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.

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.

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.

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.

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.