Non-Technical Managers in a Technical Company? 438
Futurepower(R) asks: "Before he was hired, Steve Jobs of Apple told John
Sculley he was a sugar-water salesman, and perhaps should have listened to his own words.
Under
Chairman and CEO Louis V. Gerstner, Jr, IBM did well, but was that only
because the world needs a global computer service company? Was IBM technically
advanced during his tenure? In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully
run a technically-oriented company?" What qualities would such a manager need to keep a tech company healthy?
Essentials (Score:5, Insightful)
Has a clear vision for where the company is going.
Surrounds his/herself with solid advisors within the company to indicate what is and is not possible
Listens
Rewards good ideas and performance
Discourages sycophancy
Is compensate for real success, not juggling the books or tricking Wall Street into sending up the stock price
Is able to accept constructive criticism
Knows how to properly delegate and referee
Makes the hard decisions before they become even more painful
I don't think there should be a requirement that the CEO knows thouroughly the product line of the company, a broad understanding is is essential, but knowing how to successfully run a business is key. I get pretty irked when a manager says something like, "Well, why can't we just build a database in Access? It's easy to do, I do it all the time!", when the product is actually going to be rather large and require something more robust. It's a pretty good indication there's an oversimplificator on the loose and trouble is around the bend.
Re:Essentials (Score:5, Insightful)
My worst employers have been those who were not only technically incompetent but incapable of realizing their limitations.
The best? Those with enough technical skills, background or knowledge to realize that (a) things are not always as they appear and (b) doing things the Right Way has long-term benefits that overshadow the "quick fix." Translation: you don't have to know how to do everything or how everything works as long as you know that your knowledge is limited and someone else more technically minded probably should be listened to.
Re:Essentials (Score:5, Insightful)
from that movie The Aquatic Life: "I don't know what you just said but I know it's bullshit."
Re:Essentials (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Re:Essentials (Score:3, Insightful)
The manager must know enough to know who knows. (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed, managers must know enough to realize their limitations. Not only was the recently fired HP CEO Carly Fiorina not able to realize her limitations, for example, she did not think her limitations mattered.
People say that the printer division is HP's last profitable division. However, it is not the printers that make money, but selling ink for $8,000 per gallon [ebusinessforum.com] (mostly cheap solvent, bought in tank car loads).
If that is correct, HP is not a real business, but one that depends on taking advantage of its customers to make money.
If that is true, then Carly Fiorina was not a businesswoman at all, but merely able to give the appearance of competence. And that, in turn, means that people who write for the business press are completely incompetent, too.
Similarly, often the business press claims that Microsoft is a successful company. But would Microsoft have been successful if it had not had a very unusual situation in which it was able to arrange a virtual monopoly by breaking the antitrust law? Someone who had a monopoly on water, for example, could make Bill Gates look like a poor man in a week.
However, I have some disagreement with what you said. You said, "Translation: you don't have to know how to do everything or how everything works as long as you know that your knowledge is limited and someone else more technically minded probably should be listened to."
The problem with that is the manager must have enough technical knowledge to understand very well who has more technical knowledge than he, and who can therefore be trusted. Typically, that's a lot more technical knowledge than what people mean when they say "you don't have to know how to do everything or how everything works".
Re:The manager must know enough to know who knows. (Score:3, Insightful)
So selling a product at a profit isn't a real business? What would they have to do to count as a real business? How is selling something taking advantage of the customers? Because the prices are too high? Then who decides what are high prices?
It sounds as if you're bitter because ink prices are too high. Personally I wouldn't know, I rarely use my printer and when I do it prints all fun
Re:The manager must know enough to know who knows. (Score:4, Insightful)
And, she led HP back in time. (Score:3, Informative)
Okay... Maybe that's why HP's printer software is so medieval.
If you try to uninstall the latest Windows software that HP provides for one of its printers, the uninstall deletes something like 9,000 files in your C:\WinNT folder, leaving the OS completely inoperative, of course.
