A Partial Learning Module for
ENTREPRENEURIAL MIND (ETEM)
Prepared by:
ENGR. NEIL SAMUEL G. SAMSON, M.Eng’g.
Instructor 1
August 2023
Student’s Name
Year and Section
1
This material is intended exclusively for this instructor’s Third Year Bachelor of Science in Civil
Engineering students in ENTREPRENEURIAL MIND (ETEM) for the first semester of Academic Year 2023-
2024.
This material may subject for revision and updates any time the instructor deemed necessary. This
material is for the intended student’s personal use only.
This must not be reproduced in any form for any other intended purposes.
THE ENTREPRENEURIAL ENGINEER
Entrepreneurial Engineer: Ready for the 21st Century
Today’s engineers are confronted by and expected to participate in a world of opportunity,
opportunity driven by technical change, enabled by financial and business prowess, and implemented
through skilled, collaborative labors.
Fortunately, there is a growing awareness of the need to alert engineers early in their education and in
their careers to the importance of mastering a balance of technical and nontechnical skills
Entrepreneurial Engineers
Are Engineers who mix strong technical skills, business and organizational prowess, and an alert
eye to opportunity.
Meet the challenges of changing times as opportunities, seeking challenging and rewarding
work together with an appropriate balance of intellectual, financial, professional, and personal growth.
CHAPTER 1
21ST-CENTURY ENGINEERS MOVING AT INTERNET TIME
The Internet. Global markets. Time compression. Competitiveness. We increasingly live in a
connected world where packets of information whiz around the globe at the speed of light, carrying the
electronic equivalent of letters, money, contracts, designs, or other work product between actors
located anywhere on the planet.
Not long ago, the engineer of the Cold War prepared for work by immersing himself in a narrow
technical discipline, expecting to work his entire career for one of a small number of gigantic employers
on some specialized subsystem of a defense-related or smokestack megaproject.
Today’s engineer is on a different planet. He or she faces a life filled with multiple project
assignments with an almost interchangeable array of employers, clients, startups, and established firms;
these assignments require an extraordinarily broad set of technical, business, and interpersonal skills
performed as part of ever-changing and shifting interdisciplinary teams.
As opposed to the Cold War engineer, we call the ideal engineer of our times an Entrepreneurial
Engineer.
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Today’s engineer must take charge of his or her career by seeking a challenging sequence of work
experiences that help build a marketable portfolio of diverse skills.
ENGINEERING EDUCATION, COMMON SENSE, AND THE REAL WORLD
Common sense and general education prepare today’s engineers for some of the challenges of
our fast-paced times, but the predominant emphasis of an engineering education on the technical side
of the ledger is, in one sense, misleading.
While engineering school spends a majority of the time on difficult technical subjects—science,
mathematics, and engineering—these important topics may constitute less than half of an engineer’s
working day.
Crucial nontechnical skills will determine career success.
Moreover, career success as an engineer, while tied to technical prowess, may have as much to
do with your ability to communicate with co-workers, sell your ideas, and manage your time, yourself,
and others.
Engineering education must spend a preponderance of its time on technical matters to bootstrap the
engineer into a world of increasingly complex and changing technology.
On the other hand, preparing for difficult organizational and people-related challenges helps
engineers to be more effective throughout their careers.
Another side effect of the necessary concentration on technical subjects in an engineering education is
that sometimes engineers think of nontechnical subjects as soft or easy—mere common sense.
Although many of the key topics may be classified under the category of common sense, actually putting
them into practice consistently and regularly requires practice and hard work.
TEN COMPETENCIES FOR THE ENTREPRENEURIAL ENGINEER
Specifically, an entrepreneurial engineer should:
1. Seek the joy of engineering.
2. Examine personal motivation and set goals.
3. Master time and space.
4. Write fast, revise well, and practice BPR (the elements of background, purpose, and road map).
5. Prepare and deliver effective presentations.
6. Understand and practice good human relations.
7. Act ethically in matters large, small, and engineering.
8. Master the pervasive team.
9. Understand leadership, culture, and the organization of organizations.
10. Assess technology opportunities
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1. Seek the joy of engineering
A proper understanding of engineering leads us to understand how multifaceted the learning
and practice of engineering can be.
A closer reading of history and understanding the fundamental tug-of-war that engineers face helps us
understand the essence and joy of being an engineer more deeply.
2. Examine personal motivation and set goals
Understanding what motivates a person in his or her professional life is fundamentally
important and difficult.
A more reliable guide to a life of fulfilling work is found in the term engagement. Instead of seeking
money directly, another approach is to seek work that is so engrossing that time flies because it is so
much fun.
Incidentally, the fun of engagement can lead to sufficient time on task and professional growth that the
person also gains a substantial income along the way.
3. Mastering Time and Space
Time and storage management is the tactical level of being personally organized. How one
spends one’s day and where one puts one’s stuff are basic to sustaining a high level of personal
productivity.
Significant improvements in time utilization can be achieved through the development of a few key
habits.
Primary among these are the disciplined use of
(1) a calendar, (2) a to-do list, and (3) a systematic filing system (both paper and electronic).
4. Writing Fast, Revising Well, and Practicing BPR
Entrepreneurial engineers spend a fair amount of their business days writing. Writing process
can be improved by separating writing from revision, and we examine a number of specific techniques
including freewriting, quick planning, and cut-and-paste revision to help us separate these two writing
functions.
Writing content can be improved by understanding three key elements that are common to
almost all business writing.
These elements—Background, Purpose, and Road map, or BPR for short—can and should be iterated at
different levels of a document
5. Preparing and Delivering Effective Presentations
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PowerPoint presentations are now a way of business life, but giving a slide presentation is
different than giving a speech. By preparing and treating Powerpoint slides as note cards we share with
our audience, the process of preparing and delivering a presentation is simplified.
Add some guidelines and concern for effective slide layout and presentation delivery and the
entrepreneurial engineer is well on the way to becoming an effective presenter.
6. Preparing and Delivering Effective Presentations
Formal communication skills such as writing and presenting are a good place to start in
developing interpersonal skill, but effective human relations are especially important in an increasingly
interconnected world.
By using a variation on the golden rule we call the other-eyes principle. This principle recommends that
we predict or anticipate the behavior of others by considering our own reaction to a similar set of
circumstances.
Along the way, we consider the importance of questions, salesmanship, praise, and passion in successful
interpersonal relations.
7. Acting Ethically in Matters Small, Large, and Engineering
In some ways, the whole topic of ethics may be viewed as a logical extension of human
relations, and the golden rule in both of its major forms is a useful entry point to the topic.
In moving from ethical theory to ethical practice, a key question is why people who accept a set
of moral principles fail to do the right thing, and self-interest, obedience to authority, and conformity to
the group are highlighted as major culprits. With this in mind, we suggest that practice on small matters
is the surest way to doing the right thing when the big issues arise.
In other words, our approach seeks success in micro-ethics or ethical behavior in small, everyday
matters. If we are unable to behave ethically when the stakes are small, it seems unlikely that we will be
able to behave ethically when the rewards of unethical behavior are great.
Our examination of engineering ethics concludes by considering (a) what a profession is and (b)
two contrasting engineering codes of ethics.
8. Mastering the Pervasive Team
Teamwork has become integrated into the fabric of modern organizational life as a result of the
quality revolution, but effective teamwork is difficult as many of us know from our early experiences
with “group projects” in school.
A clearheaded approach to teamwork acknowledges these difficulties and then designs team rules,
discussion protocols, and other procedures to facilitate effective meetings and team activity.
9. Understanding the Leadership, Culture, and Organization of Organizations
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Managing ourselves effectively and working well on teams are important, but understanding
organizations and leadership at a somewhat higher level is also important to the entrepreneurial
engineer for two reasons.
First, knowing good organizations and leadership helps us pick the best work opportunities. Second, an
orientation toward opportunity often results in the need to lead an existing or new organization.
A common feature of good organizations is that they think good thoughts about their
employees; bad organizations tend to distrust theirs.
