Engineering the Difference

It's fair to say none of us would be here if it wasn't for an engineer. John Logie Baird. A bit of a crackpot. But if it weren't for him - and several other inventive engineers - there would be no television.Without TV, the BBC might not exist. In which case, I wouldn't have joined millions of viewers watching the Queen's Coronation in June 1953. Stuck in remote north Norfolk, it was the first time I'd seen a television. The experience was made all the richer by Richard Dimbleby's commentary. Over the next few years, he became a regular fixture in my mother's living room. As the presenter of Panorama, I'll always think of him as the face of serious television in my youth.

Had it not been for television, it's fair to say Richard Dimbleby and his sons wouldn't have made their reputation in quite the same way. And this lecture, held in their father's memory, wouldn't be taking place.

If it alarms you to have to listen to an engineer, let me reassure you. Like you, I once thought engineers were quite beyond the pale. My family was all from a liberal arts background. My parents taught the arts. And as a schoolboy, I didn't know what an engineer or even an architect did. I was a Classics scholar who went to art school. While at the RCA, I accidentally discovered the glories of making things. And I can tell you it was quite a shock when I realized I was getting interested in engineering.

Now, as I said, no engineer has ever stood here before. And the last industrialist to occupy this spot did so nearly 20 years ago. I can't help thinking, that long absence says something about the way we regard engineers and manufacturers. Manufacturers and engineers make things to improve our lives and create wealth. But they're less important to us than those who occupy their time writing about it or worrying about it.

It was this disregard for the engineer's creation - the manufactured object - that led me to stand down as Chairman of the Design Museum a month or so ago.

There are two sides to the design coin. There is serious design - making sure that the manufactured object performs its task in the best possible way. And there is styling - the essentially superficial task of making sure something looks attractive.

Both are important to me. After all, my wife is a rug designer and an artist. My daughter and son-in-law design clothes.

However, the Design Museum was set up by Terence Conran to champion the manufactured object. There are dozens of places that examine style. The V&A, art galleries, newspapers and style magazines. There are very few places that focus seriously on how and why we make things.

I felt the Museum was failing to get the right balance. I still care deeply about the Design Museum, but in its current guise, I have little to contribute. So I stepped down.

A day or so after my resignation, I turned on the radio. When I resigned, I had mentioned a Constance Spry exhibition and now the Today program was interviewing two flower arrangers.

The interviewer cut through the florists' proclamations, about the life enhancing effects of lilacs, to ask a very pertinent question. Can you really, he asked, say that flower design is as important - or even the same - as designing an airplane?

I knew there and then that my decision to go had been correct. And that it said something about our appreciation - or rather lack of appreciation - of manufacturing.

At the Museum, the visitor figures shot up by 50 per cent! Butlers Wharf had never been so popular.

Meanwhile, in the press, my departure was being deconstructed as a clash between the past and the future. I was told that styling had usurped engineering in the latter half of the 20th century. And that it went deeper than just a change of fashion. My values of technology and manufacturing were old-fashioned, they said. And if our economy was to succeed, I had to realize something:

Yet here I am. Someone whose recipe for success, has been to make things that people want to buy. Not because they look better - although of course I hope they do - but because they work better.

I have spent 35 years making things in a country that often has little regard for its manufacturers. It has left me more convinced than ever that engineering is this country's future.

And that styling for its own sake is a lazy 20th century conceit. One that has passed its sell-by date.

WE HAVE NO CHOICE but to shake off our obsession with styling. And to focus on creating new more-advanced products. The first thing we must do, is divest ourselves of several lazy misconceptions.

"That Britain once led the industrial world. And that we really knew how to make things well."

"That the service and creative industries - there's an oxymoron for you - can replace manufacturing."

That the industrial future belongs to companies producing intangible goods such as computer software or information."

It is essential that we dump hoary old myths if we want to maintain our wealth, power, and influence over the future. This evening I'll explain why and how.

Unlike most of the commentators, I have 35 years' experience of making things. And it's taught me a lot. However, the biggest lesson came four years ago when I located our assembly in Malaysia.

Much as I was resisting the change, there were very clear reasons why we had to change direction.

We needed to invest heavily in research and development. But our manufacturing costs were going up and our market place prices were going down. And we were trying to expand our factory in the face of local planning opposition. Meanwhile all our competitors were manufacturing in China, while we were watching our profits go into freefall.