No one knows the extent of Microsoft aggression. (Score:3, Interesting)
You said, "Microsoft has always been extremely aggressive against competitors..."
That's true, and no one should think they know the extent of the aggressiveness. I came to that conclusion after trying to document some of the aggression in my article, Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going. [futurepower.org]
What made DOS dominant in the later years? Microsoft deliberately allowed piracy. That's my conclusion and opinion after considerable study of the matter.
Microsoft created a 2-tier market that squeez
The worst are technical semi-competents (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately good technical savvy requires one stay up to date and keep trying things out.Examples of very stupid stuff I've heard:
"This product must be built with C++": Umm, err, the was no C++ compiler available for the CPU in question. There was one for a similar CPU - it could be made to work but would not exploit some nifty features and would generate bloaty slow code. The current Code base which was to be reused was C, so an effort was started to C++-ify the code. A lot of time was lost trying to comply with, then refute, this "wisdom".
"You can trade off memory against CPU for performance": Semi-true, sometimes. So the system needed about 4 MIPs of CPU and about 128kB of RAM. The CPU could only deliver about 2 MIPs. No problem says the manager, just double the RAM to 256kB. Unfortunately this "decision" was made while the true techies were on vacation. Cost a bundle of money and time to cancel the order and relay the board with a stonkier CPU.
"SPI is better than RS232": True, for many things... except the RS232 interface was removed from the device and the SPI bus was made available to the outside world. Instead of being able to just plug in to a PC for upgrade, a special RS232 to SPI adapter box (which was damn expensive) had to be shipped too. Luckily the product flopped - it would have been a pig to support.
Re:The worst are technical semi-competents (Score:3, Insightful)
I know one company president who thinks that computers are basically just typewriters that let you save what you typed so you can make changes.
That company has nearly shut down an entire division because it takes too many people to do the work. If they would automate what they are doing, they could cut the personnel required to do the work by at least 75%.
They do everything nearly the most inefficient way possible.
Re:Essentials (Score:5, Insightful)
That's an oversimplification. Sometimes the right way is the quick fix and not the Right Way. If having something fast is more important than having something correct, the right way is the quick fix.
Sometimes a product can be developed perfectly, and totally miss its opportunity to be useful. This is a crucial aspect of communication between management and labor.
If it needs to be done next tuesday and won't be worth a penny on wednesday, you'll do lots of things that aren't "The Right Way". You'll use MS Access, Visual Basic, bailing wire, and duct tape if you have to. And if you've got a good boss you'll know the situation and understand how "Right" you should do it, because he'll tell you.
MacGuyver (sp?) has built many useful things escaping from drug dealers, and none of them would pass the scrutiny of a good QA dept.
Re:Essentials (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it's raining and they want to stay dry.
People in New York City generally don't carry umbrellas, and when it starts to rain there are suddenly cheap umbrellas for sale cheap everywhere. They're good for maybe one rainstorm (a gust of wind will shred them), but they'll generally function as an umbrella for sufficient time for most users.
Sure, you could sell really nice, high quality umbrellas at a price commensurate with the quali
Re:Essentials (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't mind questions being asked, but having to constantly teach baby steps to the same person over and over and over again is very frustrating.
A better question would be 'What are our options to do ', or even 'How can we best do ?'.
Re:Essentials (Score:5, Insightful)
What I do is say, "Absolutely we can do that. There are a few technical details of what you said that would need to change, but we can absolutely do something along the lines of what you are saying to meet the business goals you have in mind."
Then, I explain to them using everyday language the high level differences between what they are suggesting and what I think will actually work. I explain the basic reason why I'm suggesting these changes to their idea. One important thing is that I keep talking about it as "implementing your idea" and "meeting the business goal you called out".
