Northwestern MEM Webinar: Engineering Management 101

that is great so welcome to everybody all of our guests around the world my name is mark werweth i'm the director of the mem program here at northwestern i've been the director for about five years and i've i'm also an alum i'm an alum from 1987. the program here is something close to 40 years old and we've got a great legacy here and a great tradition uh and a great program and i'm sure that most of you have looked at that or know much about it tonight we're simply going to be talking about considerations that you might have as an engineer becoming a manager becoming a group leader things that you need to think about i know it's going to seem overwhelming so i'll tell you that up front there's a lot here some of which is intuitive um if you're already a manager i suspect you've already done some of this if not much of this uh i can also tell you that i made myself personally a lot of mistakes that helped me develop this deck so this comes from both my lived experience as well as the stuff i was taught as a young engineering group leader and engineering manager back in the day companies would actually invest in training new leaders and new managers and i suspect that there's not as much investment these days which is why we put this together so again um things we're going to talk about i'm going to include my background as well as some key considerations for you and some examples so that you have some practical uh applications for this my own personal experiences stories that if you will tie all this together and then hopefully we'll have some time for some open discussion some questions and concerns you might have um i i was in the workplace for quite some time i had almost 30 years of experience in engineering and new product development both at wms gaming which was believe it or not a slot machine company so i made slot machines a highly regulated business most of my career was at motorola where i made everything from cellular phones to base station radios and large-scale 9-1-1 systems and i had a brief stint in aerospace at northrop grumman uh program managing uh effectively a a foreign defense a foreign defense contract with marconi of england so that was a very uh worthwhile and great experience so i've managed large complex systems product development i t projects manufacturing projects radio network system implementations and i've worked of course around the world i am a pmp um it's something that a lot of our students contemplate getting while they're in the program and i i do believe this program helps prepare you to a large extent for passing the exam and for being a um a project management professional my main responsibilities as i've been the director now for about five years is to first and foremost accept only the best students so we're very selective here we're probably as selective as some of the best mba programs in the country uh my all my second job is to keep the curriculum current relevant and properly delivered by by excellent faculty my third job is to really network students to the community of seasoned professionals to plug them in so to speak you don't come to northwestern just to get a a transfer of information you don't come here just to get a few skills under your under your belt you also come to to plug in and to network in to the network of uh professional engineers and engineering managers right the fourth bullet's going to make you uncomfortable and at first it kind of made me uncomfortable but i'm here to stretch you and i'm here to stretch you beyond what you normally would would do in your day-to-day job everyone's very courteous in the corporate setting and of course we're courteous here but my job is to put you in settings that would um force you to look at things from a different perspective work in teams that perhaps people you've never worked with before on topics and on projects that you've never possibly seen before so stretch you in areas such as leadership and emotional intelligence and things that are softer topics that most engineers never get exposed to unless they take a program like meow my ultimate job my final job my my um [Music] main job really is to turn turn you and to turn students into technology and engineering leaders so uh we do that through a series of uh very i guess well calculated experiences and courses and topics and faculty members that are very good at putting you through exercises right um the first concept i guess or the first thing you need to deal with as a new leader and i'm assuming for this purpose that really you become a leader for the first time i may or may not be the organization that you were working in it could be a new organization right and if it is the first issue is going to be credibility you are the outsider you are coming into an organization that doesn't know who you are or what you're capable of so your history your background and your accomplishments are all part of the credibility puzzle if you will that people are trying to assemble on your behalf they're trying to uh understand if what you say is really worth listening to they want to know who you're connected to your network who are your senior level supporters why do they support you but they also and i hate to say this but to some extent you will be judged you'll be judged on your demeanor your presence do people naturally want to pay attention to you are you worth you know being listened to i guess right is is there something that you have to say or perhaps the way you say it that makes people stand up and take notice right and last but not least especially with engineering your knowledge your judgment your creativity your ability to understand the system or the problem that's in front of you is going to be uh you know first and foremost in people's minds are you really in the right position are you the right person to take on this job um i'll never forget the day i took over uh the gsm infrastructure business at motorola and i was their biz ops executive director and the first day on the job i came into this conference room filled with engineers and of course most of them had their