Too many people believe that a fast decision keeps the pressure off

A survey published by the Chartered Management Institute conducted over the past few weeks found that three in ten senior managers in the engineering industry have taken a decision "against their better judgement" in the past six months. Of those, 20% claimed undue pressure from colleagues affected the way they made decisions and 12% suggested they lack the time to consider problems carefully. A further 12% blamed poor decisions on bureaucracy.

It could be worse, I suppose: seven out of ten presumably have not taken a single decision against their better judgement, but even so, having to make any decisions you don't agree with is never going to result in much self-motivation, is it? The survey also found that engineering industry managers prefer to make decisions based on rational analysis (surprise!) with only 14% admitting to relying on "gut feelings". The Chartered Management Institute reminds us to think about the effects on colleagues or team members before making our minds up; that doesn't mean opting for the easy way out, but consider an issue from the point of view of what will work best for others involved.

Also, they say, too many people believe that a fast decision keeps the pressure off. Instead, if we allow ourselves time to assess all the options, we're more likely to reach a conclusion based on clear, considered arguments. And we should always remember to communicate our decisions: people are unlikely to know why we want things done a certain way unless we tell them.

Basic management stuff? Maybe. But I think many of us can't be reminded of this often enough. More on the subject: http://www.engineeringtalk.com/information/cmi-editorial.html

The world can live without media studies - but it cannot live without engineering

Sir Joseph Whitworth was one Britain's greatest mechanical engineers, famous for the standard screw thread named after him, some revolutionary machine tools and his hexagonally rifled guns. A legacy to encourage and support engineering apprentices includes an awards scheme dating back to 1868, with the aim of bringing science/engineering and industry closer together. Awards of three and a half thousand pounds are given to apprentices who are studying engineering degrees, but earlier this year only a handful applied, forcing the IMechE and the Whitworth Society to extend the deadline in a bid to encourage more applicants. The good news is that the awards were announced this week, with 12 new Whitworth Scholars and 9 Whitworth Award Holders, and of course we congratulate them all.

IMechE President Andrew Ives told BBC radio that the institution would be working more closely with schools in a bid to encourage more children to go into engineering. He said: "The world can live without media studies - but it cannot live without engineering".

The Whitworth Society President, Steve Beck, became a Scholar in 1988. He said the award must continue to be as inspirational as it was to him when he applied. "I felt becoming a scholar would be an excellent benchmark and a real test of my abilities. Given the small number of awards for the whole UK, I saw it as a real challenge and a great honour to achieve the award. What we now have to realise is that while we do need to get more young people into engineering, fewer companies are offering apprenticeships. Part of our task is to make sure people know about the award and we will be exploring routes to do that".

I'm sure we can all contribute more to getting young people into engineering.

The Whitworth Society: http://www.engineeringtalk.com/information/whitworth-editorial.html

With a plain text email, I can read it at my desk without others thinking I'm not working

"Please don't change the format of Engineeringtalk", wrote one reader in our survey last week. Because of the 'plain text' format, "as it looks like any other email, I can read it at my desk without others thinking I'm not working".

I have to admit, I'd not thought of that one. Nor had I considered the situation of the reader who wrote that "it's all very well downloading and browsing through multi-megabyte PDF files with the facilities at my office, but I'm a contract engineer and I'm more often away using other people's computers. I can't subscribe to regular emails unless I know they're going to be of manageable small size".

A more frequently-expressed comment (in fact, something hundreds of you said in various ways) was that you see Engineeringtalk as a kind 'executive summary' of what's going on - a few headlines to scan through, and you know if there's anything new you should be aware of this week. "Photos are very nice, and sometimes useful", wrote one reader, "but I haven't got time to see them all chugging past on my screen as I scroll down just to see if there's something of interest to me in an issue".

Anyway, very many thanks to the hundreds of you who completed our questionnaire. Don't think the comments above represent an overwhelming majority; there's certainly a large number of you who feel that a more graphical presentation would make Engineeringtalk an even better resource, so the message to us is that if we change things, it should be as an additional alternative to the existing format, not a replacement. In fact, at the other extreme to the above, 1 in 7 of you said that not only would you prefer a 'magazine-style' format, but that you'd also prefer the 'magazine' to be emailed to you directly, even if it was several megabytes in size!

Amongst the other questions, one set of results which we'll be bringing to the attention of all the suppliers we deal with is that when you request information from them, the vast majority of you would like something back quickly, by email. Most suppliers do this, but there are still too many who just send out printed material in the post without any email correspondence.

I'm with the newspaper correspondent this week who suggested the clocks change *every* weekend

With the clocks going back last weekend here in the UK, we've had the annual debate about whether it's all worth it. I'm with the newspaper correspondent this week who suggested we move to "Greenwich Generous Time", whereby the clocks change *every* weekend, going back by an hour on Saturday night to give us all an extra hour in bed, then moving forward again at 9am on Monday morning. Nice.

More seriously, the main argument against changing the clocks is the sheer cost of the exercise in man-hours (and mistakes). That I understand, but one aspect I've never seen added to that calculation is the cost of designing equipment to enable the time to be adjusted by everyday users in the first place. Sure, it might only be an extra button, or a few extra lines of control code, but it must add up. In many cases, for industrial equipment using real-time clocks, changing between UTC and summer time twice a year is the only reason for having to provide a time-adjustment facility to everyday operators, otherwise it could simply be a scheduled maintenance feature, which wouldn't involve the same complexity of user interface, or the cost.

Thanks to the many hundreds of you who completed our survey last week - I've met my part of the deal, and the Asia Earthquake Appeal will soon be in possession of my entire loose change collection (which turned out to be alarmingly valuable). I'll summarise what you've told us in next week's newsletter.