The rub usually comes when the schedule and budget are discussed. However, if someone is saying "Why can't you just build the database in Access instead of Oracle for our server product?" or something really silly like that, it is usually not hard to explain why (because there really is in fact a valid reason). The important thing is to couch your reasoning in terms of business goals and financial costs to the company (e.g. increased support calls because Access can not handle the load generated by being used as a back end for a server of this kind.) and not try to put the person down. Putting people down or treating them in a condescending way because of lack of technical knowledge will not generally help you get your way. It also doesn't help you win any friends. Instead, treat them with respect and understand that they probably have some expertise in other areas that are important to the business - expertise you probably don't have. Take the time to patiently explain why and chalk up the extra time and effort this takes to the overhead you take on of working with other people.
Re:Essentials (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Right (Score:4, Interesting)
He's the best boss in the world when he recognizes that he lacks knowledge of important details needed to make a lot of decisions, and doesn't make decisions without consulting his employees and considering our advice first.
But he is terrible when a decision comes up that involves something that he thinks he knows, so he starts ignoring the advice of people who know much better. It's pretty much the usual, "No, let's use FileMaker Pro because it says right here on the box that version 7.0 not supports true relational joins, can handle millions of records in a table, and works as an ODBC data source." type thing.
Re:Right (Score:3, Interesting)
So, turns out, product is a steaming pile of shit and we end up blowing through a million bucks in various consultants, "training" (I use that term VERY loosely), subsequen
Re:Essentials (Score:5, Informative)
* Has no vision at all. He takes his marching orders from the Board of Directors, who represent the stockholders.
* Surrounds himself with yes-men who tell him what he wants to hear.
* Listens? To what? He's the CEO and makes all the important decisions.
* Rewards himself when someone comes up with a good idea. His employees' performance is supposed to make him look good.
* Mandates sycophancy.
* Juggles the books if necessary to increase the stock proce. His job, by law, is to maximize shareholder value. Period.
* Is above criticism. He's the boss, after all. He wouldn't have achieved his position by being a complete f**k-up, would he?
* Loves the squabbles between his managers. Makes him look that much better. He'll just fire one of them (probably the technical guy).
* Has his golden parachute ready when the s#!t hits the fan. The layoffs and the collapse of the company are his successor's problem. Meanwhile, he leaves with a $20,000,000 severance package.
Re:Essentials (Score:5, Insightful)
* Listens? To what? He's the CEO and makes all the important decisions.
Not specific to a CEO but the lower levels as well.
Long and drawn out story follows
At my last company we had two field reps. They wer the first contact when someone wanted a new workstation or something moved.
Field Rep #1. Recieves order, does a walkthough and checks if cat5 and power in the area, checks if PC in stock, looks at IP addresses and config and provided the technicians with all the details including ip address, workstation name, chassis and port number etc.. Has the PC shipped to the location and tells the customer when we will be there for install. If cables or power needed run would tells the requesting department head that it would take about 3 weeks for everything to be done.
Field Rep #2. Immediately tells requesting department head we will have it up and running in 2 days. Slaps some paper work together and we show up. Well, there is no cat5, all ports on the switch are taken up, no computer, blah blah blah.
With field rep #1, the department heads do not like him, he always tells them 2-3 weeks and makes them pay for what they are requesting (out of switch space? Pay up $20k for a new blade). Things were done right and fully documented. We never had configuration issies and when we flew in to do a job, it was done in one day.
With field rep #2, department heads liked this guy because his turn around was "2 days". Of course we had to fly in and out several times because nothing was right the first time, customer did not even order what they thought they needed and we show up with something else etc.. He would procure a switch blade if needed from another job to put here because he forgot to check if one was needed etc..
Bottom line, the total time in both was about 2-3 weeks, one done right and the other done wrong.
During layoff time? Field rep #1 was let go by the regional manager because he was not focused on "the customer".
In my descriptions, the customer, department heads and managers are all from the same company, just different departments.