laptops open and [Music] you know the current executive director turned to me and said mark what do you think of this organization what's your first observation and luckily i had one it's not luck it was skill i knew that i had to have one and my first uh observation was that we had a serious problem with quality on gsr8 which was their system release that was going out the door and um he turned to me and he was surprised he said how did you know that or how did what makes you think that and i said well outside of this conference room is a quality chart and that quality chart is going in the wrong direction and it was clearly labeled gsr8 and it was updated three days ago and with that everyone stopped and looked at me and said wow they didn't know that so here i am the new guy one hour on the job you could argue i literally had no i shouldn't have any clue what was going on and i was able to educate everyone in that room on something that everyone in that room should have known about and uh at the time motorola took quality very seriously i think it still does but um i mean you i think i gained some credibility points that day and some of that was certainly uh by my design i wanted to show these people that i hey i might be new i may not know exactly what's going on in all cases but i am observant i can read a chart i've been around the block before and i know motorola so that came across that day so you too will be tested and that's my last bullet on this chart you too will be tested and you'll be watched very carefully i tell students in my leadership class be used to and be comfortable with the idea of being watched almost every step along the way every word you say how you say it right all the way down to um who you have lunch with because all of these things will be will be looked at and it sounds bizarre but um if you're not comfortable with that if you don't like the idea that everything you say and do will be under a microscope think twice about leadership because frankly that's just part of part of the job whether you're a group leader on the job at your company or whether you're a president of your country or anything in between you'll find that leaders are all looked at very carefully so you're taking over a new organization right you should start by understanding your boss who is your boss who you report to what's the network of bosses above you and around you um what is his or her perspective of the organization of the problem that you face of the competition of the market try to put yourself in your boss's shoes and try to understand your boss's perspective right um what's your boss's view of the organization you just took over right you might find that uh you're surprised and it might be worth asking that question right um i remember my first day on the job at uh uh when i was at northrop i was actually running a program with a client that was uh 4 000 miles away and i asked my boss that that time was an executive vp in charge of program management what do you think of this client and i thought he was going to tell me this is the most important client in the business that this client was the most important thing we've got um in the entire building and i was like amazed when he told me the exact opposite in fact he told me these this customer this client is driving me crazy he's nickel and diming us right i kind of wish they would go away um and i hope you can uh manage with that in mind and you know that those two sentences made a huge difference for me and i was very glad i asked what uh my boss's view was right what are your goals how are you going to be measured right how does your boss measure your success right it's worth knowing especially as early as you possibly can what problems has this group experience you just inherited not just the group and not just the people and not just the goals and the work plan you've also inherited those problems and some of them are real and some of them are perceived and part of your job is to figure out which is which i don't think anyone's going to give you a recipe book that says these are the real ones and these aren't i think you have to decide that for yourself that becomes your leadership perspective your teachable point of view right why were you chosen for this role um some you know it's often a good question to ask so that there might be a specific skill that they're looking for from you um you know i that's a question i wished i had asked because i eventually figured it out over time but it would have been a lot easier to just know that up front and then of course who are the key stakeholders right your success depends a lot more than just what your boss thinks because your boss is also talking to other people horizontally across the organization about you about your organization your your uh your your role in the in the in the place and how it works so it's important to understand who those key stakeholders are are and how you are going to be obsessed and how you're going to be viewed financials this might be foreign to many of you maybe you've never looked at a budget before so if you haven't find somebody in accounting to be friend and find uh find out how your budget is looked at uh get a print out of it or get some sort of a file that describes your budget and then your actuals against that budget um you know who established that budget what were the assumptions behind it are you being measured on costs revenue head count uh in my early career i was managing a cost center and then later i'd say when i was maybe in my late 20s i was running a business which had a full income statement attached to it and that was an amazing experience but clearly with the income statement i was being measured at the bottom line you know how much did i return to the company against my budget against my plan what are your actual costs to date what's your trend right contrast that with your budget what drives the budget what are the key assumptions how would you financially model your business if you had that chance right um is your head count at budgeted levels how many requisitions are you allowed to have are you over budget and do you