A management seminar for engineers

Why engineers are never on a company's board of directors and what managers have to do with it, you can read here =)

A company sent its top employees to an expensive seminar. They are supposed to learn how to develop solutions and make decisions quickly and purposefully, even in unfamiliar situations.

On the second day, a group of managers is tasked with measuring the height of a flagpole. They go out onto the lawn, get a ladder and a measuring tape. However, the ladder is too short. So they get a table and place the ladder on it. It's still not enough. They put a chair on top of the table. Since all of this is very wobbly, the entire setup keeps falling over. Everyone is talking at once. Everyone has different suggestions for solving the problem. It's a complete disaster.

An engineer walks by, watches the activity for a few minutes. Then, without a word, he pulls the flagpole out of the ground, lays it down, takes out a tape measure, and measures the pole from one end to the other. He writes the result on a piece of paper and hands it to one of the managers along with the tape measure. Then he walks away.

As soon as he rounded the corner, one of the top managers said, „That was typical engineer again! We need to know the height of the bar and he tells us the length! That's why we never let these people on the board.“.

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