Re:Essentials (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Essentials (Score:3, Insightful)
Most successful customer-facing people have learned to combine these approaches; act like #2 in front of the customer, but be careful to use some qualifying terms. "No problem, we should have this done in two days". Keep the rest of the sentence "if pigs start flying" under your hat, they don't really need to know. If they're smart enough to pry, then tell them the truth, but 99% just want to hear you say what the
Re:Essentials (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Essentials (Score:2, Insightful)
It just seems to me that he does whatever the heck he wants, regardless of what other people, or even the government, say. I mean, he has the money to, so why not.
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:3, Interesting)
right. so, you're saying that a manager has to have the appropriate skillset for the project he's managing. pretty obvious.
i think the whole question is moot and original post pointless. managers need to have a unique skillset for the project or operation they're managing. sometimes this means technical proficiency is required,
If only my manager had technical sense... (Score:3, Insightful)
He believes that our "Communication Server" which simply syncronizes inventories of the retail stores, are adequate running windows 98 and using PCAnywhere 8.1 scripted to transfer some da
Re:If only my manager had technical sense... (Score:4, Funny)
Managing Geeks' Egos (Score:5, Insightful)
These are the sort of people who like to be really condescending to others (particularly those they think know less), and managers need to know how to manage them properly, because apart from the usual management problems that you'll run into, these are the sorts of people who're going to get really snooty if they feel that they could manage the office or design a system better than the manager just because they're excellent at organizing source code.
Now, before you get all fired up over that comment, notice how +5 mods you'll see for posts that talk about how managers should respect the abilities of their subordinates? Chances are pretty good that every other person out there who agrees with those sentiments secretly suspects that they're smarter than their manager BY DEFAULT. That's a tough situation to manage. I'm sure some of this has to do with how many managers from hell lack good people skills, but more than a little of this is because people like to have their egos stroked, geeks especially.
So, if you're going to be a manager and keep your subordinates happy, notice that you'll need to do a lot of ego-management.
OT: Your .Sig (Score:3, Funny)
I haven't yet seen your sig turned into a slashdot cliche, so allow me the honor.
1. They ignore you
2. They laugh at you
3. They attack you
4. ??????
5. Profit!!!
What a moronic question. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What a moronic question. (Score:4, Insightful)
This certainly isn't a moronic question. Having experienced that my "managers" often have difficuly managing a schedule because it's far more slippery than (their project management software+their dubious skills with that software+their dubious skills with aspects of management in general), I can certainly understand where the question comes from.
In case you haven't noticed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In case you haven't noticed (Score:2)
Re:In case you haven't noticed (Score:5, Interesting)
Avie Tevanian (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In case you haven't noticed (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve Jobs was stepping down from the head job at Apple, and was recruiting Sculley from Pepsi to replace him. The crux of his pitch was "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?"
This quintessentially Jobs-ian story is well-known to any Apple zealot but, yeah, it could have done with a bit more of an explanation. Especially since the submitter's take on it isn't one I've ever heard anyone else adopt.
Atleast these two.. (Score:5, Funny)
An ex-colleague of mine had the gall to ask his PM in a team meeting for an extra couple of days to write a SELECT query just because the query was returning not just a handful of records, but millions!
The PM, to the apparent delight of all, agreed with out a second thought.
Re:Atleast these two.. (Score:2)
Well given that the data had to be stored in memory it's not an extravagant requirement if the app wasn not built ot have support for scrolling etc. In fact it would be more than reasonable to ask for a couple of weeks to handle very large result sets if the app wasn't built to handle them.
Re:Atleast these two.. (Score:2)
I took three days to rewrite a data load process (Score:3, Informative)
It had been touched by about 20 coders each of which where told to look for speed, one of whom wrote his masters theasis on query optimization. None of them new shit about performance tuning.
I got an order of magnitude performance increase (10x as many rows per second total load time).
Re:Atleast these two.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep in mind that you only need to be caught once with this kind of joke to lose all respect in the organization.
If the PM claimed to have technical skills, it's one thing, but if, as I assume, he never did, this is wrong and harmful to the company and your friend.
Have fun posting.
