Posts Tagged ‘engineering’
Are successful entrepreneurs really just Business Engineers?
The word engineering is thrown around a lot these days. It is used in every context to try to exaggerate the purposefulness of a subject. A few examples of this are social engineering and political engineering. Does it not also make sense that there would be an application in business with which the principles of engineering could be applied usefully?
“Professional art of applying science to the optimum conversion of the resources of nature to the uses of humankind.” – Britannica
By this definition, a business person that applies the very general and logical scientific method to solve their problems is an engineer.
Where is this leading? Well recently, I saw a special hour long show on CNBC about Harvard Business School. It dealt with issues of admissions, costs and most importantly – curriculum.
It described HBS as a place that teaches would-be business leaders skills such as problem solving, creative thinking and data analysis. The workload is described as very rigorous.
The students are assigned case studies which feature real life business problems faced by real companies. They are asked to identify the problem, and basically solve it. The difficulty in this is the plethora of information they receive and ambiguity of the problem. With large amounts of data and no clear problem statement, a business person can be left up creek without a paddle. The ability to create a problem statement, analyze data and create a solution that meets some criteria is engineering, and that is what business schools are teaching.
Now, I don’t want to flatter those business students by calling them engineers, but one can quickly see the resemblance between their curriculum and that of any engineer. The key difference that many of you may point out is that engineering deals with physical/chemical/electrical things and business doesn’t. It is a good point, but not one with much solidity. An engineer learns the relationships between things. There are variables in the world such as weight and speed and there are equations linking those. In school, engineers learn to identify the variables in a situation and the equations to manipulate them. For example, when trying to figure out how fast an egg falls to the floor, the variables are the height off the floor and the weight of the egg, and the relationship is how far does something with the weight of an egg drop per unit of time.
The same method can be said to be applied by schools such as HBS. When trying to determine a sales forecast, for example, variables such as consumer demand, price and availability are put together in an equation. A good business person can identify all the key variables involved in a situation, and because of their previous training, can use the relationships between those variables well enough to accurately make a conclusion. The purpose of their training then is that through case studies they learn to identify the variables involved in many situations and the relationships between those variables. Are engineers any different? They take classes to learn the variables and relationships between electrical or thermal or environmental components. The principles are basically the same.
So when can we expect to start seeing Business Engineering programs pop up at colleges across the country?
My guess is that the professional engineering societies of the US or Canada will not issue certificates to economists anytime soon, but I hope that the colleges and univertisites might see the benefit to their students of having to complete an engineering design course or two as part of their business curriculum.
Full Disclosure
The person who wrote this article, me, is an engineer.
