Engineers better managers

1. Would an Engineer make a better candidate
for management studies?
An engineer is a technically skilled person who thinks, designs, builds and improves and
maintains tangible or non-tangible machines, objects or products. On the other hand, a
manager is a person in a supervisory role who administers and ensures that work gets done
by a group of people. Even though these two professions seemto encompass very different
responsibilities, I believe that engineers are better candidates for managerial studies.
An engineer is logical, rational, and intuitive with excellent problem-solving skills. These
qualities are acquired when they grapple with complex concepts like quantitative
techniques, properties of matter, feasibility studies, production management etc. Now,
managerial subjects delivered through case methods call for deep logical analysis and
creative problem solving approach and out of box solutions.
Statistics show that compared to people from other professions, engineers with
management degrees proved to be very successful CEOs. Henry Ford, with his revolutionary
assembly lines and mass production is a case in point. CEOs of the top multinationals like
Microsoft, Google, General Motors, Facebook etc. are people with engineering background.
Even Elon Musk, the most eccentric business magnate, with a Science degree in Physics and
Economics succeeded in establishing companies like SpaceX, PayPal, Tesla and Solarcity,
after becoming a self-taught engineer.
One of the main reasons for their success is that engineering had taught them how work
gets done at the implementation level and so job design, job enrichment and employee
empathy is the prime focus in the organizations they work in.