What is being managed? (Score:5, Insightful)
If, however, the manager is managing technologists, he has more need of understanding the people than the technology.
Whatever he manages, the manager needs to recognize his own limitations, and seek advice for things outside his expertise.
Re:What is being managed? (Score:2)
Re:What is being managed? (Score:3, Funny)
It depends on the salesman. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know at my company, Cisco Systems, our CEO is a self proclaimed salesman. He 100% is customer focused. The key is he has top notch technical & marketing leaders on his team that guide the overall technical direction.
I believe it is this combination that has enabled our company to be one of the top technical companies in the world. Some of you will hack on Cisco for security problems, IOS bugs, whatever (what large company doesn't have any bugs?), but I don't think anyone can truly say that Cisco is not completely committed to customer satisfaction. In the end, isn't that what matters most for any company?
my $0.02
Todd
Re:It depends on the salesman. (Score:2)
Re:It depends on the salesman. (Score:5, Funny)
Who are you? Really?
Re:It depends on the salesman. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It depends on the salesman. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It depends on the salesman. (Score:3, Insightful)
Fine, I'd he
Re:It depends on the salesman. (Score:3, Interesting)
My experience with Cisco is that, whatever it may have been in the past, it is now a company on the way down.
What often happens is that the non-technical manager inherits a technically strong company, and the inertia carries him along until the company falls apart. That's apparently what happened to Apple under John Sculley, for example.
Certainly one could get the feeling that Cisco is falling apart. I was subscribed to a newsletter for some Cisco equipment, and Cisco would regularly send me poorly wr
enterprise vs company (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll offer up Bill Gates as the arch-typical beast (Score:2)
Well, at least here on /. it is...
Yes (Score:2)
Note: I work in tech support, so my comment is probably colored by having to tell people what a keyboard is, how to right click, that rebooting is different than reformatting, and so forth.
I don't think so (Score:3, Interesting)
A manager is a manager is a manager... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can do that effectively, for the most part, you can manage.
Re:A manager is a manager is a manager... (Score:2, Insightful)
There are so many other reasons things might not get done. Here are a few:
Re:A manager is a manager is a manager... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are managing a technical effort, you have to have technical understanding at a level far better than "basic." Otherwise you're reduced to beancounting and trying to find an authoritative source within the organization who will tell you what's going on without dragging their own agenda into it. Managers are usually not good at knowing who to listen to unless they have some means of reality-checking.
Senior executives (C-level and maybe their direct reports) are a different story, since they're not as close to the workface. But the idea that there's a generic skill that managers have that is independent of underlying subject matter is pernicious and contrary to real-life experience.
Having said that, technical skills on their own are not sufficient to make you an effective manager. Leadership is a whole different thing. So is strategy.
Catch 22 (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with that is evaluating the people you hire. How can you say a guy knows what he's doing if YOU don't know what he's doing? Not to say it's impossible, but it can be difficult. From what I've read, the most successful companies in the fortune 500 have top people who were promoted from within. They know how the company operates and what it's capable of. The CEO of XOM for example started there as a chemist - there's a lot more to running the company than that, but he knows what they do and understands how it's done and what's possible.
You mean executive, not manager (Score:5, Interesting)
The ideal executive has excellent leadership qualities. He/she can paint a picture of the where you are going and make the idea of going there sound very exciting. You cannot underestimate this. Salesmanship plays a big role as well. A CEO is forever "selling" his company, be it to customers, investors or employees.
I don't think technical aptitude has much to do with it. In 1995, Cisco CEO John Chambers did not even have a PC on his desk, let alone use one. They seemed to do OK.
You don't have to be a techie (Score:2)
I've read his book [ibm.com] about his experience at IBM and most of it dealt with getting rid of middle layer (IBM had so many managers, that half of the time the secretaries of the managers would arrive at a meeting instead of the managers). Guess wh [blogspot.com]
Wrongthink is wrong... (Score:2)
Don't forget that Jobs saw his competition as IBM, not Microsoft. That was the point of the "1984" Super Bowl ad, he was making fun of IBM. He totally misjudged the real threat to Apple.
