is the soft skills, the interpersonal people skills. Without the ability to communicate effectively and get along with people you will be at a significant disadvantage. Several times, all three panelists said something close to this: “Notice, that the thing that was missing in this situation that led to the engineer having difficulty was his or her inability to communicate and work effectively with others.” “Notice that the critical factor here was the ability to communicate and get along with others.”
4. Dorothy McKinney told of the decision to forgo completion of a Ph.D. in favor of completion of an MBA. The MBA provided her with some of the people skills that had a greater impact on her career advancement than she thought a Ph.D. would provide.
5. All the panelists believe it is important to pursue your passion whatever it is. Whatever it is that gets you up in the morning with a charge in your step must be pursued.
The bottom line is this. Do what you love to do. Whether it’s technology or management. It doesn’t matter as long as you are happy doing it. And make sure you add to it a good dose of interpersonal people skills.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
By the way. If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software. Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment. I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere.
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 08/26 at 03:50 AM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#69-8/11/08: Brave New World-Revisted!
Brave New World Revisited!
But what exactly will you learn?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, August 11, 2008
Hello everyone!
For those of you who do not read my blogs regularly, this blog is a follow-on to last week’s blog. So if you haven’t read last week’s blog you might want to read last week’s and this week’s.
That said, here goes.
Last week I wrote about how we humans are very efficient learning machines. And I said that much of what we do in our adult life is a function of what we learned when we were children… the non-technical stuff I mean. Like how we treat others, what our concept and relationship is to authority, management, conflict, etc. These early learnings drive our movement through the world in our professional lives. These early concepts generate the structure that ultimately leads us to our professions.
So this week, I want to expand this concept a whole bunch! I want to talk about the implications of what I wrote last week on managers, how we train managers, and how we teach and train our engineers and scientists.
Let’s agree that we behave… toward each other in regards to conflict, creativity, change, uncertainty, authority, management oversight, people’s voices, being told what to do versus being asked what to do, and being appreciated, to name just a few categories, in ways that are greatly a reflection of what we learned during our “formative years”.
Then, some of us become engineers, scientists, technologists. Some of us look at the world and say, “I want to understand how it works and I want to create and predict how my creations will behave. I want to have some control over my world!” That’s great!
And, it is fair to say that, in the past, science and engineering produced advances that changed our world at a moderate pace.
However, scientists and engineers are now producing change through their discoveries and products at a break-neck pace. The world is getting smaller and smaller. And this process will only accelerate.
The implications of this rapid change are overwhelming for our societies. And the responsibilities for the impact of this change does not only rest on the shoulders of the politicians and social leaders, it should also rest on the shoulders of the men and women in technology.
In the past, most scientists and engineers could work free from political and social implications of their work until after they did the work. They produced the science and the engineering and it was the politicians and the social leaders and the military who decided to use it for ill or good. A scientist or engineer could do their work, release their work and then, when the world used it for whatever purposes, the engineer or scientists could effectively wash his or her hands of the applications. They only did the engineering and science. They only did the “pure” part of the work.
Those days are gone. Oh, to be sure, we’ve had our scientists and engineers who spoke up when their inventions or science were not used for wholly honorable purposes. But they were the exception.
We must now have engineers and scientists who can join in the discussion and debate with politicians, social leaders, and the general population regarding their work. They can’t just do the work, release the work and wash their hands. They must be citizens of the world they help to create. But not just typical citizens. The engineers and scientists of the world are much more listened to than average people and perhaps more so than politicians.
We must have engineers and scientists who are “techno-social” members. They must be able to think about the social and political implications of their work. And they must be able to articulate their work and the implications of their work to and on the greater social, political, and ecological arena. They must have a heightened interest in their fellow humans and in the social structures they help to create.
The days of working in the lab or in the dark or free from social-political-environmental considerations are gone.
I often hear young engineers and young managers tell me that they joined this company or that company because, “I wanted to change the world”. I would suggest they change their wording. Their phrase has no “value” in it. Change for better or worse? They apparently don’t care. They just want to create change.
The phrase ought to be, “I wanted to create a better world”. Now at least we can begin a discussion of what “better” means and how we would recognize it.
So how do we train our engineers, scientists, and engineering managers to move in this direction? What should be the fundamental underpinnings of their education, in addition to their engineering and science courses?
They must have courses in the following disciplines:
1. Communication. Not the typical theoretical communication courses that give a survey of different ways of communicating. But communication processes tied to neurological understanding of how all people communicate. Our future engineers and scientists and technical managers must be comfortable communicating across social, political, and religious divides. We must begin early to train our young engineers, scientists, and managers in successful ways to communicate with a wide variety of people in a wide variety of situations.
2. Management flexibility. The days of managing with one management style, or at most two styles are gone. With outsourcing, immigration, teams dispersed all over the globe, and teams made up of people of different cultures, educational backgrounds, and values and beliefs, managers must be able to manage and lead a wide variety of people in a wide variety of situations. We must train our young engineers, scientists and managers in successful ways to manage early in their educational process and early in their careers.
