Non-Technical Managers in a Technical Company?

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?

Comments

The great successes of...

[dpbsmith]

Digital Equipment Corporation under Robert Palmer, Wang Laboratories under Richard Miller, Polaroid under William J. McCune, and of course Hewlett-Packard under Carly Fiona demonstrate clearly that it takes a business person to run a business.

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.

Re:Essentials

[Baron of Greymatter]

The real-world CEO:

* 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? :-D

* 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.

Marconi

[Paul Johnson]

I was at GEC when it was turned into Marconi. At the time it was being run by George Simpson. His previous job was at Lucas, the car and aircraft parts maker, so we all referred to him as George Lucas.

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.

I took three days to rewrite a data load process

[HornWumpus]

That was essentually a single select query that fired off another query for each row (which calculated line losses for the path represented by the first row, contractual losses so they were calculated by unusual methods).

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).

It had six outer joins to six instances of the company table (that alone made the backend build a temp table). Where finishing all the per row number crunching on the client before even firing off the row specific query.

I could have got a little more performance by turning the data collection into a stored procedure, but not enough to justify taking another week to work out the details (the client was Access, returning a recordset in a field of the primary recordset was not possible).

The first guy to write this code should have taken three days to understand what an index is and how to read a query plan before starting.