The great sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein once said, "One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering." My new column on GlobalSpec is all about the magic that engineers can bring to the table when they pursue high-impact, real-world innovations.

My own approach to such challenges goes way back to my arrival in California, more than four decades ago. After wrapping up degrees at Columbia University in New York City, and a stint working at UN headquarters, I headed out to Silicon Valley in 1983, with a new wife and an even newer baby. The years that followed, working arm-in-arm with top-notch engineers, taught me some important things. One particularly critical lesson resulted from my work on the climate crisis.

That lesson? The companies and governments commercializing and deploying breakthrough technologies make it hard for engineers to get the job done right. That’s a tension unlikely to dissipate any time soon. But it is at the crux of the special role engineers play; they are responsible bridging today’s world and tomorrow’s world.

Building that bridge which connects two worlds is not always a fun role to play. From my own Silicon Valley perch, during seven-plus years inside the executive office of Cisco’s global headquarters, I worked for and with both engineers and non-engineers. One of my roles was to bring all of them together with customers to focus, as a single team, on the interconnected critical infrastructure systems which need to be urgently modernized in the face of climate change, namely transport, gas, water, electric and data.

Cisco’s vast network of government customers was having a rather hard time translating their decarbonization goals. We got busy organizing some of our best engineers in ways that would shake up the ways that the public sector uses digital tools. This work required us to transform seemingly mundane, yet vitally important tasks that keep a city humming. One great example is the work we did to help city and county governments to re-think traffic management and parking enforcement; through the creative re-engineering of the data they already own. It was boring, difficult work, but I was surprised with the haste with which the engineers embedded themselves in the equation. In the end, the mass of information that’s already flowing into the traffic management center was used to make commutes more efficient and practical, without massive disruption.

My takeaway at the time was that there are engineers one can consider a “special breed.” They often show the telltale signs of being highly adaptable. For this type of engineer, getting very tough assignments is a fact of life on the job. It's all about dealing with the pressure that comes from such important assignments. These are often the individuals who get excited about navigating through territories which are largely unmapped, solving problems never encountered before. A surprising large number of those engineers actually thrive with those kinds of assignments.

The good news of the 21st century is that engineers are increasingly recognized as a pivotal source of all the wealth, created for shareholders, organizations and employees. But this begs the question: If engineering teams are so respected, why do executives continue to take decisions that make it harder on engineers?

Well, as we covered, many engineers are excited and motivated by nearly impossible requests.

Another reason is that the engineer’s labs and the C-suite boardroom still don’t have enough overlapping personnel. Consider the story at Cisco: Over most of the past 40 years, the company has solved some the Internet’s most complex engineering problems. But over the past 30 years, the current and immediate-past Cisco CEOs have been sales executives. Many of the world’s innovative companies employ top-notch engineers, but they insist on recruiting their CEOs from outside the engineering world – primarily from finance and sales. Indeed, most of them graduated with MBAs. I’m one of those people here in Silicon Valley who think that more engineers should be running these companies, in part because they have a close-up experience with all of the messiness, and the difficulties, that accompany the push for breakthrough innovation.

Among the savviest executives running companies or government agencies are the ones who don't want to make it harder for engineers to get the job done right. They define big goals in ways that set out a pathway to achievable outcomes, which in corporate lingo is often called “a roadmap”. Successful non-engineer executives know that engineers love challenges, and they’re likely to enthusiastically embrace impossible requests. We could use more such executives, especially since most engineers are just waiting for the chance to make a difference. They jump at the chance to leave their mark.

About the author

Gordon Feller is Global Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. His nearly 500 magazine articles have been published by World Bank, U.N., World Economic Forum, The Financial Times of London, The Economist, TIME, Fortune, ThomsonReuters and S&P. He’s served as director at Cisco’s global HQ, and before that at IBM, Bechtel and Lockheed. Born in New York, he has Cum Laude degrees from Columbia, which awarded him the Gov. Lehman Fellowship, the Wallach Fellowship and the Dean’s Fellowship. Later, he won the U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield Fellowship and the Japan Foundation’s Prime Minister Abe Fellowship.