Management Department and a practitioner of management of engineering organizations for several decades.

The first chart that we’re looking at is a quote by Norm Augustine from the Wall Street Journal recently.

It sums up nicely what we try to do throughout the Engineering Management Program. Focus and encourage students to develop critical

thinking, creative problem solving, and communication.

Let me ask you a question. Once we decide that we want to be the individual that leads our team, our department, or our company, what

do you need to know beyond engineering?

We often receive this first opportunity to lead based on our engineering success.

So why study management beyond that?

The second chart is a photograph of the Duomo, or the cathedral, in Florence, Italy.

Now, this dome that you’re looking at in this photograph was an architectural masterpiece of the 15th century.

This dome was constructed using 25 thousand tons of brick.

It’s a marvel. If you ever get the opportunity to visit, I certainly encourage you to do so.

Well, the engineers of the 15th century that constructed this masterpiece did not have the structural analysis tools that every sophomore

engineering student takes for granted today.

Recall that this is the 15th century. Hooke’s law about stress and strain wasn’t developed until the 17th century, or 200 years later.

Therefore the cranes and winches that hauled the brick from the street level up to where the construction was happening were designed

based on the humors of the wood used in their construction.

The architects and engineers believed that certain woods had a dry humor or a moist humor or a hard or soft humor.

And that you could match hard with moist but you couldn’t match soft with dry.

And as long as you matched humors, the device would be fine.

Needless to say, countless accidents occurred when this machinery failed and the load of brick fell to the streets below.

In our day, smart engineers sometimes have difficulty transitioning to managers.

As technical people, it’s natural for us to equate analysis with mathematical manipulation of physical laws, and we base

our actions on the results of this analysis. No engineer today would select a material without an analysis of the required properties.

However, as we discussed before, the medieval engineers who built the Duomo often based their machinery design on the humors

of wood because they didn't have the stress analysis tools available to them.

Management deals with people and how they interact with each other and organizations.

People are a lot more complex than stress analysis, which makes it difficult to tease apart the principles of how people in

organizations function.

Nevertheless, there is a science that studies this and makes principles and theories available to management practitioners like us.

We need to understand these principles and theories and apply them to managing people and organizations.

If we just make it up as we go along, or hip shoot our way through situations based on our gut instincts, we’re really being analogous to

the medieval engineers whose designs failed because they didn't have the analytical tools available to them.

Now don’t get me wrong on this. Creativity and judgment factors are critical to developing effective leadership.

But we need to start with the theories and principles that organization researchers and experienced practitioners have made available

to us.

Now the third chart is a summary of the thinking and the research of John Kotter, a very highly respected management scholar.

And he breaks management down into two constituents: One is leadership, and the other is management.

Management as the chart indicates is about managing complexity and things. It’s about schedules, terms & conditions, and contracts.

It’s about budgets and all these hardcore nuts and bolts.

And John Kotter subsequently subdivides this management of complexity into three sub tier areas:

budgeting and planning; organizing and staffing; controlling and problem solving.

The other side of this dichotomy of a manager’s job is leadership, which is about change and aligning people.

The three sub tier activities here are vision, aligning people, (or getting them to buy into the vision that you’ve generated), and

motivating and inspiring.

And you can see there’s some crosstalk between these two.

Just look at the first line that leadership is about developing the vision.

Well, management is about the plan to accomplish that vision, and what budget is required, and you really need to have both.

So what we try to do here in the Engineering Management program is shown by the fourth chart,

which continues John Kotter’s dichotomy between management and leadership and superimposes on it the Engineering

Management curriculum.

Where you can see that for the management of complexity and things, some of the core courses that address this are:

Economics for Engineering Management, two courses in Financial Management, two course in Managerial Statistics, and two courses in

Operations Research.

This is really the the real deal, and the hardcore tools required for this management of complexity.

And the adjoining side of this, the leadership, that’s about change in people.

There are two courses in Engineering Management, with the first one covering the basics of management, and the other about

creative management.

Communications, Problems in Human Relations, and Organization Behavior, which is about how people work together in

organizations.

And then the Capstone course, Problems in Engineering Administration, attempts to bridge these two and bring it all together.

So, how do you provide a leadership vision for your organization or department, and how do you put a plan in place to make that happen?

How do you use both sides of John Kotter’s dichotomy of a manager’s job?

And the last chart here is what I’ll humbly call the Pyramid of Managerial Wisdom.

And what we try to do here is infuse this in many of our courses.

Where the basics of what you need, the base of the pyramid if you will, is content knowledge.

These are the things that you need to know: the equations, the understanding of the legal structure of organizations, etc.

This is the content knowledge.

And if you go a little higher up the pyramid it’s about skills.

And skills are how to manipulate or use the content knowledge to come up with creative solutions to business problems, organizational

problems, or Engineering Management problems.

At the top of the pyramid is judgment. Judgment is impossible to learn in the classroom.

Judgment is what you’re going to learn out in the world as you take the content knowledge and skills that we addressed in this program

and deploy them in solving problems for your organization.

And I encourage you to reflect mindfully on these experiences.

As you apply these skills and content knowledge to organizational problems, judge the outcome.

How did it work? What could you have done better? What didn’t quite work?

And then refine your approach based on that. That’s the road to managerial judgment.

Start with the basics, apply them, and then gain confidence in what works.

Or, critically evaluate what doesn’t work, and change it so that it works for your specific organization.

Hopefully this has been helpful, and I look forward to seeing many of you in my classes. Thank you.