Good To Great Essay

Over the course of Engineering as a Leader Dr. Malzahn educated us on why a leader in engineering is important. For instance, Dr. Malzahn would say a leader is “a conversation about a potential future that elicits the discretionary efforts of others to the realization of that future”. For me though the answer to what is a leader is, someone who is able to find a problem in this society, be able to relate and gather people around who also have the same problem, and have the ability to motivate the others around them in the pursuit for a solution to the problem. As far as a technical leader for example would be, an engineer that has problem and needs to find a solution, their job is to gather the right team to come up with a solution. So to be a great engineering leader it is going to take someone who is part of a project, where the leader will need to be able to relate …show more content…
As well these videos and articles helped teach us on how to apply these qualities of being a good engineering leader in a real world situation. One article that I remember very well was Jim Collins “Good to Great” article. In this article it talked about how a group project can be similar to a flywheel. Now a fly wheel is a very large wheel, that takes a while to get started, and will take an extreme amount of effort to get the flywheel to spin. The Leader is drive shaft of that flywheel, and is there to help motivate or get the group aka the flywheel to get started and moving. I used this flywheel idea when I helped out in a Brooks Middles School classroom that was building a rollercoaster. The group was supposed to build a rollercoaster that a marble would roll down, and the object was, whichever group had the marble stay on the track the longest would win a prize. I was assign to assist a group in building the