Can Engineering Make you Rich? How Engineers Make Great CEOs

success creates a lot of intrigue when you hear about or meet someone who's successful it's very natural to want to know their story where they came from what they studied in university and how they climbed the mountain that they did and the more success that you achieve the more allure that you have around this person and their story everyone knows that doctors and lawyers and these types of professions that when you meet someone your internal mindset is oh wow this person is successful they must make a lot of money even though this is the case for a lot of these professions it is not these people who go on to make the most money have the most impact and change the world actually it's engineers so in this video we're going to talk about three reasons why this is why some of these from humble beginning engineers go on to run the biggest companies and have the most worldwide impact and therefore have a humongous salary lessons that you can deploy in your life whether you're an engineer today or not and we're starting right now [Music] hey guys jk welcome back to the show if you're interested in engineering topics and career success make sure you subscribe for six years between 2014 and 2019 the harvard business review ranked the top 100 ceos from all across the world they did this in categories that not only were earnings and revenue but things like company culture environmental impact and in that six year time frame we have seen some alarming discoveries as analysts and people watching the best companies on the planet you would imagine that most of these ceos have some sort of business administration degree maybe even an mba from one of the elite universities like stanford or wharton or harvard but what's actually the case is that there are more engineers on this list than business administration degrees in 2018 34 of the top 100 ceos had an engineering degree and only 32 had mbas i looked at the data for 2019 i didn't go through all 100 but 12 of the top 18 ceos have engineering degrees and if you keep going down the list you see plenty of engineers here let's take a look at some examples ceo of google sundar pichai metallurgical engineer we have larry page the co-founder of google computer engineering degree from michigan amazon ceo jeff bezos electrical engineer apple tim cook industrial engineer microsoft gm nvidia texas instruments adobe louis vuitton amd ibm exxonmobil are all ceoed by someone with an engineering degree some of this is because there are more technology companies in general and engineers are possibly more equipped to run these but there are more answers than just this alone ceos have a lot on their plate from handling overall company operations managing resources and communicating with the company's board ceo is without question one of the most difficult rules you can have and that's why they are paid accordingly when steve jobs passed away in october of 2011 it was only a few months before that that tim cook was announced as ceo everyone was worried about the future of apple without their visionary when cook was promoted from humble working-class beginnings in mobile alabama son of a shipyard worker and a part-time pharmacy worker but it turns out that tim cook was exactly what apple needed after studying industrial engineering at auburn university he launched his career with ibm where cook spent 12 years and ended as their director of north american fulfillment and it was in this role where he became a supply chain expert it's this system-wide engineering approach that led to tim cook's success running apple engineers are often excellent ceos because of the systematic way they're taught to approach the world and the problems they'll find within it apple is usually known for its world-changing products but what matters most at a mature company like apple is not the products but rather the logistics of those products an efficient supply chain distribution financing and marketing aren't sexy but they shape success when cook initially took over apple's supply chain he cut down the number of component suppliers from 100 to 24 forcing companies to compete for apple's business cook also shut down over half of apple warehouses to limit overstocking and by september of 1998 inventory was down from a month to only six days since taking over the roll cook has aggressively expanded apple into new markets especially china this wouldn't be possible without a big efficient supply chain to feed the massive growth and since cook became ceo apple has become the first publicly traded company to reach a 1 trillion dollar market capitalization which happened in 2018. apple was now worth over two trillion dollars on the markets and it was only valuated at 400 million dollars when cook took over that's 5x growth under an engineer have a system-wide top-down logistical supply chain type approach to all of your problems and all of your projects that you're working on and you can be successful like tim cook has been for apple another priceless skill set that engineers sometimes have is vision most projects require engineers of many different disciplines and backgrounds and perspectives and through this collaboration a leader's vision can come to life and there's no other engineering ceo that understands the collaborative necessity in order to institute vision other than sundar pachai the ceo of google pachai is from middle class beginnings in india where his family did not have a phone until he was 12 years old which was one of his first introductions to technology and he actually had to share the living room with his brother because he and his family only lived in a two-bedroom apartment he went on to one of the top universities iit in india where he studied metallurgical engineering and took a scholarship