The corporate titans who lead Australia’s top 50 companies are as likely to have degrees in engineering as ones in business or economics, according to a recent Leading Company analysis. Nor is it only Australian mining conglomerates where engineers are rising to the top. Around the world a combination of engineering experience with an MBA from a top business school tends to be a common path to the corner office. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is an engineer. So are General Motors’ Mary Barra and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and the list goes on.

In fact, engineering long has ranked as the most common undergraduate degree among Fortune 500 CEOs. Even Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has an engineering Ph.D under his belt.

Why do engineers end up leading companies? Is it because engineers as such are CEO material, or is it because they are more likely to have changes of heart during their careers? If so, why, how and when does this occur?

I think one value of having a technical leader is that they have a deeper understanding of the problems their company is trying to solve. A background in sales and marketing is just not a big enough hook on which to hang a company’s vision.

Not that a CEO needs to know the tech itself. They need to know enough to appreciate the difficulty of the problem they are trying to solve, to understand how to communicate with the people who are solving the problems so the truth makes its way from one end of the company to the other.