But the biggest problem was that we had no local suppliers. Our British three-pin plugs were made in Malaysia. Our polycarbonate plastics came from Korea. Our electronics came from Taiwan. It was a logistical nightmare. We needed our suppliers on our doorstep so that we could drive them to improve their quality and keep pace with technology.

In the 1970s, when I was developing the Ballbarrow, I needed some bent metal tubing. I got in my car and went to Birmingham. In the space of a few streets, I found workshops and suppliers who between them could provide the tubing, cut it, bend it and coat it. It was an extraordinarily vital environment. And it was absolutely essential to the small engineering entrepreneur.

You might ask what happened to these British suppliers and subcontractors? Quite simply: we drove them out of existence. Employment and property laws made it difficult for them to take on extra staff and premises. They needed a tax regime that appreciated the volatile nature of their business. Instead, Governments imposed PAYE and hammered them with high interest rates, year after year. By the mid-1980s, most had gone to the wall.

Moving Dyson production abroad was a tough decision. Most especially because I had to make 550 people redundant. However, it meant we could cut our costs, and expand our production. We could invest in R&D and employ more staff.

The upshot is that we now have more people at Malmesbury than ever. All of them are in higher-skilled, better-paid jobs. Most are scientists and engineers. They contribute more to the local economy. And as a company we pay much more in taxes than we did four or five years ago.

In Malaysia, the biggest benefit has been that all our suppliers are within 10 miles of the factory. Some were there anyway. Others we developed, such as a tent pole maker. We got him to make our highly engineered telescopic handles. And he turned out to be much better than our previous German suppliers.

For a company that depends on innovation, that's what counts. The know-how is here. It's British. It generates money for the British economy.

Thousands of other companies are doing what we were forced to do. From Doc Marten shoes and Hornby train sets, to Sony's high-tech electronics, they were all failing to make things competitively in their home markets, and moved their production to China.

Now they are buying Western know-how - the joint venture between Shanghai Automotive and MG Rover is primarily to secure rights to Rover's technology. Chinese companies are also copying Western styling. I should know - I constantly have to stop them.

Their universities are churning out vast numbers of engineers and scientists. And they're good.

They're taking on Western companies by snapping up Western brands. Today, a Chinese company bought IBM Personal Computers lock, stock and barrel. Manufacturing, management and the brand. Chinese corporations have bought Thomson and RCA televisions, Dirt Devil and Vax vacuum cleaners, Alcatel cell phones, and Dornier aircraft.

To survive against them, we can't just rely on shallow styling. We need technology and design that they don't have. As long as we continue to innovate and produce products that have better features and work better, we can compete.

Now I'm frequently told that championing manufacturing is yesterday's game. That we live in a post-industrial society. That the service and creative industries have replaced manufacturing.

Of the world's 10 largest corporations by revenue, nine make big, heavy things. Like cars or ships' turbines or computer hardware or consumer electronics.

These companies rely on their engineering and their technology - not their styling - for their wealth. Only one - Wal-Mart - is a service company.

Look at the most profitable companies and again the facts speak for themselves. In the top ten, only three are service companies.

And as for the world's least profitable company? Why it's Vodafone, a service company that made a loss of more than fifteen billion dollars last year.

So why does Britain need a manufacturing industry in this supposed age of the service economy? My answer is simple. We have no choice. Only one in seven

British jobs are in manufacturing, yet they generate nearly two-thirds of exports.

Manufacturing creates the wealth and spending power that feed the service industry.

Why do we think we can be different? If we want to maintain our position alongside other leading nations, we've got to join the rest.

We must take steps now. In ten years time China, with its mantra of employment over profit, will not only be the workshop of the world, it will be the technological superpower.

** Britain's service industries will wither without their manufacturing customers. Call centers and software developers are already disappearing to efficient service economies. Such as India.

** We will be surrounded by products that we have not made. That's something that is already culturally destructive. Ultimately we will be at the mercy of the buying habits of Chinese shoppers.

History repeatedly shows the correlation between a nation's wealth and its diplomatic and military powers.

Before the Industrial Revolution, Britain accounted for just one fiftieth of the world's manufacturing output, while China spoke for a third.

Its industry was now backward. Britain, with two per cent of the world's population, was making nearly half the world's goods. And politically we led the world.

So if we want to protect our quality of life and our influence, we must maintain our average wealth - our GDP per capita. The only sure way to do that is to continue to innovate and manufacture.

I believe manufacturing is the future, not the past. And we need to be clear what manufacturing means in the 21st century. It boils down to three models:

Firstly, high-tech manufacturers such as jet engine maker Rolls Royce. These survive in the face of lower-cost economies simply because they have the engineering know-how.

