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Engineering Communication is Rhetorical
41 Plays17 days ago
In this episode, Dr. Jill Fennell sits down with Georgia Tech alum Foster Finley to challenge the myth that technical communication is objective by examining how engineers make strategic, audience-driven choices in real work.
Take a look at Foster's book list here.
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Show Notes and Timestamps:
- 01:00 Introduction to topic and guest
- 02:18 Why reading is fundamental for engineers
- 03:33 Why all communication is rhetorical
- 08:13 Importance of audience understanding
- 10:35 Project failure and communication
- 14:04 Audience as codesigner versus audience as recipient of facts
- 17:42 Rhetorically skilled engineers in the workplace
- 22:01 What employers are looking for in technical positions
- 24:24 Risk of engineers making assumptions
- 26:14 How students can handle interpreting data and audience influence
- 28:50 Role of persuasion in an engineer’s job
- 31:26 How can students practice these principles in everyday communication
- 34:03 Advice for students preparing for cross functional roles and internships
- 37:43 Engineering as building and as advocacy
- 40:33 One nontechnical book you would assign engineers to read
- 42:14 Wrap up and importance of rhetorical consideration, reading
A Transcript of this episode is available here.
Episode edited by Lee Hibbard.
Recommended
Transcript
The Role of Judgment in Engineering Communication
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to season four of Communication Mechanics, a podcast for engineers. In this season, we're focusing on a reality many engineers experience early, but aren't always taught to name. And that is that communication is not just about clarity, it's about judgment.
Professional Communication Dynamics in Engineering
00:00:24
Speaker
Engineers constantly make decisions about audience, purpose, power, and consequence, often before they feel fully prepared to do so. Across these episodes, we'll explore how engineers communicate as they enter professional spaces, work across hierarchies, solicit opportunities, and take on greater responsibility.
00:00:42
Speaker
Whether you're a student, a new engineer, or someone mentoring others, this season is about understanding how communication shapes not just what engineers say, but who they become as professionals.
Communication as a Strategic Skill
00:01:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the podcast. If you've ever thought communication is just fluff or the data should speak for itself, this episode is for you. Today we're talking about a fundamental truth.
00:01:11
Speaker
All communication is rhetorical. Yes, even technical communication. Engineers don't just deliver information. They make intentional choices about what to say, how to say it, and who they're saying it to.
00:01:24
Speaker
Whether you're sharing design data with a client or pitching an idea to your team, your success will depend on your ability to communicate with purpose.
Foster Finley on Audience Awareness and Rhetorical Skills
00:01:35
Speaker
Joining us today is Foster Finley, a Georgia Tech mechanical engineering alum with nearly 40 years of experience leading teams in operations, supply chain strategy, and business transformation.
00:01:47
Speaker
As the former co-leader of Alex Partners Global Operations Practice, Foster has seen how audience awareness and rhetorical savvy aren't soft skills, they're core to technical leadership.
00:01:59
Speaker
In this episode, he shares lessons from his career, advice for young engineers, and why he thinks engineering students should read more books outside of the field. Welcome, Foster.
00:02:10
Speaker
Thank you, Jill. I really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation with you. It's a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Let's start with reading.
00:02:20
Speaker
Why do you think reading is fundamental to engineers, and how did you come to believe
The Impact of Literature on Engineering Communication
00:02:25
Speaker
this? Well, a couple of things. I've had some phenomenal engineers work for me in the years past who had not really exposed themselves to a lot of books and sometimes getting closer to whether it was fiction or other genres helped them communicate with people. I would say i was...
00:02:49
Speaker
very, very fortunate and lucky that my mother, who was a philosophy major, kind of you know pushed me into books at an early age. And I had some phenomenal instructors from junior high school, high school, and at Georgia Tech that that also introduced me to things that were they're very helpful. And that really, i think, helps a technically educated resource be able to communicate to a wider audience and make things more understandable than would necessarily be the case if somebody kind of sticks to what I'll jokingly call, you know, all the technical details.
00:03:32
Speaker
Well, that's interesting to say because sometimes whenever I'm teaching the web program communication curriculum, I'll get a little bit of pushbacks from our our engineers and they'll say things like, this is technical communication, this isn't rhetorical.
