Credit: Jake Hawkins for The Telegraph
“Engineering,” wrote the world’s most famous entrepreneur last year, “is magic made real.” Elon Musk should know. With his electric cars and his space rockets, he aims to make the most fantastical projects come true – from saving this planet to seeding human civilisation on others.
But he is just one among many entrepreneur-engineers now trying to turn dreams into reality. As digital technologies come to dominate every industry, engineers are rising from the workbench to the boardroom in record numbers, their fusion of technical expertise and pragmatic problem solving in demand as never before.
Just ask Uber’s chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi, who studied engineering at Brown University and recommends it to students regardless of their particular career aspirations. “Engineering taught me how to break down problems and how to build them back up again,” he said. “I think that it can help with anything you do in life.”
Last month Pat Gelsinger, who has spent 30 years at Intel, was named the chip maker’s chief, joining Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella in the well-stuffed ranks of engineers turned executives.
Their dominance is now entrenched. In 2020, a report by headhunters Crist Kolder reported that a whopping 28pc of chief executives running companies in the S&P 500 and Fortune 500 had an engineering degree – beaten only by business degrees (34pc) – and more than the entire liberal arts put together.
Pat Gelsinger, who has spent 30 years at Intel, was named the chipmaker’s CEO in January
Credit: VMware/REUTERS
A separate series of annual reports, compiled by the Harvard Business Review since 2014, has also confirmed their rise, charting not just greater numbers of engineers running companies – but how effective they are. In 2018, 34 of its 100 “best-performing CEOs in the world” were engineers, for the first time overtaking MBAs (32).
It is no surprise, say founders who have benefited from an education in engineering, that such pre-eminence has come at a time when myriad new technologies are unlocking possibilities to build new ventures and get bogged down in distractions and dead ends.
‘It’s like a superpower’
“Engineering equips you with that practical appreciation of the world,” says Katerina Spranger, 37, a biomedical engineer and boss of Oxford Heartbeat, a medical start-up. “When you look at complex systems like planes, they look magical, impossible things. But as an engineer you learn to break them down into small tangible steps to understand how they work. It’s like a superpower – I understand how the internet works, or the engine works. It gives you fearlessness. And of course you translate that to your company.”
Time and again, engineers emphasise their focus on the practical rather than the academic. “It’s not stamp collecting,” says Dr David Cleevely, chairman of the Enterprise Committee at the Royal Academy of Engineering, which provided initial support to Oxford Heartbeat. “Engineers aren’t about collecting facts – they are about practical solutions. Science will tell you why something works. But that’s of limited use. Most of life is about how to make things work.”
That difference is currently exemplified by the race to produce vaccines to protect the world against Covid-19. It was a scientific challenge to develop the vaccine in the lab, but it is an engineering problem to manufacture billions of doses to save countless lives. When it comes to real world delivery, says Cleevely, “everything about these vaccines is engineering”.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, left, and Ryan Graves, a board member, pose for a photo in 2019 before the company lists during its initial public offering at the New York Stock Exchange
Credit: AP/ AP
The road to entrepreneurship is certainly smoothed, says Brittany Harris, a 28-year-old engineering graduate who is now co-founder and CEO of sustainable construction start-up QFlow, because “engineering is very outcome focused”. But it is once a company is up and running, she says, that the real benefits kick in. “The goal is not just to understand systems, but always to improve them.”
This engineering-instilled quest for efficiency delivering not necessarily perfection, but the right product, at the right time, for the right price – is perhaps the key driver of business success, says Andy Hopper. He should know, having run Cambridge University’s Computer Lab for two decades before becoming its chairman of communications engineering – as well as a serial founder, notably of Acorn Computers, the company that built the BBC Micro computer.
“You have to pitch it right, so it doesn’t cost too much. You need good judgment to know at what level to engineer it. Similarly, if you’re having a downturn – which people are key? If you over cut, or cut the wrong thing, or the wrong people, you prejudice the business. You have to understand the whole system to have that judgment.”
Technical competence, if not fluency in every specialism, is an obvious advantage, says Spranger. “It allowed me to know who to hire at the beginning.” It also allows engineers to stitch teams of specialists together. “The flowering of engineers has occurred because they bring others together,” says Cleevely.
“We idolise the Elon Musks of the world as these individuals, these semi-gods,” says Harris, “but the reality is they built teams around them that could deliver. Elon Musk is not a rocket scientist; he’s found the scientists to build those rockets.”
Britain’s baggage
That, says Hopper, makes Musk “the Brunel of his age”. Indeed, he laments, countries beyond Britain have no problem defining their tech behemoths as engineering firms. Candidates clicking on the jobs page at Google are reminded that “Google is and always will be an engineering company”. Its list of engineering roles is vast and various. “Of course Google thinks of itself as an engineering company,” says Hopper. “It’s building stuff. But in this country if you say Google is an engineering company people scratch their heads.”
The problem, he thinks, is that Britain was home to the original industrial revolution “so we have all this baggage, these templates that refer to 150 years ago”. Or, as Cleevely puts it: “People just think of an engineer as a man with a spanner. “Americans have a much healthier attitude to engineering. They celebrate engineers and the VCs back them in a way that we don’t.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is “the Brunel of his age”
Credit: Diego Donamaria/Getty Images North America
In India, too, engineering is also prized. Of the 86 students who came first in the country’s exams between 1996-2015 (so called “board toppers”), more than half studied engineering. Many are now abroad, running tech companies. In the UK, however, the not-for-profit EngineeringUK estimates there is a shortfall of up to 59,000 qualified engineers against annual demand for 124,000.
“We don’t value engineers in the UK,” says Cleevely. “We revere the scientists working with the test tube. But we need to translate products from the test tube to the market. We are losing out big time because we are not making the best use of our engineers.”
He calls for greater representation of engineers in government to help capitalise on Britain’s undoubted research expertise. James Wise, partner at venture firm Balderton, has another solution. To sow the “advantages” that see engineers “over-represented” among chief executives, he suggests, students should be allowed to take STEM courses alongside their main degree – to mix a little engineering with English literature, say; some biology with history.
“Humanities haven’t switched the methods of learning in 1,000 years, engineers have to change very quickly,” Wise says. In a fast-paced world that sees speedy deterioration of specific skills, that talent constantly to update is critical. “Engineering gives you the tools,” to navigate a world of cascading possibilities, he says.
Instead of harking back to the glorious past, says Cleevely, we need to update it. “The huge economic growth of the industrial revolution was all driven by engineering … by the possibilities of steam and electricity. Something similar is under way now and engineering will become very much more important. So this question today whether engineers might make great leaders would have puzzled the Victorians. To them, of course engineers were the great leaders.”
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