Engineers Vs Business:

I wanted to share my thoughts on Engineering with my LinkedIn community and have been postponing it for a while now (read typical engineer). Interestingly enough, I have also been postponing the movie “The founder” (The story of McDonald’s). Today as a weird coincidence, I was thinking about checking these both items off the list!

 My definition of Engineer:

Anyone who solves a problem and makes a living out of it.

(Now that we got the definition out of the way, let us dive into the article)

While most of the articles out there point at Ray Kroc’s business acumen, I could draw a connection with Nick Offerman’s character Dick McDonald. (Major Spoilers ahead!)

The movie really lays out how Dick McDonald adopted the Industrial Engineering-101 concepts of assembly, workstations, Pareto-analysis (or 80-20 rule) and applied it to the food service industry. As the tennis court scene depicts- he was the finest engineer at solving his problem. He gave his model a USP “fast delivery”- the speede service system (as they refer to it). In addition, he also downsizes his menu to focus on the Top 20% (focusing on “high-movers” instead of the product-mix). 

All of this gave him “A symphony of efficiency, not a waste of motion” (quoting him).

Extrapolating the character, Dick McDonald is an embodiment of the passion engineers have towards their product or process. Later in the movie, he also exhibits his staunch stance on the requirements (Quality control of hamburgers). This level of passion towards his product and brand makes him miss the bottom line “Dollars”. While he meets an unfortunate fate of losing the restaurant and the brand he owned (spoiler), he would not have done so if he had realized that “Dollar” runs the whole show not his passion.

Unfortunately, this disconnect may often happen with Engineers too. They might often run behind perfecting their solution/process/product. While we cannot blame them for their lack of financial empathy right out of school. Later on in the career it is the Engineer’s responsibility to understand the business objectives and prioritize the bigger picture over the perfect unicorn solution.

Sometimes good enough might not be what the Engineer desires. However, good-enough can be what the situation needs to succeed!!