00:03:47
Speaker
if When we say all communication is rhetorical, what does that mean and why should engineers care? Well, so basically when you step back and say engineer to engineer is pretty easy.
00:04:01
Speaker
You know, if they have the same curriculum, if they have the same background, it's it's not really difficult to stick to that view. When you begin to think about what a trained engineer, whether he is or he or she is, a mechanical engineer, a civil engineer, or airspace engineer, on and on, these people are put in front of marketing people, sales people, finance like executives, ah human resources, so on and so forth.
00:04:36
Speaker
And if they... fall back on their strength of technical details, it is super easy and super problematic for them to lose the audience, which is where we get into that rhetorical split, because all of a sudden somebody is interested to understand what you have to propose, what your findings were, what you how much is this going to cost, et cetera, et cetera. And
00:05:08
Speaker
If a technical engineer goes narrowly down that path of wanting to explain those details in terms that are pretty unique to that engineer, there's a very high propensity that different members of an audience who may or may not have a say in what will be done, but often do get lost.
00:05:34
Speaker
And you know to them, a lot of that sounds like gibberish and it doesn't make sense to them. But a thoughtful engineer who is skilled in what I'm gonna just broadly call the liberal arts,
00:05:50
Speaker
often become much more adapt at trying to understand where they might lose somebody, how they might be able to avoid what could be embarrassing for somebody else who just says, you know, I heard what you said, but I really...
00:06:08
Speaker
It doesn't mean anything to me. You know, I don't know how to process it and what that means versus an alternative or even, you know, what you've necessarily put on the table, how I even contrast that with alternatives. So that is...
00:06:25
Speaker
really one of the, I'd say, key things that engineers who are put in that role of dealing with decision makers who could be colleagues, decision makers who could be clients or prospects, you know, one of the same prospect because they're pitching or pitching something hoping to get the deal, but once they get that the need to clarify and get buy-in has not evaporated.
00:06:56
Speaker
It's some, in many cases, intensified. One of the things that I think is easy to forget when you're in college, because you're surrounded with other people in your same major, is that you come to college to specialize, to be the person in the room who knows the thing. And I feel like it's really easy to lose sight of that whenever you're surrounded by your other majors, but it's important to remember that and to practice how you would talk if you were the only person in the room with this kind of expertise, so that you're more prepared when you graduate.
00:07:29
Speaker
There's no question about it. There's a, I think, um In many engineers case, it's it's the place of comfort to rely on what you've learned, what you understand, what you've embraced, what you're proud of because you've understood and mastered it. But that doesn't necessarily translate to folks who have a say or a stake in ah course of action that you would advocate or be a proponent for that would need to be explained or put across in ways that would make sense.
00:08:13
Speaker
So then can you describe a moment in your career when your understanding of audience fundamentally changed the outcome of a project?
Simplifying Technical Details for Non-Engineers
00:08:19
Speaker
For sure. I was working with a wonderful CFO who had hired me, Ed Pouesis, with a company at the time he was with called Dayton Superior that made construction material.
00:08:33
Speaker
And... he he He was really one of my favorite clients over time because he was the CFO and he wanted me he wanted to see me pretty much on a daily basis to go through what the financial numbers associated with what I was doing.
00:08:57
Speaker
were going in what direction, why, what I had done, and things like that. And he he was not an engineer. He did not want to become an engineer. He did not want to be schooled by me. But he realized that I and the team that I was working with were endeavoring to make some pretty financially impactful decisions that were also engineering engineering coordination things that were saving a lot of money for the business at at the time. And you know it it worked into a thing where he basically wanted to see me almost every day around lunchtime to go through decisions that we had made that he really kind of wanted the headline, not all the details. But within the details, he wanted to know what the financial implications were.
00:09:55
Speaker
And there were a couple of times when he explored and wanted to know a little bit more about the details, which was great. And I could read him that if I was beginning to bore him or lose him or get off his comfort zone,
00:10:14
Speaker
you know i I could see it in his in his posture and in his kind of demeanor, and i and I would drop it and kind of kind of, you want to go in more detail?
00:10:26
Speaker
Oftentimes he would just you know pleasantly nod and say, you've gone into enough detail, thank you i appreciate it Can you think of a time when a project failed or almost failed because of how something was communicated?
Turning Projects Around with Rhetorical Skills
00:10:41
Speaker
Absolutely. I had the, I could call it pleasure or displeasure, of leading a government project with the MTA in New York City. And they had had a number of problems with government.
00:10:56
Speaker
water accumulating in subway channels and just you know unending issues that were taking place at the time. And had a very, very smart, well-educated engineer that we'd kind of put on on point for this.
00:11:14
Speaker
And i I knew this person pretty well. He was well educated. He was not a Georgia Tech grad, but he was you know from good school and and capable of things. But one of the things that I knew before we put him in the position, he was not really a good reader of audiences.
00:11:35
Speaker
And we had a gathering and there were 12 or 15 client members in the room and he was there and I was there and a couple of other team that teammates were.
00:11:47
Speaker
And he had a 20 page deck and just decided he was gonna read it. Come hell or high water. just I don't care what you want to know. i don't care if I'm going too fast or too slow. I'm just going to read it pay every page after pay. And after that meeting, the head client customer of mine came and said, not really comfortable with his leadership.
00:12:14
Speaker
doesn't seem to be interested in our questions, doesn't seem to be ready to get into any of the details or any of the tangential points of interest we might have.
00:12:26
Speaker
And thought about it. I'd known this gentleman for a while and we replaced him with another person on the team who was at the other end of the spectrum, very engaging, very quick to respond, very good read of people, would never have done what this first gentleman had done, which was just you know read a page, read a page, read a page, and expect nobody to stop or or get clarification. And really went from capable engineer,
00:13:01
Speaker
trained engineer to, and by the way, this the replacement has a master's from Georgia Tech, and I'm still very close with him. And he absolutely, you know, i I put him down in front of the client and said, you know, this is an interview. Go talk to him, see how you feel. And they came out and said, why didn't you bring him to us the first time?
00:13:25
Speaker
okay I'll take the blame for that, but I'm glad, you i trust you are pleased with it. And he did a phenomenal job because he was a good listener, he understood, he knew how to read the situation. If he got pummeled with questions from the engineer, he would either answer what he could or pull somebody in who had the had the results.
00:13:50
Speaker
But if it was something that he was comfortable with, he would answer it with great aplomb. And they loved him. They loved him and just were very pleased with the the performance that he he gave them.
00:14:04
Speaker
This other question that has been ruminating throughout our conversation, because... If engineering communication is rhetorical, then the audience isn't passive. It's your collaborator, your critic, your adversary. right A regulator reads reports looking for risk, and executive skims it for ah ROI. yep The same data can mean widely different things for each of them. right So in your consulting work, how have you seen engineers gain or lose influence based on whether they treated their audience as a co-designer of meaning rather than just a recipient of facts?
Engaging the Audience in Technical Discussions
00:14:41
Speaker
So you've you've hit to the heart of what I really think is important for engineers or consulting or really almost anybody who's talking about an important change or project inside an enterprise.
00:14:58
Speaker
Enterprise being a school, a business, a railroad, take your pick. the The real point is to understand that different people come with different expectations and different desires for changes to their enterprises or organizations.
00:15:18
Speaker
And you have to understand that one person who comes from ah sales perspective is going to look at it very, very differently from somebody who's coming from an HR perspective.
00:15:33
Speaker
One's worried about retention, the other's worried about the top line. But is it the engineer's job to care about that? The engineer has to be cognizant of that because I'm not saying or advocating that the engineer must become an expert in HR or an expert in marketing.
00:15:57
Speaker
I'm suggesting the engineer understand what he or she is an expert in and whose questions he or she can comfortably answer, but also be able to say without discomfort or embarrassment, I need to get back to you on that or I would like to rely on my colleague here or my colleague who can come next meeting to address that directly.
00:16:24
Speaker
the The idea is not to say if you're an engineer you're going to answer ever conceivable question that gets tossed over the the wall to you. It's to say look, if I understand this, I'm going to give you a confident answer because I understand it and I appreciate where you're coming from.
00:16:43
Speaker
We also, as engineers, have to have the gall to say, you know what? That's a good question. I'd like to get back to you on that and I want to consult somebody or I want to bring somebody or I want to do some research in order to give you an answer that I'm comfortable with. And any colleague, client, prospect is going to appreciate that honest answer more than getting top of mind, unthought through, not necessarily good responses and really undermines the confidence in whether it's an engineer or not that he or she is willing to run out to the end of the gangplank and maybe fall off the end even if somebody doesn't have the detail or content to give a competent answer.
00:17:42
Speaker
We've talked about a lot of really good examples, but could we define what does a rhetorically skilled engineer look like in the workplace? So I think that has a lot to do with the personality of him or herself to begin with.
00:18:03
Speaker
I would tell you, my my maternal grandfather was a civil engineer. And he was really almost his entire career was in the military. He was in the Navy, he taught at Annapolis, and he was in you know government work in Maryland for decades.
00:18:23
Speaker
um He was an engineer. And he you could read his discomfort when people asked him things that were outside of his core area.
00:18:38
Speaker
it just wasn't interesting to him and it made him a little uncomfortable. um That's one type of engineer. And I love him.
00:18:50
Speaker
He was wonderful. He was a wonderful grandfather. But I kind of could sense that there were certain things he didn't want to talk about.
00:19:01
Speaker
And that's very typical of a lot of engineers who don't necessarily embrace literature and wanting to kind of you know understand people or or situations, all all true.
00:19:20
Speaker
Go to the other end of that spectrum and say, there are engineers who are deeply skilled in a lot of the minutiae of engineering and details, but who are also adroit at being able to read an audience, read a room, understand when or can read whether his or her answer or response landed or not, or whether they need to pull pull somebody else in.
00:19:52
Speaker
I have no problem with a core engineer who wants to stick to what he or she wants. And if I were to say to him or her, you know, you should read this, that, or another, and they're disinterested or don't think it's going to be relevant to them, fine.
00:20:09
Speaker
Fine, that's fine, but there are a hell of a lot of engineers who are going to during his or her career have colleagues, prospects, clients, whatever it happens to be, who are going to engage them on topics that are not rooted in technical details and they're gonna find that they're better off being able to carry on a conversation with a little technical details, but they have to be prepared for the
Isolation vs. Engagement in Engineering Careers
00:20:45
Speaker
emotions. They have to be prepared for the limitations.
00:20:49
Speaker
if If I'm sitting across the table from a CFO who's worried about cash flow for the next 18 months or an upcoming shareholders conference,
00:21:00
Speaker
there there are some very specific things that that engineer needs to be able to address or be able to say, i don't have that information at my fingertips to give you the details, but I can either get somebody or come back to you with that, is very important. And I think the majority of engineers, we want we want them to be able to interact with multiple different functions.
00:21:27
Speaker
And if we want them to be able to do that, They have to be multi-skilled. They have to have the details in the engineering that Georgia Tech gives them. but they also have to be able to recognize and appreciate the different aspects that people with whom they're continually going to be exposed to in different aspects will be treating them differently and not going to be wanting narrowly deep technical answers and solutions to every conversation they have.
00:22:01
Speaker
So there are positions where you could live in the realm of of numbers. Yes. But is it safe to say that those positions are much fewer than the engineering positions where you need to be able to communicate?
00:22:15
Speaker
So if if an engineer seeks to want to only do engineering and be surrounded by engineering, those jobs can be found. And the recruiters who look for that those Those are in fewer numbers.
00:22:33
Speaker
They do exist and they can do that and they can love it and have a great career. But though the the the number of jobs where a trained engineer is able to kind of bury into his cubby and only do that are fewer and fewer. And I think the issue is why would I want as an employer to pay somebody that when when every time I want to get an answer I feel like I need translator to take that information and and convey it to me in a way that makes sense that that is becoming I think more difficult for people to do my i my grandfather was a little bit like that for sure and he didn't really have a
00:23:22
Speaker
a lot of Patience for things that were out of his his kind of core alley. And I think that is just becoming a narrower and narrower source for somebody to have an entire career. Especially if you want upward mobility.