have to cut back right who approves changes to the budget and when are budgets set and what is the planning process those last two bullets are questions that i should have asked um you know even my last job at wms gaming it took me a while to figure out the cycle and where you are in the cycle of executing against your annual budget and establishing those new budgets so you know when is your chance in the year to actually adjust your budget assumptions and your budget in your budget model right if your financial model so these are questions that you need to ask early on in my mind so there's a lot more you can say about all of this stuff that's you know frankly why we have a course in finance we have a course in accounting so that you can do a deep dive and understand what an income statement is what the balance statement is you should be getting in my mind at least a monthly budget report where you can compare your actuals to your to your budget and then see what adjustments you might need to make right don't be afraid to deal with issues and early on don't be afraid to ask silly questions because i think it's better to ask those early than to ask them later um hr right something that we often forget right in the u.s we view hr very differently than how it's viewed overseas in the u.s hr is often a an extension of the law department kind of a part of the general counsel's office or at least implementing the policies of the gc i would say the first thing you should do in hr from an hr perspective when you take on a group is to review all the performance reviews and the rankings of your staff do you have a good team do you have a team that's well regarded and well compensated look especially for time and grades salary position and grade and training backgrounds um of course it makes sense to sit down with each of your direct reports and get that firsthand from them but i don't think you want to necessarily ask people their time and grade per se or their salary those are things you can look up but i'm sure people would love to share their their background their educational background their training their experience some organizations have a very formal 360 feedback process review what that said especially feedback from peers i would also review reports from your staff things that have been written down about projects about you know status across the board so that you have a sense of both how your staff communicates how they view the organization and uh what their what their strengths are you can start to see that in their writing get some uh get some feedback from peers in the organization about not just the organization but who works in it who your direct reports might be okay so payroll kind of an extension of the financial discussion but is everyone on your payroll budgeted do you have budgeted headcount that's not yet on board what offers are outstanding what are the pay grades of the people on your staff these are key questions to ask or get answered i guess one way or the other paid time off do you have a way of tracking that you know where are people in their pto cycle uh where are they when it comes to vacation time um is everything coordinated so that you don't have your entire organization taking vacation at the same time right and is this factored into the work plan for your group so it's amazing how often our work plans do not include very basic things like gee schedule time off or vacations that are very foreseeable right this last bullet is the most difficult mark i'm just going to chime in we had a question uh in the chat box about uh specifically what is a 360 feedback process ah okay it's a good question if you haven't experienced it it's when usually hr coordinates a feedback or formal feedback of your peers so um literally asking for feedback on your behalf and supplying you that data not just up and down the organization but across the organization so anyone and everyone you work with uh would be asked to fill out a 360 evaluation right um and then the last bullet like i said is probably the most difficult right are job descriptions and pay grades all in alignment meaning do you have people that are working beyond the jd are they working beyond their pay grade or perhaps not living up to that pay grade um and do the jd's really um are they properly compensated uh or has perhaps time gotten the better of those job descriptions they need to be upgraded and they need to be aligned um a work plan i would think that every organization would have a work plan but it's kind of surprising how often they don't have published work plans or documented ones so what projects are you staffed and which projects are not staffed in your group what are people assigned to what's the next project on the horizon and what's the project you're finishing up does the work plan align with the realities of how you're staffed and budgeted are the assumptions in the work plan in alignment with reality right how does your group's roadmap fit into the higher level organizational roadmap hopefully you were hired because you knew some of these answers but if you don't this is certainly something you need to talk to architects talk to the um i guess your your peers right as well as your boss to try to understand how what's the big picture here right how does your project or your set of projects fit into the the grandeur revenue scheme of things right what's your current status right i remember distinctly uh uh my first meeting with a client at northrop i literally had um maybe a half a day's notice if that and uh i literally was almost the first day on the job and here's the the client grilling me about the status of a unit under test in the reliability lab the irony or the i guess the good fortune was that i had walked past that lab on the way to my office and i talked to the engineer and i had a full scoop on exactly what was going on down to the latest failure what the root cause that failure was and what we were going to do to fix it when i finished briefing the client this was literally the first time i'd ever talked to him and he's asking me for status i gave him such detailed status he paused