10. Assessing New Technology Ventures
Technology opportunity assessment and planning are challenging activities that require the
entrepreneurial engineer to imagine new opportunities, match them to markets, and determine
whether they are both technologically and financially feasible.
Working on a technology opportunity assessment or a business plan is the quickest way for the
entrepreneurial engineer to bootstrap him- or herself into understanding the importance of sustainable
competitive advantage, customers, marketing, pricing, costs, and value at the core of the business side
of engineering
These 10 competencies are at the heart of what entrepreneurial engineers need to master to be
effective in a faster moving world of deals, teams, startups, and innovating corporations.
THREE PRINCIPLES
The entrepreneurial engineer has many nontechnical skills to master, but at their root, these
manifold skills of managing time, space, people, and money can be reduced, in many cases, to just three
recurring principles:
1. Seek engagement.
2. Create first; criticize later.
3. Analyze through the eyes of others.
1. Seek Engagement
Engagement —finding and doing things you enjoy profoundly—as a key skill to understanding
personal motivation.
An engineering education provides a broad platform of technological and general knowledge from which
to seek engagement, and the profession itself is sufficiently multifaceted that it can comfortably
accommodate a wide range of motivations and personal preferences.
2. Create first; criticize later
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In any creative activity, whether it be designing, writing, presenting, or problem solving, it is
important to get many ideas out on the table to permit their cross fertilization and to stimulate
additional associations.
3. Analyze through the eyes of others
Efficiency requires that we maximize the former and minimize the latter; to do this, we must
understand the motivations of the other individuals involved.
It is interesting that we are pushed in this direction not by altruism but by pursuit of personal
effectiveness. It is also interesting that our study of others often results in our becoming better—
marginally more objective—observers of our own behavior.
Although it is impossible to capture the complexity of all human interaction in a few short words,
learning and using the three principles can often lead to useful guidance in new or unanticipated
situations.
THREE CAUTIONS
Engineering teaches us to apply models in an almost promiscuous fashion. Engineers model
structures. Engineers model circuits and control systems. Engineers model manufacturing workstations,
assembly lines, even whole factories.
But when it comes to modeling creative activity and human interaction, we need to be
somewhat more cautious in our modeling.
Specifically, three cautions must be exercised.
1. Be Realistic in the Application of Ideals
2. Mastering the Obvious Is Not Easy
3. Engage the Material and Put It into Practice
1. Be Realistic in the Application of Ideals
Many nontechnical skills are discussed in terms of ideals. Doing this has benefits and risks. The
primary benefit of using ideals is that we can easily define a target by which we can measure our own
behavior and make adjustments.
The primary risk is that no one can live up to ideals all the time.
One should be sensibly realistic in applying ideals. It may be all right to press for your own top
performance or that of an organization that reports to you, but applying ideals to others who do not
share your vision is a prescription for unhappiness and disappointment. Moreover, as pointed out
elsewhere (Fritz, 1991).
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You should select ideals with considerable care, as it is possible to become paralyzed by conflict
between what the ideals promise and what is actually possible
2. Mastering the Obvious Is Not Easy
Engineering students often think of practical nontechnical matters as being “common sense” or
“obvious,” but just because some skill is superficially obvious doesn’t mean that mastering that skill is
easy. The problem here is the inherent complexity of many nontechnical skills.
With so many levels requiring adequate performance, it is difficult to be proficient on all of them
simultaneously, and there is always room for improvement on one of them.
The core nontechnical competencies required of the successful entrepreneurial engineer are sufficiently
complex that there are many subtle details or facets to learn; it is impossible to learn them in a single
lesson.
Moreover, it takes conscientious practice to maintain a skill once it has been developed.
3. Engage the Material and Put It into Practice
When you find an idea, suggestion, or tip that makes sense, why not try applying it to your
work? When you disagree with a topic or approach, why not read what others have to say about the
same subject?
There is more to engineering than technical skill, and engaging the material herein, questioning it, and
putting it to practice is a good start toward becoming a more entrepreneurial engineer.
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Reference:
The Entrepreneurial Engineer, by David E. Goldberg, Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