00:23:38
Speaker
Yes, you're exactly right. But there there are people who just you know like the details. but By the way, I see that more in and around research. really than anywhere else. Right.
00:23:50
Speaker
And that's probably one of the more comfortable places for folks that are very, very focused like that. But I would still argue that shouldn't mean that those engineers or those people with engineering backgrounds couldn't or shouldn't expose themselves to literature and be able to learn to you know appreciate different points of view and aspects that I think, you know, makes life that much more worth living.
00:24:24
Speaker
And let's talk about the risk of that. What's the risk when engineers assume their audience understands or shares their point of view or understanding of data? So I think that's a huge risk when people do that. And I would go back to my point that if you can have a an audience in front of you and perceive that maybe they're not totally on the wavelength with you, that you have the presence of mind to say, hang on, you with me?
00:24:57
Speaker
did did i you know Did you understand what I tried to convey? And by the way, I would also say the more broadly engineered engineer there would say, I'm sorry if I got into the minutia a little bit.
00:25:14
Speaker
I take the blame for that. You know, did I did i get into a little more detail than you were comfortable with? As opposed to saying, did you not understand me? Which, you know, is like the absolute quickest way to permanently lose an audience.
00:25:30
Speaker
To say, oh, I'm the engineer and I said this and if you didn't get it, why am I wasting my time? o that's That's very, very unhelpful. Especially when you might be entering that room with an assumption that engineers already communicate that way. Not that they do, but there is the stereotype of engineering communication.
00:25:52
Speaker
Right. Sometimes whenever we're thinking about rhetoric, we also have to think about the assumptions about us our audience already has. Correct. And not feed into those assumptions. If if if you give them fuel for it, it's going to simply reinforce a mindset that's unhelpful to to the profession, to the vein.
00:26:14
Speaker
Okay, so what would you say to students who have a concern that interpreting data is somehow overstepping or over influencing their audience? It's not one or the other.
00:26:26
Speaker
It's really, I'm a believer that facts are friendly and numbers are part of the fact set that's there. And many, many, many.
00:26:40
Speaker
functions, advertising, finance, et cetera, et cetera, have numbers behind everything that they're doing. You know, how many eyes saw the commercial, you know, what's our EBITDA this quarter, next quarter, et cetera, et cetera, or what are we projecting?
00:26:58
Speaker
and And by the way, if if I'm managing inventory, we forecast this much in sales, how close were we or how far off were we okay that is the comfortable engineers domain the the the point is it all has to be taken back into a realm that's multi-dimensional for people to jointly come up with a course of action and what they're going to do and how they're going to manage it and i think engineers who have taken the time to um
00:27:34
Speaker
be able to communicate what needs to be communicated to other people without upsetting them, without making them feel that like they're being talked down to or things like that, I think is really pretty easily mastered.
00:27:52
Speaker
When people get the guidance, and I teased earlier, you know, my mother was able to say to me that I misspoke or I used the wrong tense with an adjective or what what have you in a way that just absolutely sounded like she was purely trying to help me, not chastise me or tell me I did something wrong.
00:28:18
Speaker
And regrettably, I have not been able to replicate my mother. It's very hard. Yes, when I'm talking with my own son or my wife. But it's an effort to balance the details and as you and I have called it, the truth.
00:28:37
Speaker
And it's It's a matter of taking that truth and conveying it in terms that people who are not steeped in some of the engineering disciplines that we are able to convey to them in terms that make sense to them.
00:28:50
Speaker
I often tell students that the engineer's job is to inform decision makers. Is it also a little bit to persuade? Absolutely.
00:29:01
Speaker
and And it's to do. the the the engineer in many cases, I mean, you think about in research in particular, you know, absolutely not only coming up with a plan, but executing the plan and, and, and controlling that, that that's been the case in many, many fields within the engineering domain for a long time. and,
00:29:25
Speaker
you know i don't want to take us off too far of a tangent, but ah I think about the Manhattan Project and you know the stories around that of very, very narrowly focused deep engineers that were clustered around that. and the funny stories of how they were communicating back and forth with their military supervision.