3. Implications of membership in the Human Community. Until recently, many engineers became engineers because they didn’t want to necessarily spend a lot of time with other humans, or at least time with humans who were not similar to them. Those days too are gone. We must begin to train our engineers and scientists what it means to be a member of the human community. Companies will demand more and more positive social interaction and we do a great disservice to our young people by not throwing them in the social river earlier rather than later. We must train our young engineers and scientists in successful ways to effect the social directions of their work and to be willing to enter a discussion/debate of the implications of their work.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
By the way. If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software. Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment. I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere.
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 08/11 at 03:09 PM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#68-8/4/08: You Are Efficient Learning Machines!
You Are Efficient Learning Machines!
But what exactly have you learned?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, August 4, 2008
Hello everyone!
This weekend gave me pause.
I once again realized how unique we human beings really are. We are just incredible learning machines. We absorb and learn like sponges. We live in this ocean of information, of patterns, of data, or chaos, and we absorb and work very diligently to deduce and hallucinate patterns. We find patterns everywhere.
And rest assured, learning requires patterns. No patterns equals white noise. White noise is no useful information. So our job, our nature is to cancel out the white noise in existence and find patterns. And once we find patterns we prioritize those patterns in terms of what is most useful to us.
We are “pattern identifiers extraordinare” and we should applaud ourselves. Our evolution, our genetic structure gives rise to an extraordinary pattern recognition machine, us!
It’s what led Newton to his three laws… patterns.
It’s what led Einstein to relativity… patterns.
It’s what led Heisenberg to his uncertainty principle… a pattern in the contradiction of patterns.
It’s what allowed us to evolve tools… patterns of successful hunting, building and social interaction, including war.
We are, bar none, the most efficient and effective, pattern recognition machine on this planet.
Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Sounds like we ought to pat ourselves on our collective backs.
Well, not so fast.
In some respects it is our greatest strength. And in other ways it is our greatest weakness.
As the creator of the Matrix told Neo in the last film of the Matrix movie series… “It is at once your greatest strength and simultaneously your greatest weakness.”
This might be the perfect place for you to ask, “What the heck is Steven talking about?”
Well, let me explain.
We all know that pattern recognition is one of our strengths. Great. Applause please!
The weakness, if we can call it that, is that at a certain point in our life, that ability to learn and absorb is extremely critical, but we don’t have any “discernment”. In other words, we can’t distinguish what we learn as good or bad for us.
And what I’m talking about is your childhood. My childhood. The childhood of everyone.
Up until very, very recently, it was not a big deal. It was very important for children to learn, learn well, and learn quickly everything their parents could teach them. Because it meant survival. People didn’t get around much… think before airplanes. Parents had to raise their children to survive. To succeed. And to do so within the close proximity of where the parents, families, and the children lived.
Each son learned the profession of his father. Each daughter learned what to do as a woman from the mother. That was it. No body ventured much. If they did they were adventurers, conquers, etc. For the multitude of people, sticking close to home was it. Grow up like for father, grow up like your mother and you were successful and happy, whatever that meant in those times.
So learning everything you needed to know from your parents was good enough. The world changed slowly. Evolution only applied pressure on the fringes.
And then the world changed. The renaissance arrived. The industrial revolution came about. Flight became a reality. Medicine changed our world. Democracy changed how we saw ourselves in that world! Heaven forbid. People living together outside of marriage. Children being conceived just because one person wants to have a child. Goods and services being exchanged around the world. Traveling faster than the speed of sound. Living in outer space. Cell phones. Hip hop.
Soon it became clear that the following statement was true; “There is no way parents can prepare their children for the world the children will live in because the world the children will live in will be so different from the world in which the parents grew up that the teaching of the parents will no longer apply. But old habits, old genetic codes, are hard to break.
So here’s the deal. Those of us living now were raised by parents who could not conceive of the world in which we now live. They attempted to teach us, since we are all such good sponges. But what they taught us, to a large extent, was good for them. Probably not so good for us. But we still learned it. And now the question is, is what they taught you still good for you?
Here is an example.
Think about your concept of authority. How do you respond to authority figures? Policemen? Your boss? The President of the United States? A government official? Are these your own responses or are they the responses you were taught by your parents? Or by others in your life who had a great influence on you when you were young? Can you even answer those questions? Can you even tell the difference between what you were given in your youth and how you could behave now?
Odds are, your responses are not your own… they are the responses of your parents. The best way to say it is that your responses to authority are those that were given to you when your were growing up, very young. And you are still using them now.
They influence how your respond at work. They influence how your respond to your boss. They influence how you manage other people. They influence how you deal with people across the oceans. It’s all driven by what you learned, as a great sponge, when you were a child. Are those patterns you learned way back then still serving you… or not.
Is it time to change? Is it time to be different? Is what your parents and others taught you long ago, still applicable now, or does it all need to be updated? Where you prepared to live and function in “their world” or the world in which you find yourself now.
We are very efficient learning machines. Perhaps too efficient. If you could learn just what you needed to make you successful now, what would that look like? What would you need to learn? And could you? Would you? How would it be different from what you leaned back then?
Look in the mirror. Ask yourself, “Am I behaving in a way that advances my career” or “Am I behaving in a way that is a reflection of what I learned as a child that might not be so useful today?”
Nine times of out ten, for most people, the answer is the latter.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 08/04 at 10:50 PM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink