All too often, technology companies fail to find the right balance within their business executives. When a business exec is too technical, she may not have the aggressiveness or “street smarts” to help a young company succeed. If a business exec isn’t technical enough, he might swim out of his depth and make wrong decisions about key technology or product hires.
You may have heard it referred to (unkindly) as the Mechanic Dilemma: Business execs, like car owners, rarely have the knowledge to understand or question what their “mechanic” (tech team) tells them. The word “hostage” is also used, as in “Our management is being held hostage by our tech team!” Whatever the words used to describe it, there are few things more harmful to a company’s prospects than a lack of trust between the business leaders and product and engineering leaders.
The truth is, business execs don’t need to be very technical — they just need to have a strong understanding of, and respect for, the ethos of their technical leads and show the hallmark qualities of good leadership: ethics, determination, discipline and humility. By examining the top five reasons business execs fail to work effectively with technical execs, it’s possible to anticipate and avoid some common problems.
5. Failure to Focus
Young technology companies can be “organized chaos,” with rapidly changing business models and plans. Still, business execs need to demonstrate that their approach makes sense — even if it involves a period of experimentation, so they can “fail fast” until they hit on the right strategy. There’s no surer way to alienate product and engineering teams than to whipsaw them from project to project with an ill-conceived “Idea of the Day” approach.
4. Failure to Show Respect
When in Rome, do as the Romans do. If you’re a tourist overseas, you shouldn’t assume that everyone speaks English. That’s just plain rude. Natives of your host country will appreciate any attempt to speak their language, however feeble it might be; it’s a sign of respect and will go a long way to making sure the waiters don’t spit in your food. Likewise, even if business execs don’t understand the “language” of their technical counterparts, they need to do their homework and try to gain a basic awareness of the job at hand. It shows respect and breeds confidence. Business execs also often fail to appreciate what inspires and motivates technical and product folks, who sometimes are creative types more interested in building cool, innovative and useful stuff than making a busload of cash.
3. Failure to Delegate to an Ally
Micromanaging is bad enough when the micromanager is in his or her comfort zone. But it’s really intolerable when a non-technical business exec tries to micromanage the intricacies of product development and release cycles. Most successful companies have a technical-minded product or operations person who is also fluent in business matters. The engineers all know and like her and are happy to follow her lead. A pure business exec would do well to make this person an ally and delegate to her.
2. Failure to Build Consensus
Disliking the consequences of a decision, including the work that flows from it, is much different than disagreeing with the decision itself. Business execs should make every attempt to build consensus for the decisions they make, so that the long hours of work that flow from them do not cause resentment. The product and technical teams may dislike the fallout from those decisions, but if they understand and agree with the decisions themselves, they will support the mission.
1. Failure to Be Humble
Humility, or a lack thereof, is a theme that runs through this whole list. As Jim Collins says in “Good to Great,” the most effective leaders are humble and strong-willed rather than outgoing and full of ego. Unfortunately, the technology industry has a lot of big egos and charlatanism, and the snake-oil tactics aren’t limited to outward-facing communications. Ego-driven business execs often try to “sell” internally, rather than admit what they don’t know and learn from the folks around them. They don’t call it a technology company for nothing. Without the technologists and product people, there would be no company. Be humble.
Kevin Fortuna and Marty Abbott are partners with AKF Partners.
“Ethics” as a substitute for technical knowledge? Hardly.
Most of the other problems you describe here happen have non-technical business managers as a core pecipitating factor.
Imagine a CEO of a car company who had never changed his oil or the head of a hospital who doesn’t know the difference between a blood transfusion and an amputation. Nobody would stand for it. The only reason why it’s permitted to go on in technology is because the field is so new and it moves so quickly.
Great article, guys! And I could not disagree more with jeffrey, the first commenter. For every so-called “expert” or “technical” CEO (Bill Gates), you can find at least five who aren’t domain experts in the particular product the company is selling. Richard Branson, to take one example, cannot even read a financial statement. Do you think Jack Welsh could take apart a jet engine? A CEO needs to be a good leader, first and foremost. Good leaders keep their eyes on the horizon. Good leaders hire and delegate to domain experts who run the various departments of their organizations. I like this list a lot. And I totally agree that humility is sorely lacking in our industry.
I like this post a lot and agree that leadership qualities (ethics, management skills, humility) are much more important than technical ability.
great article. very good list.
Speaking as a technical manager, I couldn’t agree more with Kevin & Marty. The phenomenon of the pointy-headed boss is one of the most insidious and devastating cancers contributing to the slowdown in US entrepreneurial ventures. Self-importance, strategy-Tourette’s, and just plain hamfistedness can kill a technical venture far more quickly than a lack of technical acumen on the part of the business owner.
Numbers 3, 4 and 5 are the main things to look out for. If there are business owners out there with less technical savvy than Jeffrey obviously has — pay heed: You don’t need to know exactly how your tech group does things. But you need to be able to put your faith in them, to give them clear and tractable guidelines within which to operate, and to establish clean lines of communication between yourself and them. You could do worse than to follow the guidelines laid out above.
To Jeffrey’s point, I’d just say this: there’s no point in everyone doing everything. The technical group should be given as much autonomy as possible and the freedom to see around corners. Similarly, the business owners shouldn’t live in fear that some recent bio-informatics PhD is going to poke her head into a board meeting and start commenting on the
slides.
OK – lets go through some of the big companies in our industry
Microsot ( Biil Gates ) — Steve Ballmer
Apple ( Jobs ) – Scully
Intel ( Grove & Noyce) – Otellini
AMD ( Jerry saunders ) – Ruiz
Google – ( Eric Schimdt & Page & Brin )
HP – ( Hewlett & Packerd & Young ) – Carly
Oracle ( Larry Ellision )
Siebel ( Tom Siebel )
In software and hardware world it helps being technical. There is always exceptions such as Sun & Cisco. Human qualities to become good CEO is same whether your are technical or non technical.
Reason #1 is missing: analysts, press, employees, shareholders and customers all define effective differently.
Some of the comments got me thinking about “eating your own dogfeed”. Not sure who invented this phrase. The first person I ever heard use it was Steve Ballmer in about 1991. Now I do know what the phrase generically means but I’ve yet to encounter an executive of any pet food manufacturing company that eats what they make.
Great article!
Reason #6 is missing: Failure to provide input and feedback
While product and engineer folks are pretty bright, they can’t design and implement winning solutions entirely in a vacuum. Yet, all too often, upper management is very hands off when it comes to the product’s development. This is not necessarily good as frequent, detailed and direct feedback are necessary for the product team and engineers to know that their effort is compatible with the business exec’s vision.
If business execs simply want to occupy themselves with fanciful meetings and don’t want to collaborate with the development of the product then the product will likely fail.