and he said well mark congratulations i think we're in good hands welcome aboard so was he testing me absolutely did i pass the test that day i think i did and um is it in your best interest to be prepared at all times absolutely because you never know when you'll be tested um and then lastly you know is there a roadmap for long-term direction setting in your group you know where are you going both with product technology resource tools environmental aspects everything associated with your roadmap you should have some sort of directional understanding and some rationale behind it do you have a client many of you do i'm sure some of you do not have a client do you know their expectations right what's the status of your client do you have proposals in the pipeline are there current items under contract are you delinquent on anything right what's your possible new proposal in the future right what are they looking for that they haven't gotten my sense of negotiations with my client was that almost every day he was he was asking me for things that weren't in the weren't in the spec weren't in the contract and in turn there were things i needed so it was really kind of keeping track of the stuff that he was asking for and keeping track of the stuff i was looking for and then when the time came matching those two things up trying to create some sort of a deal where you know give me this i'll give you that and all will be even because we tried to avoid uh you know changes in the dollars because that was difficult on both sides and then what are the expectations of your client by your management right um what are they expecting so quality work product and work process is there a measure of quality and consistency how do you stand in your organization with that are you delivering what people are expecting do you track and control design changes and what's the process for that at uh almost every company i worked at if we didn't have a change control process i put one in and those processes really put your finger right on the um on the jugular if you will right on the the pulse of the organization because frankly if you don't control changes they're probably going to be controlling you right are all the products properly documented are you proud of that documentation right if there's a build process how consistently is your product being built to that process right are there tools and measuring equip equipment and are they controlled and calibrated is there a process model or procedure that your team is following supposedly or in reality right is your process well-defined documented in key performance indicators kpis are they created do you know what they are and how do you track against that so these are kind of the process management steps that we go through in a typical process engineering class here on campus we both uh simulate processes we characterize processes and in some cases we provide tools to help our students automate processes so all three are what we try to embrace in my process class next up is governance right so how do you hold people and teams accountable this is a very kind of uncomfortable topic for people um [Music] sometimes it's as easy as simply asking how are things going where do we stand on that deliverable from last week right do you hold meetings with your team is it meant for accountability or is it more focused on communications and alignment um so it gets back to i'm sure you're being held accountable by your boss is there a way that you're comfortable with that helps you hold your team accountable and then how are decisions made in your organization is there some sort of a process for prioritizing or choosing projects or deselecting projects how is uh decision making allocated amongst team leads and project managers right is the project manager a heavyweight as we would say in the textbooks or is it more of a lightweight project manager uh is it more of a coordinator function what is the role of the functional manager versus the project manager right and in my classes we spent quite a bit of time talking both about that and the role of the sponsor right through projects have proper sponsorship right from senior leaders how are we doing for time steve okay i can't hear you so i'm hoping you can hear me yeah we're doing we're doing okay okay cool all right so i'll keep going uh some revelations from the trenches right this is um these are things i learned kind of little aha moments in my career that just kind of struck me that and and some of these i apologize up front some of these are going to seem painfully obvious for those of you that have lived through it but others of you have not so you know the first bullet was simply you know we try to hire people and and kind of affiliate with people that are just like us right uh and the truth is they're not just like you right and that could be a good thing and that can be a bad thing but everyone is different and the more you learn about them the more you realize these differences right i remember trying to um promote somebody the irony was he was one of the first employees i had that was maybe 10 years older than i was and i assumed that he was just like me that he wanted to be promoted the same way i wanted to be promoted and he smiled he gave me this kind of uh funny grin he leaned forward and he said mark i'm not interested in promotion i'm not even interested in making more money right and these are the things i'm interested in boom boom boom he laid them out he was more interested in paid time off he was more interested in having an enjoyable vacation and following his hobbies and um i had no idea so don't make the assumption that like i did that everyone is just like you right the second bullet you hire people for their strengths right we tend to want to fix people for their weaknesses and try to offset that or maybe correct them and uh you may learn over time that those are very difficult things to change so you want to leverage their strengths instead of wallow in their weaknesses right it's your job to leverage those strengths right and it's your job to either mitigate or manage the weakness you're probably