High performance expert Paul Rulkens provides the inside advice you need to accelerate your career as a business leader with an engineering background—from building on your unique strengths to achieving big business goals. How Successful Engineers Become Great Business Leaders is full of thought-provoking insights, practical applications, and pragmatic techniques to help you get everything you can out of everything you have. You don’t have to be ill in order to get better. Whether you’re an experienced business executive, corporate manager, or ambitious professional, this book will show you how to apply your specific engineering strengths to: Maximize your skill and talent to accelerate your career; Grow your business with the least amount of effort; Set and achieve ambitious business goals; Focus on strategic quitting to raise the performance bar; Avoid behaviors that mask your strengths; Create a high-performance execution culture; Improve your own executive judgment; Build long-term client relationships; Develop a blueprint to become an unstoppable goal achiever. The road to business success for leaders with engineering backgrounds is common and predictable, but not always obvious: There is a method to the madness. This unique book will show you how.

Software startups make global headlines every day. As technology companies succeed and grow, so do their engineering departments. In your career, you'll may suddenly get the opportunity to lead teams: to become a manager. But this is often uncharted territory. How can you decide whether this career move is right for you? And if you do, what do you need to learn to succeed? Where do you start? How do you know that you're doing it right? What does "it" even mean? And isn't management a dirty word? This book will share the secrets you need to know to manage engineers successfully. Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors and managers? How can you support flexible and remote working? How can you improve diversity in the industry through your own actions? This book will show you how. Great managers can make the world a better place. Join us.

Focusing on basic skills and tips for career enhancement, Engineer Your Own Success is a guide to improving efficiency and performance in any engineering field. It imparts valuable organization tips, communication advice, networking tactics, and practical assistance for preparing for the PE exam—every necessary skill for success. Authored by a highly renowned career coach, this book is a battle plan for climbing the rungs of any engineering ladder.

"Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech products?how to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the book's message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams"--

Herb Johnson believes that we are meant to live abundantly. We are designed to live the good life, with the freedom and creativity to follow our passions. What will defeat us is an attitude of impoverishment—the belief that we are undeserving, so why should we try. In Engineering Business Success, Johnson explores the structure of success. Many books overflow with detail about business systems—important, yes, but they don’t reveal the big picture of what it takes to succeed. What fundamentally must be in place to open and effectively operate a successful business? As an engineer and as a businessperson, Johnson has written an important resource for both. But his book is for anyone who wants to make something of himself or herself, because the themes here are central to winning. Business opportunities abound in our society, and Johnson shows you what you should be looking for, and what needs to be in place if you are to win. So many businesses fail right out of the gate, and Johnson has the antidote so that it won’t happen to you. Foremost, he says, you need to seize the responsibility to serve— to serve your industry, your clients, and your stakeholders. That is the underpinning of success. In Engineering Business Success, Herb Johnson shares what he has learned in his 28 years at the helm of the thriving company that he founded. And he shares what he has learned in life, since his boyhood rural upbringing, through his years as a young engineer, and as he has worked to make the most of his business. Johnson’s story demonstrates the trajectory of following one’s passion—and doing so with the spirit of service and with the business savvy that he has learned along the way. “Herb embraces an attitude of abundance, a dedication to discipline, and commitment for lifetime learning, all of which pour forth from this story of his entrepreneurial journey. Business owners, and those wishing to experience the freedoms Herb has enjoyed, will get a dose of enthusiasm and pick up some helpful hints from reading this book.” —VERNE HARNISH, FOUNDER, ENTREPRENEURS’ ORGANIZATION AND GAZELLES AUTHOR OF SCALING UP AND MASTERING THE ROCKEFELLER HABITS

Do you feel disconnected from the other engineers you work with? Are personal interactions often uncomfortable, adversarial, or just plain weird? Or, do you know your people skills need help, but you're unsure of where to start?WARNING: Failings with people can be the undoing of even the most talented technical team.Drawing on more than sixteen years of experience working alongside other engineers, Tony Munson provides a foundational set of people skills every engineer should possess in order to avoid--and resolve--relational problems before they have a chance to impact your personal effectiveness.These problems include but are not limited to:- Feeling isolated and disconnected from others.- Problems with management or co-workers.- Poor performance at interviews or meetings.- Interaction regret or wishing you would have behaved differently in personal interactions.- Inability to properly lead and motivate others.Don't learn the hard way, through repeated failures, when your career is on the line! People Skills for Engineers can help fill in the gaps in this crucial and often underdeveloped engineering skill set.Here's what others have to say about People Skills for Engineers:"People Skills for Engineers reminds us that being a technical leader isn't about what you do, but how you do it. Tony asks readers to take an introspective look at the kind of engineer they are today and shows them how improving communication skills can get them to the next level. Throughout the book he creates an introvert-friendly Human Interface API, pulling advice from great authors, real leaders, and his own experiences." -- Tiffany Greyson, Computer Engineer"In People Skills for Engineers, Tony breaks down how our relationships effect our success as individuals and as an organization. He then outlines practical and concrete ways to become a better engineer, team member and leader by increasing our effectiveness with people. He brings to the surface common mistakes that are potentially holding us back and provides ways these mistakes could be prevented or repaired. I think that the information Tony lays out in this book could help anyone seeking to improve themselves; not only as a team member but as an engineer; no matter how far into their career they are." -- Arthur Putnam, Software Engineer"I instantly recognized some 'difficult engineer' behaviors I was guilty of myself. Tony gives real-world, practical advice that you can use to start improving yourself right now . It was both enlightening and motivating when he highlighted all of the things you could be leaving on the table by not improving these important skills." -- Derek Wade, Mechanical Engineer

As you step into senior engineering leadership roles, you need to make an impact, and you need to make it fast. This book will uncover the secrets of what it means to be a successful director of engineering, VP of engineering, or CTO. With a hands-on, practical approach, it will help you understand and develop the skills that you need, ranging from how to manage other managers, to how to define and execute strategy, how to manage yourself and your limited time, and how to navigate your own career journey to your desired destination. You can become a great engineering leader, the kind that runs a healthy, ambitious, and efficient organization that builds quality products, and this practical guide will provide you with the skills to get there. With this book you'll uncover the tools, techniques, and secrets to being a successful and effective engineering executive. Starting with the roles and responsibilities of directors, VPs, and CTOs, explore their positions in the org chart and understand how they engage on tactical, operational, and strategic levels to deliver great products at scale. Dive into the tools and techniques that you need to be successful. Understand how to frame and allocate your time, how to play finite and infinite games, how to position and manage senior individual contributors, and how to get the best from your peers, your manager, and your counterparts that you collaborate with in other disciplines. Understand how to communicate at scale and then raise the bar through effective performance management. Get strategic: define, create, and execute your vision for your organization that stands the test of time. Understand the typical monthly, quarterly, and yearly cycles that companies go through and how to use them to your advantage. Tackle planning and budgets and understand how to make both work for you. Navigate wartime and peacetime successfully by adapting your priorities and leadership style. Plan out your career journey by understanding that it's never, ever a straight line to get to where you want to go. It's time for us to lift the lid on effective senior leadership. What You Need: There are no prerequisites for this book. However, it is aimed at engineering managers, so some experience or interest in management is useful.