Why would a book about executives be relevant to engineers? Well, a couple reasons. This is a relatively old book (published in 1943, with corresponding language), and engineers for the most part love artifacts. The author, Daniel Starch, was a professor at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin (hence a Badger connection). The author uses a variety of surveys and semi-quantitative measures to get his points across, which might appeal to someone with a numerical bent. But more profoundly, given the challenges of the world, couldn’t we hope for more dispassionate, objective, results-oriented leaders in business and government, possibly drawing from a technical background? One hopes so.

Why are better leaders needed?

Since few of you may ever come across this book (though I see copies for $0.32 on Amazon, plus shipping), let me quote from the Introduction, to put things in perspective.

The entire globe is ablaze with the flames of the Great War. Not a continent, not a race, has escaped.

Leadership has failed. Statesmanship had completely broken down.

Businessmen, too, had failed. Perhaps even greater blame rested on them than on public leadership, for in the end public leadership derives its power from private leadership.

Between conflagrations the world smolders, ready to burst forth anew with ever greater ferocity. The vicious, volcanic cycle thus rolls on through the generations from fury to fury.

Progress! Is this progress? Or is it only an illusion…Far sounder leadership and greater statesmanship, both private and public, than the world has yet seen will have to arise if we are ever to lock the jaws of war and establish a lasting peace.

Everyone feels their age is subject to the worst tumult, the greatest crises, and today is no exception. If in some way engineers, as leaders, can use these tools and lead us towards a better vision, let’s review how this author offers encouraging counsel. At the end, there is also a reference of some hidden gold that I will preserve for those that don’t have the book.

Selected Section Teasers

While we won’t replicate the entire contents of the book here, the section headings give some clue to the type of Dale Carnegie, exhortative, encouraging advice that the book contains. Some of my favorite sections (with some apologies for the male-consistent choice of pronoun) are:

Using the Method of Science to Find Out How Men Become Executives

How Much Schooling Do Executives Actually Have – And Need?

Five Basic Techniques in Thinking

What You Must Think And Learn More About

The Most Valuable Thinking Business Men Do

The Two Forces Behind the Inner Drive of Great Men

Why Assuming Responsibility is Necessary to Rise Up From the Ranks to the Executive Level

Would You Succeed in a Business of Your Own? – Seven Tests

What Is at the Bottom of All Dealings With People?

The One Way to Get a Man to Do What You Want ( a must read)

A Simple Way to Save a Man’s Face If He Has Made a Mistake

How to Avoid the Commonest Fault in Dealing With Others

Is Any Man Worth $80,000 a Year? [see a related post]

How Executives Make or Break Our Civilization

The book is peppered with personal examples of the paths executives, military leaders, politicians, or philosophers took to their positions, big and small, success or failure. The author backs up the observations with surveys he did of 150 executives, across the span from 50 top-notch heads of large business, 50 mid-level, and 50 small businessmen. He measured ‘strengths’ of different forces or capabilities, and among many other observations, proposes a formula that expresses what he thinks makes leaders great. This is worth examining. The formula is:

Executive Achievement = D (I + R + H), where

D is Drive

I is Intellect

R is capacity to assume responsibility

H is ability to handle people.

What’s interesting about viewing achievement in this way is that Drive is multiplicative, not additive. When comparing the ratings of the bottom 50 with the top 50, there was a 19x average difference in this ‘Achievement’ overall score, indicating how the truly successful leveraged all the assets they had to harness, but especially Drive. If one took nothing else from the book, it would probably be understanding that one category by itself cannot overcome inattention to the others, and certainly not if uncoupled from a serious helping of Drive.

Noblesse oblige

 Let’s close with a section from Businessmen Winning the Peace as Well as the War, which might be relevant to our times:

No matter what happens, the world always goes on but this horrible chain-lightning of thunderous explosions, this first globe-encircling war, will uproot mankind as it has never been uprooted before. During every crisis men have said: “This is the time of greatest responsibility and opportunity.” These words are threadbare but the problems and involvements of events and peoples today are the most complex and difficult ever witnessed. For the first time the earthquake is global….only great-minded men will ever achieve a lasting peace. And today above all times business leaders must be great-minded. If only a thousand men, if only a hundred men, at the controls of business were suddenly transformed into genuinely magnanimous persons who would see both sides of every problem, who would envision a thousand years instead of a day – this nation, this planet, would be transformed into a new earth.

If only.

Final Bonus

One key aspect of an executive’s development, especially to spurring creative thought, is to “read widely the best thought and literature of the world”.  Dr. Starch consulted with “distinguished persons” to compile a list of the 100 greatest books. There is a list of those works (clearly pre-1943, and with some western focus) in a separate post, as a way to preserve and make available this valuable compilation.