Mentoring is vital for the future of innovation as it relates to leadership, management, engineering, and new technologies. While technology is marked by ongoing change and a focus on the future, a recognition of the past vis-a-vis experience and lessons learned is invaluable. This is where mentorship become a focal point. Welcome to an interview with David Falzani, who dedicates a large portion of his time to Sainsbury Management Fellows' Society, which provides educational scholarship and career development for aspiring young engineers.
What is your
name and your relation to career development?
David Falzani, CEO of business consultancy, Polaris Associates, and President of the Sainsbury Management Fellows’ Society (SMF), a charity that provides educational scholarships and career development for aspiring young engineers. I was a beneficiary of an SMF scholarship. I am also a Visiting Professor at Nottingham Business School (NUBS). NUBS is a centre of excellence in the development of enterprise and entrepreneurial skills, innovation and understanding the commercialisation of research. I teach about the value to the economy of hi-tech wealth-creating industries and modern manufacturing, and how they can extract value from engineering and technology. I share my experience of steering entrepreneurial businesses through the development of ambitious business and marketing strategies. I aim to give students an insight into the challenges faced by a new business, from raising investment to scaling up an operation.
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| David Falzani, President, Sainsbury Management Fellows' Society |
What is the
importance of interdisciplinary education?
The world is an increasingly interconnected
place. Consequently business problems,
and their solutions, are becoming increasingly interconnected too. For example, today, every organisation is an
information business and data is the most valuable asset to the operation. The ability to interpret and understand data
and information in a business context is a major benefit because it creates
opportunities to add value to a business and thus its performance and success.
To achieve more elegant and effective business solutions, we need better ways
to handle higher levels of complexity.
The best way this can be delivered is through broader approaches to
problems, rather than through the traditional single ‘silo’ disciplines.
That’s where SMFs’ philosophy
and scholarship scheme comes in. The
Society promotes the benefits of a combined business and engineering education
to help improve the performance of the UK economy. We believe that by equipping engineers –
experts in understanding how to best apply technology – with business knowledge
and experience, they can use their mix of skills to build new products and
services that enhance business performance more rapidly and ultimately improve both
the UK economy and people’s lives.
What is the SMF
programme?
SMF aims to improve the economic
performance of UK engineering, manufacturing and construction businesses. This is achieved by providing highly
motivated professional engineers with MBA scholarships to undertake a
first-class business education in an international setting. This helps them to embark on leadership roles
in business with a high level of confidence.
Through its scholarship
programme, SMF enables professional engineers to add business, finance and
marketing expertise to the diverse skills gained through their engineering
training and qualifications. SMF awards
£300,000 worth of MBA scholarships each year to engineers with exceptional
education qualifications and leadership potential. SMF has already awarded £7m worth of
scholarships.
An award of £30,000 each is made
to 10 successful applicants annually so they can do a full-time MBA
course. The Award is given on condition
that the candidate obtains a place at one of the 12 business schools (in Europe
and USA) that participate in the SMF programme, which is administered by the Royal Academy of
Engineering.
Candidates must be UK citizens
normally domiciled in the United Kingdom. Candidates should ideally have a first or
upper second class honours degree in an engineering subject and have Chartered
Engineer status or be making substantial progress towards it. Given SMFs’ goal of getting more engineers
into business leadership positions, candidates must have the potential and
ambition to achieve senior management responsibility early in their
career. To learn more about applying for
an SMF scholarship click here.
There are now 300 Fellows – 10
of these are studying for their MBA degree currently. Nearly 90% are employed in industry or
services to industry and 70% of these are based in the UK or work for UK firms. Sixty Fellows are entrepreneurs and own and
manage their own enterprises. Some of
these recipients have already gone on to create new businesses worth in excess
of £500m, whilst others have helped further develop some of the UK’s largest
corporations, creating economic wealth and providing jobs for many thousands.
Lord Sainsbury is the founder of the Sainsbury
Management Fellows’ Society. You will
know him better as David Sainsbury, former businessman and politician – he was the
Minister of Science and Innovation from 1998 to
2006. Now a life peer, he sits in the House of Lords as a member of the Labour Party.
In the 1980s, David Sainsbury
(now Lord Sainsbury of Turville) felt that there should be more people in the
boardrooms of British industry who have both the knowledge of how things are
made and effective management skills. By
contrast, he found that many overseas companies, particularly those in Japan
and Germany, were succeeding because their senior executives and boards
included qualified engineers. To help
bring about a change in business culture in the UK, in 1987 Lord Sainsbury set
up the Sainsbury Management Fellowship scheme to develop UK engineers for
future leadership roles in commerce and industry.
How can
engineers improve the performance of companies?
SMFs
(and other professional engineers who also have high calibre business degrees
and real life business experience) have a unique combination of technological
and commercial knowledge and experience that makes them particularly suited to
strategic decision making processes.
Yet,
historically, professional engineers have not been seen as a natural choice to
sit on boards of blue-chip companies, however, things are changing. Business leaders are starting to recognise
that once equipped with the essential financial, marketing and leadership
skills, professional engineers have a myriad of talents that help businesses
grow faster. A professional engineer’s
ability to span both the technological and business spheres enables him or her
to help in the rapid commercialisation of new products and technologies. While there are many facets to the successful
launch of a new technology or product, the speed of commercialisation can be
the difference between success and failure – the faster a new technology or
product can be brought to market, the more benefit a company and its
shareholders will reap.
SMFs
can take a view on internal and external factors that influence business that a
director without an engineering background may not take because they start from
different perspectives.
SMF has
produced a downloadable publication Re-engineering the Board to Manage
Risk and Maximise Growth, which explains the
transferrable skills that engineers bring to business.