The RB211 jet engine was a revolutionary leap of technology. Airlines value features and reliability over price. As long as Rolls Royce maintains its engineering edge, it can manufacture in a high-cost economy.

Then there are companies like Dyson - creating products in Britain, but making them abroad. We've pared our costs to the minimum but we've maintained our head offices in our expensive home nation. Why? Because we've spent more than a decade building up a highly talented team of engineers and scientists, to develop our technology and ensure our future.

Finally, there are companies such as the stylish Apple. Outside contractors do their manufacturing and engineering. Apple maintains its value by marketing its brand expertly. However, in my mind this could make Apple vulnerable. If a rival makes a significant technological leap, then styling and branding will count for nothing.

So again it's plain to see. In all three scenarios, only innovative engineering will guarantee a future.

But to get engineering and manufacturing right in the future, we need to recognize our strengths and failings in the past.

I am convinced the industrial revolution happened not because we were a particularly inventive or industrious nation, but simply because of circumstance.

By the early 16th century, we'd cut down most of our forests. The Royal Navy had built the fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada. We were constructing wooden housing and using charcoal to fire blast furnaces. Our timber stocks were so depleted that, Parliament passed laws restricting the use of wood.

We had little choice but to turn to coal to fire the pottery furnaces, and to power the textile looms that were emerging in the Midlands. Necessity was the mother of invention. We developed the steam engine to help us mine that coal. That triggered the industrial revolution.

In this virtuous circle of confluent political and industrial needs, industry grew at an incredible rate. The Empire expanded rapidly and we created many inventions. Our imperial ambitions were fuelled by our industrial might. And vice-versa. The Empire provided plentiful raw materials, and a captive market.

The growth in manufacturing capability was extreme. It is tempting to suppose it was the result of adept management. Or the skilful exploitation of our engineering know-how. That would be a big mistake. It happened because the conditions were so right that it was almost impossible to fail.

It was nevertheless a period of great creativity. We have a lot to be proud of. For 200 years we dominated invention, science and manufacturing. Like no other country before or possibly since. From Newcomen, Watt and Savery's development of the steam engine, in the early 18th century, to Fleming's invention in 1904 of the vacuum diode. Britain ruled each successive wave of technology.

Behind all these, are fascinating tales of human ingenuity and determination. But, above all, these inventions came about in Britain, because the conditions at the time were absolutely right.

Crucially, few were the result of particularly clever engineering development. They were the products of good craftsmanship rather than scientific investigation.

And it meant we repeatedly failed to capitalize on many of our best ideas. A British curse that persists to this day.

For example, we developed every major innovation in the iron and steel making process. Yet our steel industry, failed to adopt them with the same gusto as its counterparts in France, Germany and America.

And lo and behold, by the late 19th century our volume of production had fallen behind America.

To make matters worse, we were failing to educate the next generation. On the eve of the First World War, Germany had 60,000 university students. We had just 9,000.

Having founded reasonably good car, aerospace, textile and shipbuilding industries, we seemed to give up.

My theory is that by 1945 everyone was exhausted. After two world wars and a depression, a desire for security was endemic in society.

We were encouraged to get a job that promised a safe future - accountancy, law, medicine, the foreign office or some other part of the civil service. We sought refuge in the comfort of pipes, nursery food, big fat armchairs in stuffy, overheated rooms and low-risk jobs for life. We'd become lazy and we failed to capitalize on our wartime inventions such as penicillin, radar and computers.

Meanwhile, grammar and public schools groomed us for university. We were encouraged to become middle-class professionals and to avoid industry and manufacturing.

When I was at school, my teachers told me that if I failed my exams I'd end up in a factory.

They conjured up a ghastly Dickensian image of grime, repetitive tasks, lousy working conditions and bookkeeping on thick ledgers on high lecterns.

And as a manufacturer, I've had to get used to the brickbats that I heard bandied as a child.

The most prevalent of which was that manufacturing was exploitative. Oh, how we liked to paint a picture of being "under the thumb of big business".

Even as a child, I never quite understood why anything to do with industry was portrayed as a dark, evil thing. But if someone made money from 40,000 inherited acres of prime farmland, or from retailing, then somehow it was morally acceptable. And then we nationalized our major industries.

As a result of all these attitudes and conditions, we failed to benefit from the great, international, post-war, economic boom. While the economies of other countries were expanding, ours was contracting. Much of it was down to our dwindling manufacturing base. In 1950, we produced a quarter of the world's exports, in 1970, just one tenth. By the mid 1980s our international goods trade was in deficit. Fast forward to today.

