Back just 3 and a half decades ago or so, I was an aspiring graduate student at Virginia Tech. My advisor was Larry Adler; he had started at Columbia University with a degree in math and went on for his master's and then a PhD in Rock Mechanics at the University of Illinois.

His mentor was Steve Boshkov from Columbia. [ http://www.aimehq.org/programs/award/bio/stefan-h-boshkov ] . Larry invited Steve to Blacksburg for a seminar presentation to the graduate and undergraduate mining students. That evening he invited me over for dinner and brandy, so there we were, student, mentor and übermentor. Being young and brash enough to get away with it, I dared ask Steve what was the most important thing in life.

Without flinching he spent 10 minutes holding my fascination and that of Larry as we both just sat listening to the anecdotes that came following this simple statement:

"In life, you do well if you can get along with people, and you do well if you can get along with money. If you can get along with both you do very well. If you can influence either one you are quite successful, and if you can influence both you are phenomenal. That's all there is to it, purely and simply."

Engineers do incredibly well with numbers, and good engineers are the ones who relate those numbers to money and the wealth of their company. Very seldom, though, do you find an engineer who is really good with people. If you do, you make him a manager. But, the engineer who is skilled with money and with people makes himself your manager and proceeds far beyond any expected level. That's why Steve stayed at Columbia, because he could influence the engineering curricula heavily inserting humanities and arts to give engineers what they really needed much more than another course in mechanics or mathematics.

That's about as far as my tired old brain wants to go this morning, especially with my cluster headache meds kicking in, but it should be food for thought for anyone who wants to bother researching the topic even casually. Think about it.
That is all.
Word.