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.
If only Adobe was still run by engineers.
I think you would make the best CEO ever. You should write a post to that effect and ask to me made CEO of a company of your choice.
And then there was Steve Jobs. The furthest thing from an engineer, and he had no college degree at all.
Steve Jobs was much closer to being an engineer than many CEOs. He could genuinely evaluate what he was being told by engineers instead of simply relying on their judgement. That allowed him to push them, because he knew what was actually possible. Didn’t always lead to the best outcomes (the NeXT MO disk was probably not a winner, in retrospect).
I don’t agree with the premise, though. Engineering-background CEOs nearly ran IBM into the ground in the eighties, and completely tanked most early computer/software companies. It’s not the degree, it’s the vision.