00:29:48
Speaker
And there there are some really phenomenal stories of the deep technical specifics of nuclear atomics versus what generals and politicians were viewing that caused some really record-setting arguments and and debates amongst because you had really, really, you know, kind of almost the target engineer we're thinking about in mind, very deeply focused on one thing, along with people who were, you know, at the time thinking, well, wait a minute, this nerd over here is about to make the most explosive device ever seen by mankind. So there is that balance, but I think we have to appreciate that
00:30:38
Speaker
There is an engineer, a type of engineer who doesn't really want to take the time, does not really want to assimilate in his or her head, some of the soft aspects and wishes to be in a community of people similar to himself or herself, which is a point of comfort.
00:31:01
Speaker
But as said, I think that's those jobs and those positions are dwindling to a great extent. And I think the most successful engineers are going to need to be able to communicate with other areas of expertise on a level that's not based on all of the engineering detail that's behind their work.
00:31:26
Speaker
How can the students practice identifying purpose and audience in everyday communication now? I think that's a ah combination of the discussions they have with their acquaintances, which can be fellow students, could be their family, could be their neighbors, could be you know people that they're with in the summer you know during the break.
00:31:54
Speaker
And I also think that that reading is a huge help. I'd say better better to read a couple of chapters of a book than scroll through LinkedIn and for 45 minutes. Reading is you know a way for us to live.
00:32:14
Speaker
hundreds of thousands of different lifetimes and experiences. And we can see a character, is this character able to convince the other character of something? No, right why not? Where did he go wrong? what What poor assumptions did he make about this audience?
00:32:27
Speaker
it it Yes, it becomes a field of information and education for us of fictitiously in many cases, at least with with fiction, what worked, what didn't. And one of the reasons that I love history, one, particularly when we're talking about um in cases, governments and leaders in government and things like that is meticulously recorded, going back a long way.
00:33:01
Speaker
And you can see and perceive when they erred in a big way or when they were particularly on point and why.
00:33:12
Speaker
And, you know, those just being able to absorb those, I think, helps an engineer to kind of even think if if if the point comes up, am I being ethical by sharing this or so, to actually put it in terms of, well, guess what?
00:33:33
Speaker
Maybe a leader in a war at some point thought, an adversary was going to do this or that, which caused him her to make this is so decision. Doesn't make it unethical, doesn't make it wrong, even if it didn't work out the way, but to be able to assimilate the similarity of the decision making that takes place in your head. And there's not an equation that you can get out of a book that says, here's how to get the answer.
00:34:03
Speaker
What's your advice for students preparing for client-facing roles, internships, or cross-functional teams when it comes to understanding audience? Well, um'm I'm a big believer that getting to know the people you're going to be dealing with is important.
00:34:19
Speaker
um Coming across as open-minded and being prepared to take what comes I think it's great if um in the evenings or on the weekend, he or she reads a little bit, you know, maybe at the expense of, you know, so streaming or other things like that.
00:34:39
Speaker
But really, at the end of the day, it's interaction between us. And we want to make it better. And that means conversing with people, discussing with people.
00:34:54
Speaker
It doesn't mean you have to break the rules that it has to turn into child rearing or religion or politics. But it should mean that you're having meaningful interactions with folks and being able to interpret their their loves, their hates, their in-betweens, where they're going, what their aspirations way think.
00:35:15
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. And you know when And when you interpret how some people think differently than you, doesn't mean that you, me in this case, are wrong.
00:35:28
Speaker
It may be interesting to kind of you know put that idea in your head and see you know how you make decisions differently if you assume assume a little bit of a different persona for a brief period of time. Mm-hmm.
00:35:44
Speaker
What kind of ethos is going to work best for this audience? Which side of me should I bring out the most? Well, I think that's very much a factor of the individual and individuals, you know, um I'll call it typecast. and You know, you you yeah I'm sure you're aware of, you know, kind of like ESTJ, et cetera, cetera.
00:36:07
Speaker
An engineer who's very introverted is going to be very, very different than very extroverted engineer who is very interested in interacting with a lot of lot of people. you that Those will be two different characters, and I'm talking about you know on a different long scale. But...
