In one line: Choose an accomplished leader, preferably an engineer, research them deeply, and analyze them with the program’s frameworks. Biography makes leadership concrete in a way theory cannot.
Core idea
The program closes with a “leadership stories” session. Each participant picks a leader they respect or are curious about, from any era, in engineering or an adjacent field, and researches them through biographies, memoirs, histories and primary sources. The rule is to go deeper than an encyclopedia entry. The result is a one-page report and a flip-chart poster shared with the cohort, so that everyone learns from many lives at once.
How it works
A structured lens for the analysis:
- Personality type: which personality-type descriptor (for example an MBTI four-letter type) best fits, and what evidence supports it?
- Capabilities: plot a Spider Chart for the leader on the fourteen Engineering Leadership Capabilities and justify each rating with events from their life.
- Power: which two Sources of Power were their defaults, which did they use least, and why?
- Climate: what organizational climate did they create and work within?
- Story: reduce it to a poster, the few moments that show who they were (see Storytelling as Leadership).
Research tips:
- Use primary sources where possible: the leader’s own writing, period journals and interviews.
- Note what contemporaries said, not just later admirers.
- Look for failures and turning points, not only successes.
In practice
Engineers often choose figures from their own discipline, which makes the study doubly useful: technical history and leadership lessons at once. One example in this vault is Phillip H. Smith, whose graphical tool for transmission-line problems became one of the most recognizable images in radio-frequency engineering. The program founder, Bernard M. Gordon, and the expedition in Leading at the Edge are worked examples of the same exercise.
Questions to ask yourself
- Which leader’s choices would I most like to understand from the inside?
- What evidence would change my rating of them on a capability?
- What would my own leadership poster show, and what would I want it to show?
Connections
- Frameworks applied: Engineering Leadership Capabilities, Sources of Power, Culture and Climate.
- Presentation: Storytelling as Leadership.
- Examples: Phillip H. Smith, Bernard M. Gordon, Leading at the Edge.
- Capabilities exercised: Inquiry, Communicating and Advocacy.
Sources
- Program exercise; no public source.