Those of you who watch The Apprentice on Wednesday night will have heard Alan Sugar suggest that he had ‘never met one engineer who was good at business’. See Daily Telegraph . Although the Apprentice is sometimes good ‘trash’ entertainment, it often makes my blood boil as its depiction of business is the exact opposite of what happens in our company – and, I would suggest, most of our readers’ too.
But this ‘gaffe’ really does take the biscuit. Indeed, I would contend that practically all the world’s great businesses were both founded AND RUN by engineers; from the Ford Motor Company onwards. In our own sector, the list is endless from Larry Ellison at Oracle, Andy Grove at Intel, Steve Jobs at Apple all the way to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. All engineers who have done rather well at running businesses! Indeed, I would suggest Sugar’s argument is ‘stood on its head’. Whatever you may think of the ‘software engineer’ Bill Gates at Microsoft, it did rather better under his leadership than under that of ‘salesman’ Steve Ballmer.
In my role I meet many CEOs. An increasing number of them don’t understand the technologies used in their own products. They lack the passion that I, personally, think is the key to success. I’m not saying I have never met a passionate accountant but…
What we need is more programmes in the media extolling the twin virtues of engineers and entrepreneurs. (For goodness sake, I’d like to class myself as both!) The combination is electric. Sugar should hang his head in shame. Indeed about time he was fired!