What was th
Managing is more about people then tech, IMO. (Score:5, Interesting)
People who want to dive too deep into the tech, when they're job is more about facilitating and steering from good thoughts of others.
My best managers have been those who have been out of the coding game long enough to know a good idea, but not necessarily how to implement them.
My worst have been people who graduated with a masters in Comp Sci, and thought they knew better then the developers: turning them into nothing more then factory workers, pushing buttons in a direction that always ended up being less then adequate.
Only one skill required (Score:2)
Popular agreement is not the same thing as correctness.
Yes and No? (Score:2, Interesting)
If the manager is good at delegation, good at recgonizing and promoting the strenghts of his/her employees that helps.
At the end of the day the manager should be dependent on the skills and knowledge of their product anyway (even if they have a strong competant knowledge) so wether they have to pick up the background as they go or they a
The most valuable thing a manager ought to know.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, sometimes asking questions from ignorance, asking "well, why DO things need to be that way?" is the route to a good idea.
And sometimes, you are just asking programmers why they keep putting bugs in their code and telling them that they need to put more features in, instead.
A good non-technical manager for a technical company needs to be more of the first and less of the second.
A good manager (Score:5, Insightful)
- Loyal to the managers above, and demands loyalty back
- Moderates the sh*t rolling downhill
- Let's the troops know the important stuff
- Understands the goals and keeps the team congruent
- Provides a beer fridge when the going gets rough
- Does not sit still for pettiness and backbiting
- Mentors
-
Oh, be still my beating heart. What cloud-cuckoo-land is this I imagine?
My two cents (Score:2)
And let's not forget.... (Score:5, Funny)
Why Not? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because of this, his team was very efficient and very loyal.
If you're a manager, you should probably be delegating most of the technical anyway.
Manager Vs. Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
A smaller company will have the main manager selling the product at the same time. He needs to know the product.
A larger company will separate daily operations from selling the product. The manager makes sure that the team is heading the right direction, he tells the tech team where to go, not how to do it.
A Manager will work for a large company, but as long as he's not marketing the product.
Absolutely. (Score:2, Insightful)
Realistically though, Big Business promotes people due to age, wardrobe, ass-kissing, lineage, sexual favors or sheer lottery before they'd do it due to actual skill. So the chances of getting both a good people manager and good technical manager together are slim. It's more likely to find a good technical manager who doesn't completely suck at people management, and let them run the show.
Best quality in a manager? (Score:5, Funny)
Ability to speak Hindi or Mandarin.
The CEO myth (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at HP, a great example of "CEO skills" at work. What happened to pormoting from within or at least within your own industry.
And people wonder why the tech economy is so bad...Wow (Score:2)
Bad Examples (Score:2)
Gerstner took IBM from a $15B loss, back when a billion dollars was real money, to a rebirth that has seen profitabililty and respect return to the computer giant. To say nothing of tech superiority: PowerPC anyone? ThinkPads? They ran the HD biz so hard into the future that
Well, that depends... (Score:2)
In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully run a technically-oriented company?
You'll need to produce a counterexample first.
Balance (Score:2)
Just because you are trained by profession as an economist you are better of as a person managing funds and a buisness venture, not always the case.
This is a broad question to answer human nature and traits and should be asked on a case by case basis.
What does a manager do? (Score:2, Insightful)
So, in my opinion it
The last thing you want in that role... (Score:5, Insightful)
Geeks are easily distracted by shiny things.
Better to have someone at the helm who is less shiny-thing-obsessed.
Re:The last thing you want in that role... (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, we run several things well past their Vender EOL because it was incredibly stable and upgrading had serious transition costs. We practice the transitions over, and over again testing each change. To ensure that everything will go smoothly. Lack of support for the stable system be damned.