not going to fix people so try don't necessarily go in there thinking you're going to fix people in that sense being an engineer and being a manager can be very different as engineers we want to fix broken things right you're not going to be able to fix a lot of the weaknesses you see in people you can provide them training some guidance perhaps some advice coaching is always a good thing to do but you're probably not going to overcome fundamental weakness right you're not here to become the most popular person in the building um if you are you're probably not going to be that effective people don't necessarily respect amy ability if that's all you have is that that's the only thing you bring to the party um if all you can say is i brought the best donuts to the to the meeting uh people are not gonna necessarily respect that right and at the same time people say is it okay to be friends with your staff and my response is generally no i think um you have to keep some sort of distance if you will with your staff so that uh you can look at them objectively and they can look at you objectively and you don't have to kind of intermingle this idea that i need to be friends with everybody um i you know it's worked for me and i suspect it'll probably work for you as well recognize that different people are motivated by different approaches different uh different ways of learning different ways of being enticed to work on a project it's your job to learn what motivates each person i'll never forget my boss in my last job said mark i know exactly how to motivate you all i have to do is say we need help we need help and that alone would literally get me all excited i'd want to jump in and be the first person to help um and you know that doesn't work with everybody but she knew that it worked with me right some some terms that i use especially in my project management class is this term called situational awareness right and it comes out of the military uh but it basically means understanding the train that you are uh situated in right what are your advantages and disadvantages right who are friends and who are foes um you know what's your current supply situation what's your current fuel situation what's your current situation with regard to everything that's going to make you effective and uh you know successful in that engagement right it's amazing sometimes how clueless some people are they have no idea what the situational awareness is right i show a movie from december 7 1941 in the u.s that's known as uh you know the attack on pearl harbor the movie is torah torah torah and for the first three to five minutes of the attack it seems like the american officers and the american military was totally um not just surprised they'd say almost shocked right they were bewildered they were staring at the the sky wondering what are these airplanes and where did they come from they literally for the first three to five minutes could not recognize the enemy uh they had very poor situational awareness right the other aspect would be do you understand your staff's perspective right when's the last time you talk to your staff do you do you feel like they're being honest with you right do you understand your client's perspective and your boss's perspective if you spend too much time trying to convince them of your ideas you may not actually be getting the full uh scoop from them so you want to make it safe for them to be honest with you uh for both the good news and the bad news right the third bullet kind of threw me off too as an engineer because i always thought that reality was this cold harsh thing right in front of you um and it was physical and it wasn't really debatable but i think you know whether it's politics now or whether it's um you know the workplace perception of reality is just as important and there's so many different percep perceptions out there that you need to understand them right your job is to fix or prevent problems keep those projects on track right and these problems could be real or they could be perceived but just because they're perceived doesn't mean that they're not going to hurt you or impede you from success right this last bullet has cost people their jobs for not understanding this right um meet your teams and your people where they are not where you think they should be what i mean by that is you might have been trained um [Music] to have some sort of idealized view of how an organization should work it could have come from a textbook a classroom a maturity model like the sci and it could say these are the things that you're supposed to have right but you really can't teach calculus to a kindergartener right you cannot get people who don't understand algebra to do differential equations right there is a sequence to maturity there's a sequence to learning and you have to walk with people down that path um in that sequence i don't think you can skip steps i can't you don't think you can't just wave a magic wand or snap your fingers uh meet people where they are instead of preaching to them about where they should be right and i've seen the preachers i've seen i've heard them and oftentimes they do more more harm than good all right these six leadership styles i'm not going to go through them in too much detail i would only refer you to daniel goldman this is from the adaptive school of leadership right so daniel goldman's a professor out of harvard he's written extensively about these six styles of leadership affiliative coercive pace setting coaching democratic and authoritative right um engineers tend to like believe it or not the authoritative because they have this kind of authority that comes from expertise right and oftentimes we as engineers will listen to the smartest person in the room or the person who knows the design better than anyone right i would say the other favorite for most engineers is pace setting um meaning that we work hard we expect others around us to work hard we set a pace that we expect others to follow and uh it's done often in silence it's not done by explicit uh you know verbal commands or any kind of uh anything but just just literally setting