to then achieve access to the united states where he did his master's degree at stanford he abandoned the phd route and went to get his mba at wharton where he then accepted some jobs at companies and then eventually got into a product engineering role at google this was in 2004 when google had no web browser it was just a search engine where pachai and his team worked on the google search toolbar feature so that you could use google no matter what web browser you were operating with but i could tell that this situation left google vulnerable and he went to then ceo eric schmidt and the co-founders larry page and sergey brin about the challenge that google was potentially going to face because they did not have their own web browser and his ideas got shot down eric schmidt in particular the ceo said that this idea was way too expensive we cannot build our own web browser and sudhar went on to play this situation with patience in order to execute his vision what's perhaps most striking about mr pichai's ascent at google is that he has operated differently from most other senior executives at the company google has had a combative internal culture in its upper ranks and turf wars can be fierce yet mr pachai is subdued and usually eager to collaborate rather than wage a political fight something that's won him respect across the company and the trust of mr page and it's this patience to execute on his vision that led to success it took two years for eric smith to see that they need a web browser but finally he greenlit the project and it was barely on time later that same year in 2006 microsoft announced that their browser internet explorer was going to launch using bing.com at the time it was called live search but this announcement was devastating to google in response google amplified the development of their own web browser project and it took them a full two years but finally in 2008 they launched google chrome in early 2009 internet explorer had a dominating 65 of all search traffic and chrome was about one percent today chrome hosts more than fifty percent of all web searches and internet explorer is under four percent i don't even like being friends with people who use internet explorer larry and sergey were impressed with sundar's vision and this led him to further promotions and more innovation like creating the chrome operating system creating chromebooks taking over the full android department and eventually being offered the ceo role in 2015 and later the ceo of all of alphabet the parent company of google in 2019. so pachai has gone from sharing a bedroom with his brother in the living room in his two-bedroom apartment in india with his family to now being worth 600 million dollars in net worth pretty good ascent to being a powerful rich and famous engineer when it comes to leadership it oftentimes does come with a larger office and a higher salary and most team members don't actually mind this they understand that's why the leader gets paid more but what is required with these things all of these advantages of being a leader is that when danger shows up or challenges or issues you need to appear and save the team and do what's right as a leader [Music] you need to be responsible for what has happened and no one knows this better than mary barra the ceo of gm she was the first woman ceo in the automotive industry just days after becoming the new ceo in january of 2014 barrow discovered that an ignition switch failure in gm cars were directly responsible for 124 deaths and 275 injuries at the time gm had a bad reputation of taking accountability for their actions like when congress slammed executives during the 2008 bailout for their perceived arrogance during the hearing barra was quick to issue apologies and publicly take responsibility for gm bar's behavior shows that leaders aren't perfect and they shouldn't pretend to be in fact by handling their mistakes well leaders can be an example to everyone in the organization the ignition switch scandal caused borrow to redesign its safety processes fire some employees and implement a safety week so gm team members can continue to improve so that no one forgets what happened since 2014 baro has gone on to accomplish some great things she was featured on the cover of time's 100 most influential people in the world ranked number one on fortune's list of most powerful women in 2016 and remain number one for 2017 and having earned 21.6 million in 2019 borrow has the highest compensation of any leader of the detroit big three automakers responsibility is a huge asset within engineering engineers in canada even wear a ring that touches all of their work to remind them to take accountability for their work such that they are serious about every design every calculation and estimate that they conduct on a day-by-day basis so that they can keep people safe keep people alive and keep the environment clean and healthy for everyone so when you're on your career journey whether you're an engineer or not take a page out of some of these engineering ceo's books in order to have better success take a systems-wide approach like tim cook have great vision for your ideas and stick to that vision through collaborative exercises and patience like sandar pachai and in the case of mary barra take responsibility and accountability for your team stand up and apologize if you need to it will be a great leadership lesson within your group or organization i hope you enjoyed the video guys if you're an engineer or someone who cares about career success make sure you subscribe [Music] you

Channel: Jake Voorhees

Views: 39,072

Keywords: Can Engineering Make you Rich, are engineers rich, why do engineers make great ceos, highest paying jobs, how to become rich

Id: A8Xv5rz_LOU

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021