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Lew Hodgett

wrote:

The reason you see more Marketing/Finance people in mid/upper level
management in large companies is purely political. These folks tend to
do a lot of presentations to executive management and receive a lot of
visibility for it. It colors everything that that top management sees.
Promotions naturally follow.

IMHO, rubbish.

Engineers tend to forget to ask the basic question, "Why are we here?"

They are to busy getting lost in the details.

I have found that Business types at least try to think along these lines.

Basic reason I got out of pure engineering and into sales/application
engineering. Chased details to death.

As a sales engineer, probably got to do more creative engineering in a
month than most engineers get to do in a year.

The first question you ask as a sales engineer is, "Is this project
funded?"

If it is, it now becomes a fight about money between you and your
competitors. That requires being creative and quickly finding the
right solution.

If it isn't funded, be polite and move on and come back when it is funded.

The big problem I see with engineers is a tendency to sneer at the
marketing
people and the bean counters and the other non-engineering
specialists who
are necessary to actually grow a business instead of filling a
warehouse
full of widgets that nobody buys.

That is a management failure to show the way to the goal, IMHO.

Nobody asked "WHY".

I am one Engineer who really appreciates the disciplines of Marketing
and Finance. Out of necessity I am forced to cover these functions
myself and I know they suffer as a result. Unfortunately, it's
difficult (impossible?) to find people in these disciplines who are
willing to "risk" some of their time and effort on their own abilities
(i.e. "pay for results"). The latest challenge has been developing a
Marketing Plan with which to attract the services of a Marketing
Agency. It's quite a "chicken and the egg" situation.

Had a district manager who used the following sorting system for all
incoming mail. (This was long before the internet)

1) Checks.
2) New Orders
3) Change orders to existing orders
4) RFQ's

Everything else went in the circular file.

When asked if he might not be throwing something important away, he
answered, "If it's that important, they'll send it again."

He made regional mgr in record time.

Lew