|
In the past decade software has been eating the world. Silicon-based technologies are disrupting traditional industries everywhere. The publishing industry is struggling against digital content; the telecom industry is threatened by voice-over-IP; computer animation is raising the bar for producing movies; postal services are going bankrupt, and so on. Yet most leadership roles in society are still reserved for people who don't fully understand computing technologies. The recent near-disaster of SOPA screams out that many business executives and politicians have questionable understanding of the technologies that are fundamentally changing our society. Maybe engineers are partly to blame for this. Engineers are analytic by nature. They are problem-solvers: give an engineer a problem and her brain will obsess over it for days. But why do so few engineers take on leadership roles in society? Qi Lu (Microsoft) recently talked about why it's hard to find engineers that can think beyond technology, and described his personal lessons from attempting this transition. Qi leads Microsoft Bing (amongst other things) as the President of Online Services, and reports directly to Steve Ballmer. He took a red-eye flight to talk especially in the "CTO Course" at Princeton (thank you Qi!). This thought provoking talk had enough lessons to justify a series of posts. I'm going to focus on just one point right now: leadership roles and the skillset required for them. |
![]() Qi Lu speaking at Princeton |
Continue reading Engineers as Thought Leaders.