Sure on my desktop, I've got some shiney new stuff. On my servers. Not a
Re:The last thing you want in that role... (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe new-school geeks, but old-school geeks value durability, supportability and sustainability over shiny new toys.
I think this is analogous to the differences between "new money" (rich) and "old money" (wealthy).
Chairman Lou did it right (Score:4, Insightful)
-aiabx
for starters (Score:2)
A love of black turtlenecks?
Enough business knowledge and a network (Score:2)
If a sugar water salesman gets the right technical advisers he is more likely to succeed than a techie with a good PR adviser.
In case you wonder, I'm a techie (what a surprise on
Dear Slashdot, (Score:2)
Um.... Yeah duh? Next question please.
The great successes of... (Score:4, Informative)
Addle-headed technical people without marketing expertise are apt to introduce boneheaded products like the PDP-1, the Wang Word Processor, the Model 110 Pathfinder Camera, the HP-35 calculator, etc. etc. when none of these products were backed by solid evidence from focus groups showing that consumers had any need of them.
They also have a disturbing tendency to be perfectionists, and build products that are better, more reliable, and more durable than they actually need to be, adding cost and decreasing margins.
After 25 years experience... (Score:3, Insightful)
No.
I worked for Lou Gestner. His talent was making money by laying off people, selling off divisions, and making loans to other transnational companies. IBM is a ghost of its former technical self as a result.
My dealings with non tech savvy CIOs. (Score:3, Interesting)
One had some promise. He understood that he was, to be kind, completely devoid of any real understanding of the technology. He relied heavily on the knowledge of the staff and focused on the client facing and staff management aspects of the job. All was well, until it turned out he was a paranoid nut who started playing a variety of political games instead of doing the job, but until then, he was able to do well. He'd demonstrated that a good manger really can manage something of which they have limited understanding.
Another manager was the flip side. He had no understanding of the technology, and was, to be kind, a hand wringing, spineless jellyfish. The thought of pushing for the cash for a major hardware upgrade was beyond his capabilities, and all of our insistence that the system was dying fell on deaf ears because "Well, it's working now, isn't it?"
And when I say "hand wringing" I mean it literally. He would walk around wringing his hands like he was washing them, and whenever we discussed budgets or the need for new servers, he would get a terrified "Deer in the headlights" look in his eyes.
While he accomplished literally nothing and was, through his inaction, responsible for several major system crashes, he lasted a VERY long time, because he always told the owner what he wanted to hear, and blamed the IT staff when something went wrong, something the owner was apt to accept at face value.
THERE IS NO SUCH THIN AS A 'TECHNICAL' MANAGER (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't matter whether it's Fig Newtons or Apple Newtons.
Beyond that, people skills and financial skills are fully fungible.
Machiavellian thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
India vs. Us. (Score:3, Insightful)
India is the world's largest IT producer. China is the world's largest semiconductor producer. Japan is the world's largest consumer electronics producer. Us has the highest engineer unemployment in the world, highest trade deficits in the world, and the lowest quality of life in the world.
Re:India vs. Us. (Score:3, Insightful)
and the lowest quality of life in the world.
What do you mean by that ? I've never been to the US (i assume thats whom you mean by Us) but 'lowest quality of life in the world' ?
compared to say... burkina faso or cambodia (sorry, no disrespect to readers from these countries meant) i'd say the quality of life is nothing short of nirvana.
The Jobs-Sculley story turned on it's head (Score:5, Interesting)
Scully on the hand, while he clearly has skills on the marketing side of things (and was indeed selling "sugar-water" at Pepsi when Jobs was trying to hire him), actually started of on the engineering side of things and has demonstrable skills in that area. This is the guy who as a *kid* filed a patent on some color CRT techniques just one day after Sony beat him to the punch.
It's also worth noting that during the Sculley years, Apple's market share was impressive and grew quite well. While he made a mess of things in a lot of ways, Macintosh computers haven't achieved the market share they had under Sculley either before or since.