the pace for the work and setting the example for the rest of us the one that definitely does not work for engineers is coercive if you've ever known a coercive leader my suspicion at least in the u.s is that it would not be an effective leadership technique in an engineering context because engineers are more professional and they tend to have this kind of competition of ideas and coercion is really just a use of force force of will right and if it works in an engineering community it doesn't work for long and the others i'd say are secondary the affiliate affiliative coaching and democratic styles tend to take a bit of a back seat so last slide and your my key takeaway for you my key message for you is you have to be comfortable as a leader in your own skin right develop your voice and if you don't know what i mean [Music] ask yourself how comfortable are you in public speaking situations right how comfortable are you articulating what you believe about the organization what you believe as a leader right what you believe about the team the mission that you're on right and how can you best deliver that message so if this makes you uncomfortable that's probably a bit good because it's the same kind of discomfort that we have uh in the program to kind of stretch you into areas that will make you a better better leader so again be comfortable in your own skin the university of michigan has this thing called the teachable point of view and uh that basically says that you should know what you believe you should know what you you should know what you know right and you should be able to explain it easily and succinctly to others um in any kind of context whether that's one-on-one or a group setting so that takes time i understand that takes maturity all of these you know key takeaways really require that you be a little bit introspective about what you're doing and also how you're doing it and you know what does your gut what does your gut tell you right um what does it tell you about the way you're doing it and how you can do it better and with that i'm thinking i'll take questions so should i stop sharing her steve um yeah you can yeah you can it doesn't really matter uh regarding your sharing but now we can see you yeah in full video mode okay and uh if if anyone wants to ask a question you can uh go and unmute your mic or or in the chat box if your mic's not working and i can verbalize it to mark they're gun shy they're shocked they're shocked they've never heard this before or even and this is also an opportunity um if any this is really oh we have we have a question mark okay i couldn't hear anything hey can you guys give me that dude i can hear it's a little garbled can you hear steve it's hard to hear maybe type it out in the chat window yeah he's he's typing it now does he just typing it out now i got my chat window open too steve so okay good okay i should also say if you know this is really uh a webinar with a lot of our admitted students so if there's any questions about the program too that you want to ask mark p please feel free a lot of what i talked about today kind of fits within the realm of leadership and i think some of these topics are covered to some extent in the leadership course but also the leadership course is a discovery process you're really discovering about yourself your styles trying to get you to be more comfortable in your skin so that you can project that confidence and that the leadership quality that kind of elusive leadership quality that people are looking for right okay i got some questions here um how different are career paths of people who pursue engineering management versus the traditional mba i think what you're going to find is that in engineering management you are you could still become for example a product manager but you'd probably be more on the technical side you can go into project management or process work you can become a supervisor of a technical line that's that's producing product the traditional mba teaches you skills such as finance and accounting and perhaps even marketing that um you know frankly those are the comfort zone if you will of the traditional mba and the engineer has perhaps a slightly different path as an engineering manager so you could still do things like i said product management operations management is a very classic kind of role and i think you just see a slightly different focus right and i've seen that i've seen a crisscross in fact our last speaker uh was the ceo of shore who had worked her way up through uh marketing and sales and uh she was an mem alum so i you know i don't think it's you know 100 certain per se but i think there's certain uh trends that i've seen right okay since i graduated from the program how have you seen the program change over time wow that's a good question um you have to recognize for about 10 or 15 years i had stepped away from the program and i pursued my own phd and a few other things first of all the program is taught by working professionals now people who are ceos and ctos back in the 80s this program was taught by [Music] mostly research professors or tas we actually had a lot of grad students teaching so we've gotten a lot better in terms of the practicality of our teaching the experience level of the instructors and the reality-based or call it reality-based education that we were delivering um i think the curriculum today is much better thought out you have much more experiential type of education not just theory it's a balance of theory and practice we do things like simulation of running a business that never existed in the 80s right so there's a variety of kind of i would call them curriculum enhancements things like analytics that we dive deep into now we have project management that didn't exist in the 80s so project management and process management what i've tried to do is bring me and my immediate predecessors have brought the real world of corporate america and corporations in general into our curriculum and into our classroom does that answer it steve yeah and he said yes as well sure i mean i mean i have to say that uh the whole idea of mem evolved quite