Author Archive for: deg

About David E. Goldberg

Based in Champaign, Illinois, Dave is a change consultant in education circles and a leadership coach to students, faculty, and administrators in higher education as well as technology managers and professionals around the world. Prior to founding ThreeJoy Associates (www.threejoy.com), Dave was the Jerry S. Dobrovolny Distinguished Professor in Entrepreneurial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is known for pioneering work in genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation. Dave holds BSE, MSE, and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Certificate in Leadership Coaching from Georgetown University. His two most recent books are The Entrepreneurial Engineer (Wiley, 2006) and Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda (edited with Ibo van de Poel, Springer 2010).

Entries by David E. Goldberg

Calm and the 2nd Agreement

An earlier post (here) talked about understanding the nature of complaints and one royal road to feeling calmer through the speech act of making clearer requests.  This post discusses an important point made by Don Migel Ruiz in his bestseller, The Four Agreements, in particular, a point made in his 2nd agreement, “Don’t take anything personally,” […]

An Engineering Education Tops Disciplinary ROI

CNNMoney reports that of the 15 top college majors, ten are in disciplines of engineering or engineering technology.  Here’s the list and the associated salaries: Pre-med $100,000 Computer systems engineering $85,000 Pharmacy $84,000 Chemical engineering $80,000 Electrical and electronics engineering $75,000 Mechanical engineering $75,000 Aerospace and aeronautical engineering $74,000 Computer science $73,000 Industrial engineering $73,000 […]

To Complain or Not to Complain

In coaching, one of the ways to help clients to achieve greater peace is to work to help them reduce the proportion of their day they are occupied with negative emotions, and one of the regular sources of negative emotion is complaining, especially complaining about particular others. What is a Complaint? What is a complaint? Merriam […]

3 Habits at 3 Levels for Change

Mark Somerville and I have an article out on Huffington Post entitled Three Habits at Three Levels for Improved Engineering Education. The article starts as follows: Students in advanced economies today want to become anything but engineers (A.B.E.) and often choose to become lawyers, physicians, or businesspeople instead. Even those who do study engineering sometimes leave because […]

Higher Education Bubble

Parents pay more and more for their children to learn less and less from faculty members who are increasingly less engaged in education and learning.  Can this go on? httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAwBN2Q8L14 “No,” says Glenn Reynolds, who thinks it’s a bubble.  Watch the RSA-style animation in the video above or read the book here. What do you […]

Urgency-Importance Revisited or the Covey-Rotter Quad

I was going through some old posts on my blog for my book the Entrepreneurial Engineer and found this (here) somewhat different take on Stephen Covey’s famous urgency-importance distinction. In The Entrepreneurial Engineer I talk about Julian Rotter’s work on the distinction between those with internal versus external motivation. In Stephen Covey’s famous book, he talks about the distinction between […]

HuffPo Piece–Below the Waterline: A Deep Dive to Rethink Engineering Education

There’s a new piece up on Huffington Post here called Below the Waterline: A Deep Dive to Rethink Engineering Education.  This pieces discusses the ways that education concentrates on particular facts and figures and processes (above the waterline), but neglects deeper issues of reflection and learning (below the waterline): Focusing above the waterline and filling young minds […]

Are You in Judger Mode or Learner Mode?

There are many things to like about Marilee Adams book Change Your Questions, Change Your Life (here).  Written as a business parable, this book explores the role of asking questions and curiosity in effectiveness at work and in life.  Routinely in my coaching and training practice, I use many of her particular questions as well as her idea of Q-storming (brainstorming […]

Creativity Is vs. Creativity As

In developing a course at the University of Illinois on Modeling for Tech Visionaries, I did two lectures on creativity.  The Powerpoint slides from the first lecture are presented in the viewer below or may be viewed on the slideshare page here. [slideshare id=55929&doc=what-is-creativity-55929-26002] Slides numbers 5 and 6 have dictionary definitions of the term […]