We rely on our service industries to prop up our alarming trade deficit. And this sorry situation is often presented as the conclusive argument that we have tipped from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.

The number of 'Made in...' labels in shops, is no longer an accurate gauge of a country's economic output. So how can we continue to generate wealth when we're making less and importing more?

A commentator recently gave an example. Buying a plastic model of Professor Dumbledore the Harry Potter character - costs around £10. Doubtlessly it will be labeled 'made in China'. But according to the commentator, the retail and wholesale margins, royalties, design, advertising and promotion will contribute £7 or £8 to Britain's GDP.

Well I'm sorry to disillusion everyone who believes this argument, but as a manufacturer who operates in 37 countries, I know from experience that this isn't the case.

Most of the distribution costs will be spent shipping the toy to this country. Advertising and promotion are likely to be coordinated in the manufacturer's home country. And 10 per cent or more of the cost will go to Warner Brothers.

First, we spend much more on big, expensive engineered things than we spend on cheap goods such as plastic toys.

Things like: cars or airplanes, or the glass and steel used to build skyscrapers in the City.

And if you buy something substantial, then the proportion of the total cost spent on distribution and marketing, within Britain, is minuscule.

But there is an even better argument for supporting our manufacturing industries.

Just imagine that a British company was manufacturing the toys. Then, instead of

scraping a few pennies off each doll sold here, we would be recouping the revenues from every Dumbledore sold anywhere in the world.

But I am not arguing that we have to manufacture everything in Britain for it to continue to generate wealth for us. What we need is companies that make their money from manufacturing. Even if they do their assembly elsewhere.

Do the engineering here. Develop the technology here. Oversee the production from here. Plan the marketing and organize the selling here.

Then if they sell their Dumbledore's - or their cars or airplanes or televisions - anywhere in the world, then the revenues return to this country.

And the people doing those engineering jobs are highly paid. More than the people doing the retailing jobs that the commentator cited.

But instead of appreciating this simple fact, we have created a strange society.

One in which economic growth relies on us continuing to spend ever greater amounts of our money shopping. Napoleon wasn't quite right. We're not a nation of shopkeepers, but shopaholics.

I'm as guilty as the next person. I like nothing more than a trip to the shops. I often find myself lost and overwhelmed in DIY stores.

But I am convinced that our love of retailing is part of the reason for our lack of interest in engineering and manufacturing. We say that we're heading into town for a bit of "retail therapy." What we're really doing is going for some product therapy.

But the phrase 'retail therapy' reveals our true motives. We are as turned on by the act of buying as by the goods we purchase. We have become divorced from the producer.

the first question will be 'Where did you get it?' not 'Who made it?' The inference is, that if you bought it somewhere expensive and exclusive, then it must be good.

The perception is that the shop makes the goods, not the producer. The massive retailer eclipses the producer.

Yet making money from retailing or the City is admired. While making it from manufacturing is not. Clean money is okay, it seems. Dirty money isn't.

'Not bad for two years' work,' said Philip Green, when he made £460m in two years from his investment in BHS. The general reaction was good luck to him.

Maybe it goes back to the Florentines teaching us the business of trade. Trade, of course, predates manufacturing and has always dominated it. But it's pretty pointless if we don't make anything to trade.

That means investing in engineering, and engineers, to ensure we don't repeat the

The first step is to address the shortcomings of our education system. And to use it to change attitudes.

Actually, it is one area of our culture that has vastly improved its approach to engineering. We have a generation of children who have studied Design and Technology at school.

I'm also heartened by the changes taking place on our university design courses.

They have recognized that styling, as a separate entity was an invention of the latter half of the 20th century. And that it was essentially about putting a tired product in new clothes.

Most art and design colleges are now moving from teaching industrial design to teaching engineering design. It's not just a name. They are actually teaching engineering.

The Royal College of Art was in the vanguard when it devised a joint-course with Imperial College. It draws on Imperial's engineering expertise - something I did

Five years ago, students got away with turning out conceptual designs. Few of them worked. They were entirely styling and marketing exercises.

Nowadays, students have to make breadboard prototypes that work. Then they think about the packaging and styling.

But there's more we could do at schools and universities. I believe we force our children to specialize too early.

By the time they are 14 or 15, our children have been pigeonholed. They are either scientists or artists. It limits their choices. And it doesn't create the kind of rounded characters that make innovative, lateral thinkers. After all, the Lunar Men, who made the discoveries that set the industrial revolution in motion, were polymaths.

