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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?
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In my experience, even managers with tech experience can't always run the show. There's certainly more to it then domain expertise, common sense being one of the most important.
Managing a company isn't a matter of engineering.
Steve Jobs is doing a pretty good job at keeping Apple above and beyond the norm of the computer industry.
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. -- FDR
If the manager is managing technology, he should understand it.
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.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I think a non-technical CEO can be incredibly powerfull in building a customer orientated focus.
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
A modern CEO of a computer company does not need to know how to operate a computer, they need to know how to operate a business. It doesn't matter if you are selling computer chips or potato chips, all businesses are run *about* the same way. The skills that a non-tech CEO would need are an open mind willing to listen to input from all levels, and the ability to surround themselves with good people that know the tech part.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
...is when they are out of their knowlege base.
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.
Gentoo Sucks
- Loyal to the troops, and demands loyalty back ....
- 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?
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Depends on the size of the company.
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.
As long as these people managers listen to their technical manager counterparts, they can be very successful.
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.
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...Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Yeah, well... taking advantage of a Project Manager with limited technical background who commits the sin of trusting its subject matter experts is really hard...
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.
A manager is responsible for coordinating people and processes. While it would help for the manager to have some knowledge of the work the people he/she manages does on a day to day basis, it is more important that the manager understands the needs of the team. A good manager should be able to identify individuals who consistantly out perform their peers. They could be someone who cooks french fries to just the right crispness, or a programmer who always comes through in a crunch.
So, in my opinion it isn't as important that they understand the technology, but that they understand the business and people involved.
VD
the *last* thing you want is a geek who will insist that all production systems should run the latest, most bleeding edge stuff.
Geeks are easily distracted by shiny things.
Better to have someone at the helm who is less shiny-thing-obsessed.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
There are so many other reasons things might not get done. Here are a few:
He was the man who made the decision to take IBM down the Linux path, even though he was not primarily a technical guy. The secret is to find competent subordinates and listen to what they say.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
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.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
I work in a mid sized retail store, I have a manager who is a technical, but unfortunately he has not been keeping up with his technical skills. He took some courses on how to install Netware 3.11 way back in the day, and he preaches today that Netware 3.11 is the most stable and best suited fileserver for our POS system.
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 database files from store to store to get them all up to date.
He also believes that our POS system (Which is written in Fox4) is an excellent database tool, because it only needs to be completely re-indexed daily and has so many compatability issues with today's hardware that it can't be the POS system which was made and developed in the late 80's, but rather the hardware today "isn't made like how it used to be."
What I am getting at, is that it doesn't matter if your manager is technical, it's if he understands *today's* technology. I just listen to this guy and laugh to myself while they reboot their 'communications server' daily because 'there must be a virus on it or something'. Heaven forbid it could be the crummy memory management of Windows9x.
Without someone technically inclined informing a manager of what is right and what is not, we'll always be stuck with outdated people in technical jobs. If there is somebody with technical experience who can report to the managers, it gives the store managers something else to worry about instead of learning the newest and greatest database software.
Honestly managers, don't get too technical, leave that up to us and go manage your business, you'll never get both done properly at the same time.
I'll probably get modded to hell for this, but whatever. One thing that really sucks about the IT world, sometimes, is the geeks. You know, the people who ALWAYS tell you to RTFM when you're asking newbie questions, or show fanboyish favouritism about certain areas of tech, or still in this day and age make fun of windows users.
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.
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.
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.
Steve Jobs exemplifies a non-techy, successfully leading a technologically-oriented company. In fact, I think a non-techy can do well. . .IF he acknowledges his own blind spots. That's the key: A leader honest with his weaknesses. A leader who knows when to defer to his team of experts. . .The story goes that Henry Ford, once proclaimed himself to have expert knowledge in several fields, after which he immediately brought in his team. . .
The worst case, ( and many, including myself have worked for such schleps ) is working for a CEO who fronts as expert, or even knowledgeable, when he has no clue. That is a recipe for disaster - denial.
Either you understand your product and its market, or you do not.
Doesn't matter whether it's Fig Newtons or Apple Newtons.
Beyond that, people skills and financial skills are fully fungible.
It's worth noting that the second time around Steve put Avie Tevanian in charge of software, the lifeblood of Apple.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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 (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".
There are a number of attributes that a good manager must have, but there are differences depending on the type of business the company in in.
For example, all good managers need to know the business they are in. They need to understand the market, its products, what they do, and where his company is situated within that market. He/she must be able to recognize trends and prioritize new things. He does not have to be an expert in designing and building the product.
Of course, companies have many different needs. Some bosses handle production, some sales, some HR, some planning. When they work among peers, bosses are coaches/captains of the team. When they work among unskilled, they have to be guides and teachers and schedulers. When they work with sales, they need to be good ranchers, keeping the cattle on track and pointed in the right direction.
The best boss I ever had was my first, some 35 years ago. This was a peer-peer situation with a group of professionals, but what he said to me is universal and I have used it in every kind of situation since. He said "My job is to make your job easier. My job it provide you with the best tools, equipment, information, and working conditions that I can, and to help you do a better job. The better you look, the better I look. I am all for you being as successful as you can." That says it all.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Non technical managers in technical companies is the way it's done in Us. It's so unique to Us, there's even a term "entrepreneurial management" to describe us. To determine if it's successful, compare countries which use technical managers to countries which use non technical managers.
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.