considerably right so instead of taking research professors and bringing them into the classroom 100 percent of the time or bringing in their tas and dealing with very kind of theoretical topics we've tried to balance that with practical topics that i mean my best feedback from a student is i took what you taught me last night i brought it to the job the next day the very next day and it made a big difference right and steve's shaking his head because he's probably heard that hundreds of times just yesterday just yes okay there you go i've heard it myself uh if not hundreds of times at least dozens of times and i know the rest of the faculty has too so that's the big payback when a student says i loved what you did yesterday it might have seemed basic to you but i brought it back to work and it made a huge difference right there's one thing i didn't mention too is that we have this thing called the mpc the consortium so we actually change uh we actually work with probably seven or eight other schools including duke dartmouth cornell stanford mit usc tufts and purdue some of the best schools in the country that also teach mem and we were by the way one of the founding members of mempc so we brought these other schools in to a large extent and uh what we find is we're sharing best practices we're sharing some of the lessons learned we're sharing things everything from marketing to curriculum to uh teacher selection and even uh student selection right how do you how do you pick the best candidates so we're all sharing you know best practices oh this is an interesting question what is the best way to identify perception versus reality in the market in the workplace right i almost said marketplace wow uh believe it or not this is actually a huge deal and this is probably what distinguishes yesterday's leaders from tomorrow's leaders right is the ability to say well what is real and what is just perceived i in in mem we tend to focus on data we're very data centered and we we think that data is the bridge that that bridges that gap so uh we can believe a lot of things and in many cases it's not based in data and in our personal lives that might work fine but in the workplace uh your beliefs need to be rooted in data and analytics in what we like to think of as cold harsh reality so um and that's sometimes difficult to difficult to grasp um if you don't have the data then you're basically almost running on a theological basis right you're running on people's belief sets so i'll never forget we had a problem in the field at motorola and i was not an rf engineer but the problem was an rf problem and i watched the technicians take a tiny bit of information and try to run in 15 different directions with it and i stopped them and i said time out guys why don't we actually collect some data and their first reaction is we don't have time for data collection we have to solve the problem right and my answer was you could be solving the wrong problem it could be causing other problems right let's stop take a deep breath spend 48 hours collecting some data and let's see if we can solve the real problem sure enough i designed a data collection sheet we went to the dispatchers and had them fill it out and the problem that we discovered had nothing to do with what any of the technicians thought the problem was right and not only did we save money and time but we saved face because i'm sure the the customer the client was getting pretty impatient with us so i think data is the way to bridge that gap and uh recognize that you might be surprised what you thought was perception might actually be reality so this next question here does what drove you to take a change in your career path from a sophisticated engineer to a good professor while in between sophisticated engineer which i guess i appreciate i'd like to think i was um to being a professor was that i was a leader i was a manager for probably 25 years at least 20 years director of program management executive director running biz ops and what i found myself doing as a leader was doing almost what i'm doing right now which is explaining teaching trying to listen trying to respond and trying to be as real as i could and deal with the issues that were in front of me and then i decided well if i can do that on this scale maybe i can bring it back to a classroom right um i also felt that the classroom needed a little bit more reality based and you know corporate based and um you know a little less theory and a little bit more practice so i wanted to bring that to the classroom and see if it would work and so far i think it has i've been doing the teaching now for close to uh 14 years since 2001 so maybe it's more like 16 years but um yeah i've been teaching for quite some time and i think it helps me be a better practitioner and during those 16 years i spent a lot of time in industry i think i became a better practitioner for it and i think my practice informed my uh teaching so i think if you talk to any clinical professor especially in the say the medical profession i hope they would tell you the same thing right but their practice informs their teaching and vice versa what drove me to do it i guess that's almost an internal personal thing i i guess um the sense that this is what i was supposed to do right and hopefully that's what drives each of us right we're doing what we were supposed to do right um any other question didn't mean to get too spiritual there but it's not i mean sometimes we struggle with what we want to do versus what we were actually supposed to do uh it's funny when i was really young i was a horrible public speaker i mean horrible and uh something inside of me said you know what you have to overcome this i had other deficiencies that i didn't think i had to overcome but this one i thought i did and i spent 15 20 years practicing speaking in public from everything from the church setting to a school setting to work settings and i overcame it so i think deep down we all know which deficiencies we have to overcome and uh that becomes our life mission at least part of our life mission right getting close to nine o'clock i don't see too many