Look at the countries where engineering is held in high esteem - France and Germany. Most pupils continue with some science instruction right through school.

We also need to develop a culture of rewarding failure. For too long, we have valued effortless brilliance, like the Oxford double first. Not the dogged determined slogger. It has created a culture in which "having a strong work ethic" is a term of insult.

But the fact is, the B grade students are the most successful in life. They make the best entrepreneurs. They have learned to persevere and they're not scared of failure. Thomas Edison summed it up brilliantly: "Invention and success are one per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration."

If I had given up on prototype 05126 I wouldn't be standing here tonight. It took one more prototype to really make it work. All that taught me a huge amount.

In subjects such as Design and Technology, I think students should be marked by how many mistakes they make.

It's what they learn from those mistakes that are important. Not how quickly and neatly they complete the task. We need to instill an ethos that learning should be through experience and experiment, rather than by rote.

Educating our children to appreciate engineering is only the first step. The next is to change their attitudes.

On one side "an extra 125 million pounds for Theatreland." On the other, "funds for

As a result, we now produce only 3,000 Physics graduates a year. Compare that to an astonishing 15,000 psychologists!

Again, long-term prosperity is being sacrificed at the altar of short-term gain.

Certainly it's an attitude I encountered again and again when I was starting up.

I was seeking funding to manufacture my vacuum cleaner. A delightful American called Bob Peyton was also looking for money.

I wanted to build up something with a potential worldwide market. My business would not offer a return for several years, whereas Bob was promising a relatively quick buck. So guess who got the funding?

Banks and venture capitalists are not going to invest long-term unless we give them an incentive.

To do that we need two things. Tax breaks on long term manufacturing investment. And lower interest rates. Permanently.

As I explained in evidence to the Monetary Policy Committee, manufacturers quite

like inflation. It's interest rates and the exchange rate that bother them. Inflation means our borrowings get smaller, faster. High interest rates, on the other hand, hamper investment. And high exchange rates create the double whammy of less revenue from exports and more competition from cheaper imports.

So it seems to me utterly bizarre that we set a target rate for inflation. And to achieve it, we try to use interest rates - a blunt instrument at the best of times.

It should be the other way round. We should set low targets for Interest and Exchange Rates. That will encourage investment in manufacturing and R&D.

It's a fortune by British standards. British companies invest a meager 2.1 per cent

the rest of the stock market. So there's a good reason for the City to take a longer-term view.

The Government already gives a small tax break for R&D. It needs to be extended to cover not just innovation, but devising step-by-step improvements to existing products and the consequent re-tooling. It's what made Japanese products so successful.

But without support for on-going research, it is much more productive for companies to invest in advertising. It offers short-term sales gain but provides no long-term investment in our future.

The Government could take genuine steps to encourage R&D investment. Then we could turnaround one of the most depressing signs of our diminishing inventiveness.

And in terms of patent applications per capita - probably the best measure of a nation's inventiveness - we are fast slipping down the league tables. A few years ago, Britain was in seventh place, behind Luxembourg and only just ahead of Monaco. I'd be tempted to ask you to name a famous Monegasque inventor.

And to encourage manufacturers and financiers to invest in the future through R&D.

We're already taking the right steps in our schools and universities. They have turned their backs on shallow styling. They have realized that the future belongs to people who make things that work better.

The cultural change has long been apparent in architecture. It has abandoned the hollow styling obsession of post-modernism. The best architects now make a feature of the technology that makes their designs possible.

It shows that in the field of architecture, technology and engineering are shaping the future.

We got it halfway right in the past. If we recognize our failings, we can do better in the future. Manufacturing and engineering are about brains, not brawn or looks.

James Dyson, British engineer and entrepreneur, and the world-famous inventor of the 'bagless' vacuum cleaner. A man who like to make things work better, he and his research team have developed products that have achieved sales of over £3 billion worldwide. To find out more, visit Dyson's corporate website .

Since 1997, we have closed 18 physics departments and 28 chemistry departments. As a result, we now produce only 3,000 Physics graduates a year. Compare that to an astonishing 15,000 psychologists! And it's going to get worse. Yet more science departments are due to close. Again, long-term prosperity is being sacrificed at the altar of short-term gain.

Yeah... You just wait until we get a "Wake-up Call" from the Chinese, when they (with their hundreds of thousands of science and engineering graduates) start producing military technology that completely obsoletes our entire military in the twinkling of an eye.

