Leadership and Management in Engineering

This paper provides electrical contractors with important information related to the future vision for the industry and how knowledge management can play a key role in a firm’s success. The methodology involved conducting nine structured and extensive interviews with experts in the electrical contracting business about trends and related best practices. These experts identified that the electrical contracting industry is becoming more complex, and that contractors must adopt more sophisticated management tools. Electrical contractors must also accelerate their adoption of information technology and actively pursue new market opportunities. A literature review on knowledge management as a best practice tool is provided, followed by a discussion of how this management tool can be used to help electrical contractors meet the challenges they face and enhance a firm’s chance of survival. The results of the interviews have been collated and placed within the proposed knowledge classification system as a case study. Research from this study can be applicable to other specialty contractors.

Today’s competitive global market and changing work environment demand that engineers possess “soft skills” in addition to technical skills, and they must be able to understand project goals and have the ability to accomplish them with available resources. Currently, engineers learn leadership and management skills while working—learning “soft skills the hard way.” In order to meet the demands of this changing world, engineering programs are challenged to come up with innovative ways to teach classes so that graduates are prepared to take on the challenges twenty-first century engineers face. This article provides a summary of engineering leadership and its relationship to engineering education, problem-based learning, and service-learning pedagogies as they relate to engineering education, and an example of implementing these pedagogies in an engineering course.

The title of this paper comes from the book by Jon Huntsman, Winners Never Cheat. His thesis is that ethics are not a set of highly complex rules and that he successfully created a billion-dollar organization based on the simple rules he learned on the ball field as a child. This position is strengthened by former General Electric CEO (and engineer) Jack Welch and also by the author of the book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum. The paper presents the chronology of the ASCE Code of Ethics in order to understand the present code. Sources of guidance for ethical situations are given as well as a short discussion of ASCE’s global ethics initiative. Finally, the essence and simplicity of ethics are captured by Steven Covey when he wrote: before you make a decision, ask if it’s right.