other questions you want to prod them again steve see if we can poke more questions out of them i'm looking i still see 10 participants online so we they're still here right okay that is right i'm frequently asked why i choose to study in the us when i'm already 36 years old thank you well i got one in one more story when i was 40 years old i was pursuing my phd and my fellow students were of equal age in some cases older so we'd like to poke at each other and one of my fellow students poked at me one day and he said what is the roi of your phd and he knew i was kind of financially oriented and most of us thought in terms of roi return on investment right what's the roi of your phd and for some reason i got really angry at him and i turned to him and i said what's the roi of your high school education what's the roi of your grade school education what's the roi of your family we all make decisions in life and some of these life decisions have nothing to do with roi right um job prospects okay can i share some information on job prospects something not already mentioned on the sites well i i'll tell you what i've experienced working with um you know young mem students and and watching them pursue their careers first of all as as most of you know in the us it's a highly competitive uh situation there's a lot of people going after the jobs and you have to differentiate yourself right and whether it comes from the classroom or comes from yourself you have to find that passion that's going to connect you to that interviewer you to that hiring manager right and it can't be that well i know what your product line is it's got to be this is why i believe your product line makes a difference right um i've seen students who worked on that energy project with schneider electric last summer and the one that got the job in the energy industry was the one who was passionate about energy clean tech energy and what he learned in that and not just in the classroom but working with the client solving the problem he had a great story to tell and he was excited and passionate about it right so i i guess what i can say is it's highly competitive out there in the us for all sorts of jobs including engineering management you have to differentiate yourself and i think one good way this is to kind of dive deep right so mem is about kind of the horizontal right engineering management but also being a technical expert in at least one area so that you have credibility back to slide one credibility right in that marketplace very few good managers are experts at nothing you have to be at least an expert in one one area that's valuable to companies today right this last question is do you agree there's not enough of an understanding in the market about the engineering management degree and what's the best way to educate people on the value of this degree especially with the creation of the consortium well i'll tell you this is something i've been wrestling with for five years [Music] i agree that engineering management is a specialized degree as is so many others i could rattle off 10 other specialized degrees here at mccormick including analytics product development masters in project management masters in robotics masters in biotech masters in information technology every one of these is specialized and is cannot be compared to the mba in any way shape or form um it's a little like comparing i don't know a fast food franchise to a a small gourmet restaurant right that specializes in a very particular type of cuisine there are probably a hundred times more mbas in the world and a hundred times more mba programs in the world than there are mem programs and i acknowledge that we'll never have the brand equity of an mba on the other hand um what makes it so ubiquitous could also potentially make it a commodity right everyone knows what an mba is and what an mba program is but the fact that they're everywhere might have diluted its value so i would just leave it at that um you know the same thing happened in my phd program does anyone understand what a phd in org development is right uh every phd is specialized and i think to a large extent having a commoditized master's degree is unusual and most master's degrees are specialized at least they have been historically it's the mba that's the exception it became ubiquitous and and mark just for uh being mindful of time and i've had people sidechat me saying they have more questions why don't if you have side questions why don't you email me directly and i can forward them to you mark um and kind of kind of get if there's general themes kind of organize them but uh we can we can end the discussion here it's been an hour and i i didn't want to be mindful of time and also send out the recording to everyone um what do you think mark that work that works fine for me unless there's something that's absolutely pressing i mean i'm open to that but uh i do want to thank you all for for sticking around for the hour i can tell you that this is probably a different kind of discussion than what you would have had in a classroom setting here classroom settings here we probably would change the modality every 20 or 30 minutes you'd have a lot more dialogue this turned out to be mostly a monologue and you would have a lot more if you will case study type you know content brought to the classroom so that you can all reflect on the same kind of problem and solution in front of you so um as practical as this was i'm hoping it was practical um i think our classes are equally practical in different ways and probably in a deeper dive kind of way but i hope this was kind of a what can i say kind of an introductory uh discussion on some basic concepts of what engineering management should be and i hope you found it useful so thank you all thank you mark and hopefully he'll hear from everyone soon okay take care have a good evening or morning whatever it is out there take care bye you

Channel: MEM Northwestern

Views: 18,164

Keywords: Master of Engineering Management, Northwestern University, MEM

Id: OQhnFeBfJmw

Length: 58min 20sec (3500 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2017