00:36:28
Speaker
I'm one of the luckiest people I know because I had some unbelievable profs at tech, some great high school instructors in in high school that I'm still in contact with and even in junior high, and and a mother who took a lot of time and effort trying to kind of push me in a tick typical area to you know explore. I think you know reading books literature, reading history, reading biographies, autobiographies, um are are things that you will find, interestingly enough, that as you meet with different people, whether they're colleagues, prospects, what have you, you would be surprised the number of people that will have also sometimes
00:37:18
Speaker
read a same or similar genre, and it turns into a little bit of a means of a commonality that you wouldn't necessarily have expected. Our conversation here has really been to recognize engineering as a social profession.
Consistency in Communication Across Audiences
00:37:35
Speaker
The best technical solutions fail without buy-in, and buy-in depends on how you communicate.
00:37:43
Speaker
As we wrap up, what's one piece of evidence that proves an engineer's identity isn't just what they build, but how they advocate for it? It's being able to lay out a path that makes sense, that getting people's buy-in. and And by the way, I think one of the key aspects of this is I can think of multiple examples where people I or members of one of my teams would have to basically kind of work through different resources or different functions to get the buy-in.
00:38:24
Speaker
And there was a real premium to making sure that you gave the same story because there was a risk that two clients or two colleagues in different functions, compare notes and say, I got a different story.
00:38:42
Speaker
Which you you you can't risk that. I think the matter is being able to step back and one, appreciate where is somebody coming from.
00:38:54
Speaker
a sales person is gonna feel very differently about what's important to him or her than CFO. And... What actually counts as information to this person. Correct.
00:39:07
Speaker
But you have to make sure that it's a consistent story, that you've not given people what they could argue is conflicting stories. But it it goes back to that subset of rhetorical discussion to say,
00:39:24
Speaker
I wanna understand what you want to know. And I either will answer it now or I will circle back with you later after I've done some homework and give you that data or or give you the results so that we are we are clear on that. And you know in 30 years of consulting, I've had times where had a private equity firm who owned the business and company management, and then people in a function, whether was manufacturing or whether it was logistics or whatever it happened to be, who, again, we had to have the same store story for three different audiences from a different perspective.
00:40:06
Speaker
PE firm wants to make their money in four years and sell it. Management team wants to get the numbers and make sure that they're doing well for the PE firm and the people in the roles making it happen are working their butts off trying to make sure that they're you know doing the right thing that makes sense given the competition, the state of the the economy, et cetera, et cetera, to make sure that that all of that fits together.
00:40:34
Speaker
As we wrap up, if you could assign every engineering student one non-technical book to read, what would it be and why? I would put toward the top of my list, actually two books, Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. Classics.
00:40:52
Speaker
They totally are. Those two works are, I think, great. unbelievable and leading to and you've got this there's a little kind of squiggly tail here but then the Aeneid and then to the last century for James Joyce's Ulysses I mean it's it's a fabulous stretch of time that really explores our heads politics
00:41:26
Speaker
relationships. Virtues, vices. Yes, and the founding of Rome and Italy in between, which to me is amazing. And when you think that that's almost what we've inherited for our culture and you know there are a lot of other books that I have and can share with you that I think are worthwhile as well.
00:41:50
Speaker
But those those those two I think are among the best I think to kind of take somebody into an unexpected realm of thought and give him and her a lot of opportunity to kind of explore things that I think are not as common to experience in in our day and age.
00:42:13
Speaker
Right. Well, thank you so much for having this conversation with me. i I've really been thinking about this for a while, how, one, if you think anything isn't rhetorical, you're kidding yourself.
00:42:26
Speaker
But also, acknowledging that everything is rhetorical doesn't mean everything is a lie. It could just mean that things are situated in a way that are more beneficial for everyone to make things easier for other people. And reading fiction, while you know this isn't truth or nonfiction, is still really valuable for thinking about the way that people think, how people get out of bad situations thinking about the Odyssey.
00:42:57
Speaker
Yes. So thank you so much for having this conversation with me. Jill, I can't tell you how much I enjoy this. I really appreciate it. And thank you for the opportunity to speak with you about this. Thanks.