Hire the incompetent (Score:3)
I just said "goodbye" to a man hired in by my company (a national television network) who is going off to a subsidiary after getting his M.B.A. while on the job. His wife also had two children during his tenure.
I feel sorry for the guy in many ways. He was prevented from giving us the resources we truly needed to make a seamless transition into new technology; he was attending classes at a hard business school and he was doing the "new daddy routine" in being awakened every three hours by not one but two infants.
But I do have a problem with the concept of someone who has never actually made any television making judgements and purchase decisions on behalf of people who do make television for a living and whose jobs depend on continuing to crank out excellence. I do have a problem with him announcing: "There will be layoffs" in a meeting when the transition to new technology has not been started yet and there is absolutely no understanding of how many seats will have to be filled in order to make airtime on a daily basis with an absolutely inflexible deadline.
And now he will go to work in a medical field with absolutely no training in or understanding of medicine.
I suppose he can complain that he was ordered to cut costs by his superiors but he was too disinterested to really try to understand the business he was in and he was too yellow to push back when faced with orders that made no sense.
Only problem is that the people who gave him the order to cut staff will now be closer to the "production floor," which puts jobs in greater jeapordy. I wonder if this is what they're teaching in Business schools these days: You don't need to know the business; You don't need to be curious; You don't need to measure past performance in order to predict the future and you don't need to respond to the real needs of the situation. Oh, and you can best build a team by threatening everyone's job in order to set everyone against each other.
There are some managers who do pay attention who don't have any experience in actually making things work on the production level but, in my industry with large conglomerates owning media companies and trying to run them as if they were assembly lines making widgets, they seem to either not challenge the Corporate Line or get eased out.
I have heard that M.B.A. means "Mindless Brainless A-hole and in Corporate America today with no corporate interest in being a good citizen and no investment in employees, that seems to be borne out in experience.
US Industry Says "Vaginas Need Not Apply" (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact is, business is hesitent to employ women in top fields. So whatever qualifications you place on managers the one quality that certainly does not rise to the top is a vagina.
That implies, to me at least, that all the other criteria for a good manager discussed thus far in this topic are highly subjective. Your results would be equally effective by mounting a set of categories on a rotating circular board and throwing darts to set your standards.
And for those who believes women cannot be tough and single-minded in their purpose, I have only two words: Margaret Thatcher.
Marconi (Score:4, Informative)
Simpson was bought in as a deal maker. He took GEC, sold off the defence business to BAe, renamed the rump of the company Marconi and turned it into a telecom company. So far so good, and the share prices soared. Unfortunately neither he nor any of the team he bought over from Lucas knew anything about telecoms. You had to go about three levels down from Simpson before you found anyone who could stand up at an industry meeting and not look like a fool.
The next big deal was for Marconi to buy a big ATM equipment manufacturer in the US named FORE Systems. They had shares inflated by the bubble. We also had shares inflated by the bubble. But we had to pay cash because our shares could not be traded in the US at that time. Oops. The deal meant that the four founders, who had most of the intellectual capital, now had FU Money as well. So they said FU. Eventually Simpson managed to promote someone else from Fore to be CTO of Marconi. But he wasn't one of the guys who got FU Money, and there was a reason for that. His idea of a technical strategy was to get the engineers to build a bigger, faster box than the last one.
Orders dried up. The company almost went bust. I got laid off with a whole bunch of others, and Marconi is now a shadow of its previous self.
Managers don't need to be technical wizards, but they do need to have a decent understanding of what the engineers are talking about. Middle PHBs can sometimes get by, especially if they are not directly managing techies. But if the guys in charge of strategy cannot tell which way the wind is blowing in your industry then get out while the getting is good.
Paul.
Uh... Gerstner had a solid technical background (Score:3, Informative)
Gerstner has an engineering degree from Dartmouth and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The Harvard MBA and various honorary degrees are less relevant. Just because he's most famous as a bean counter rather than for technical work is no reason to compare him to the sugar water salesman at Apple.