May 3, 2010
8 comments
Teach Engineers to Be Remarkable
Engineers are trained to deliver high quality, repeatable processes. That is very good.
But very good is not good enough in today’s marketplace. Books with titles like “Good to Great” and “Purple Cow” are rife with the sentiment that “good is the enemy of great” and “very good is not good enough.”
What is needed in today’s economy is to be remarkable. Only remarkable stuff gets people’s attention. Only remarkable stuff can survive.
Remarkable, incidentally, doesn’t mean the next biggest invention.
As Seth Godin says, remarkable is anything worth remarking about, worth telling someone else about. It can be a cool new product. It can also be the a wonderful interaction between a client and customer or between a project manager and team member.
It takes innovation to produce remarkable stuff. You have to take risks and put yourself out there. You have to be willing to invest part of yourself into the thing that you’re doing, make it personal.
So, the challenge for engineers, and the people who work with them i.e. entrepreneurs, managers, and a State like Michigan -that has more engineers than any other state, is to create an environment, a process that pushes engineers to not just be very good, to not produce testable, repeatable processes.
The challenge is to push engineers to be remarkable and produce remarkable stuff.