There'll be an insatantaneous 1960's-Sputnik-launch-style panic to "Reform The Educational System" so we can "Close The Technology Gap" - but this time, it will be too late.

"Now, as I said, no engineer has ever stood here before. And the last industrialist to occupy this spot did so nearly 20 years ago. I can't help thinking, that long absence says something about the way we regard engineers and manufacturers. Manufacturers and engineers make things to improve our lives and create wealth."

I read this far. I suspect part of the problem one sees in the 'outsourcing' craze, especially in the technology sector, stems from a lack of understanding of the scope of what engineers do. I have said it before in this forum that engineers tend to be the Atlases of the business world, and I still think this is so.

Bookmarked for later reading.

When you invent meanings for words you are doing the work of a lexicographer. Are you one? You invented a new and novel meaning of "engineer" for the sole purpose of scorning a whole field of study, a practical art and a profession.

We are no certain exactly what YOU mean by your novel definition of "engineer" except for that clear aspect of your usage.

Now what be you? A lexicographer for the vanity published Dictionary of Belittlements? Why do you make us guess?

As long as the engineers stick to engineering, fine. When they venture outside there "scope of work" into business or finance... disaster!

What horsecrap.... I'm sitting here in the heart of the Silicon Valley, a place founded by engineers who weren't happy at their big corporate jobs, so they decided to form their own company.

'Nuff said.

You did. That is the meaning of your words.

Engineering is working with things to make them work. It is an art that involves deep understandings of dynamic processes and skills in mathematics. Engineering differs from a mathematician's pure trade, or that of a physcist in that an engineer is concerned with actual practise, with developing practical systems that perform as intended.

Those things are exactly what a CEO needs -- to make things work in actual practise, usually with some representation of real processes in models. The same skills in fact as a CFO.

Most CEO's and CFO's are competent engineers in that sense of applying mathematical representations of business and market process to acheive practical goals.

Your usage of "engineer" as a verb was entirely in a belittling sense. You meant that the art and practise of "engineering" was something that hobbles a person, makes tham unable to perform. Why is that? We do not know, you refuse to tell us how that is.

As an engineer I founded a company in a spare bedroom of a
townhouse. Today (Ten years later)I provide electronic equipment,
instruments, electrical connectors, embedded control and
power conversion (all manufactured in house) for the
Army, Navy, Marines, U.A.V.
industry, OEM aircraft manufactures (Bell, Sikorsky,
etc.) GDLS (tanks), FMS (foreign military sales),
hospitals (Johns Hopkins, Mayo etc.), police, USCG, FBI, Even
the President's aircraft.
In the last couple of months we added vibration, emi,
temperature, explosive atmosphere and altitude testing
to our line card.
In fact I am engineering the bottom line right now.
It's called profit.
It's is the next 100 million dollar product I am going to
market to the aerospace industry.

Engineers: From the Drafting Room to the Board Room
NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 1 - Every year, a new management fad seems to emerge that "guarantees" success to those who apply it. But, those looking to succeed in the upper levels of management may want to consider a more traditional approach that many of today's top executives have used - a degree in engineering. According to a recent ranking by Business Week of CEOs of the top 1,000 publicly held US companies, more chief executive officers majored in engineering - not marketing, not finance, and not law - than any other discipline.

To determine why engineers are "suddenly" leading major corporations, perhaps one first needs to look back in time. In fact, at the height of the industrial revolution in the late 1800s and early 1900s, engineers were much more visible as business leaders. These entrepreneurs - such as Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and the Wright brothers, to name a few - not only invented new products, but developed the means to produce them. As a result, new corporations were formed to manufacture, market, and distribute their innovations. These organizations were usually led by the engineers who founded them. Succeeding generations of leadership often possessed many of the characteristics of their founders, including an engineering background.

Today, a second industrial revolution, this one involving communications, is also being led by engineers. Like their predecessors, they are also founding and leading large corporations that are at the forefront of the communications revolution.

Webster defines engineering as:

The application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people b : the design and manufacture of complex products

Doesn't say a shingle from a school is required. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and many others (you know who you are!) either dropped out of school or never went. The University system was belittling to their intelligience and they were looked upon as threats by their insecure professors. Instead of given freedom to flourish, they were ordered to conform. In the old days, you were trained by the company you worked for (Ford trained by Edison)and sank or swam.

Engineering is all about one thing: Finding a way to get it done.

Just bought one of Mr. Dyson's vaccuum's a month ago. Boy does it suck! (the way it is supposed to!).

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