 Leaders in engineering and beyond |
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by Dietrich Georg
Managing Editor |
The 2007 list of Australia’s 100 most influential engineers is the fourth Engineers Media has produced. Again, we found many engineers in very senior positions, not only in engineering but also in other areas of leadership such as finance and politics.
The list focuses on present influence rather than historical achievements. All of the 100 engineers are currently in leadership positions, either in organisations or by virtue of their enigneering expertise.
Since the first list in 2004, which set out to disprove the then widely held view that engineers were good at problem-solving but rarely made it into top leadership positions, the list has not only put that perception to rest but it has also become a prestigious list in its own right. Many of the Top 100 engineers have included that distinction in their CVs, and the lists of previous years have consistently attracted large numbers of hits on Engineers Media’s website, long after their publication dates.
I was again assisted in the selection process by an eminent panel of advisers. This year there were six – five retired engineers, who all had distinguished careers and are still very active in a variety of roles, and an internationally renowned leadership consultant. They were David Croft, General Peter Gration, David Hind, Prof Rolf Prince, Dr John Nutt and Margot Cairnes (see photo and caption).
To be able to reflect the wide range of activities engineers are involved in, we divided the list into seven categories – Industry, Consulting, Academia/Research, Associations, Public Service, Expertise and Other.
We did not rank the names by level of influence as a comparison between the different areas of influence would have been very difficult.
We used the following selection criteria:
- In the Industry category we used the size of each organisation measured by revenue and staff numbers.
- In the Consulting category we applied staff numbers because revenue figures are often not revealed, as most of the firms are not publicly listed companies.
- In Academia/Research we considered the size of each university, mainly by student numbers.
- With Associations we looked at membership numbers.
- In the Public Service we considered the responsibilities of the candidate’s position.
- In Expertise we looked at technical achievements and their impact on engineering practice.
- In the Other category we included engineers who are influential in other areas such as politics.
We found that the Expertise category was the hardest to select as the criteria are by nature not as clear-cut as in all the other categories. Nevertheless, we believe this category is important as it is the only one that recognises influence through engineering practice rather than through leadership and management.
Generally, we selected only the most senior engineer of an organisation, except where subsections of the organisation are very large in their own right and operate virtually autonomously such as Leighton Contractors and Thiess, which are both part of Leighton Holdings.
As for citizenship and location, we included engineers working in Australia, independent of their nationality, as well as Australians working overseas.
In fact, there are quite a few Australian engineers working in very senior positions overseas. The Industry category has seven – Peter Farrell, Richard Goodmanson, Greg Lewis, Jonathan Ling, Andrew Liveris, Stuart McGill and Mike Quigley. In Consulting there are three – Nigel Robinson, David Singleton and Mike Wilke. And the Associations category has two engineers leading international bodies – Chris Champion and Chris Smallbone.
This year there are only two women on the list – Prof Elizabeth Taylor and Shireane McKinnie.
Overall, there are 38 new names on the list, some of them reappearing due to new roles, indicating that there is always movement at the top, mainly through retirement and the promotion of new people into senior positions.
Inevitably the selection process contained subjective elements and we don’t imagine everyone will agree with our choices. But we are confident that the list again demonstrates the wide spread of engineers in influential positions in this country.
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