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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?
The problems with most companies that have non-technical managers isn't that they can't manage a technical company. The frustration that people have with non-technical managers is that they make business decisions and don't seem to appreciate the technical end of things. I'm referring to a non-technical manager perhaps cutting a project that may not be all that profitable but has a lot of technical value. And often to business people, R&D has little value in the present and can be cut.
At least my frustration with non-technical people is they seem to make business decisions on what can make a profit now and ignore technical merit of future potential profit.
Simply because when it gets down to the crunch, you have to know if your engineers are bullshitting you or not. There will always be those that say something can't be done when it can be.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
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, sometimes it doesn't.
2 1337 4 u!
...and if you can truly manage, it doesn't matter what the "subject" is really. If you have a grasp of the basics (and even most non-technical people have a grasp of some computer basics), and you know how to manage people, then you will do well. You have to be able to hire smart people, make sure they know what they're doing (and if they don't, it becomes evident even if you don't know the advanced stuff, when things don't get done), and run interference from upper management, and inspire the people below you.
If you can do that effectively, for the most part, you can manage.
libertarianswag.com
There's a big difference.
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.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Personally, I've been bitten by managers that are *too* technical.
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.
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KickingDragon
Running a succesful company requires a number of things. Background and a strong understanding in the industry is only one of them, and not always the most important one.
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 already have it, it's almost inconsuiqential.
Brian
You can run lots of businesses with the top salesman. However, a growth oriented tech company needs a tech oriented person in charge. This is how Microsoft has remained on top.
A mature industry like PC manufacturing can survive with a showman at top, like Apple and Dell.
Never, ever let the accountants take over. Just look at GM for what happens when the accountants take over.
One of my best managers had no technical background. He was just very sensitive to the needs of everybody who worked for him.
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.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
It isn't confusing if you know the history behind it, but I would hardly call Apple history "common knowledge." Jobs tried to hire Sculley away from Pepsi to come work for Apple. The story goes that he swayed Sculley by saying something to the effect of, "Do you just want to sell sugar-water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come to Apple and change the world?" With hindsight, it's clear that Jobs was right. Sculley just knew how to sell sugar water. He ran Apple right into the ground presumably because he didn't know anything about technology. Of course that raises the question, "Then why did Jobs want to hire him in the first place?" It's also helpful to know that Sculley probably played an important role in getting Jobs thrown out of Apple. In the end not only did Jobs get Apple back, he also got them to buy his company (NeXT) in the process. This definitely puts Jobs in the category of "Smarter than your average bear" IMHO.
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I work for a small software company started by a guy who has worked in high places for a number of companies and for the govenment. He also has an MBA. He saw a need for a certain product so hired a couple programmers and worked at it for a few years. The product was a huge success and the company is doing very well now. It has grown and been around for almost 10 years now. He wasn't very technical but is a great salesman, strongly believes in his products, knows them inside and out and has learned the lingo from us programmers. Over the years he has learned a lot about computers. He knows the industry the product is targeted for inside and out, and has many contacts. That probably helped a lot.
I had a non-technical manager that can either be the best or the worst boss in the world.
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.
I'd respectfully suggest that what you describe has anything to do with technical capability.
Organizational Design theory, one version of it anyway, says that from the CEO down there are specific jobs or tasks that need to be accomplished. the CEO needs to see out 10 years or more, the layer below him 5 years, and so on, until you get down to first line folks whose projects last til friday.
the CEO has to see and understand, on a visionary level what the company is doing. this requires a competence and familiarity with the industry, the products, the strategy etc etc. so should he/she know the 'tech' stuff? of course. but at such a macro level that doesn't even require that they use it. but rather that the understand where/what/who/how of tech in people's lives.
some CEOs come up from the tech side, others from the sales, others from finance or marketing. What they need to be is visionary, big thinkers.
ever watch West Wing? Like the Prez on that show... he doesn't DO all the work, he surrounds himself with smart folks, listens to them, then applies their advice to his vision, his mandate, and then makes a decision. and then if he's a good leader, people line up behind him and get shit done.
I've got a history degree, and the most important thing it taught us was to read documents with a high degree of cynicism - ie, to detect bias, bullshit and distortions, and try to understand what the writer wanted us to think. I've found this incredibly useful when reading reports, technical or otherwise. It also teaches you to research stuff on your own, which is something not every IT techie I've trained knows how to do. So don't knock Medieval History, it's not that useless.
"If he were a plant, people would roll him up and smoke him."
I've had a couple of bosses who were very ignorant of the technological aspects of the work the company did. They were CIO's and were hired primarily because the company owner thought that a good manager should be able to manage anything.
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.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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 written email messages of more than 150,000 bytes.
Contacting Cisco technical assistance was a frustrating exercise in corporate politics. Cisco representatives would regularly talk to me using acronyms known only inside Cisco.
John Chambers, Cisco CEO, is certainly an example of a non-technical manager doing a poor job. He is presiding over his company while it seems to be rapidly on the way down.
If the past is any guide, when Cisco gets someone else, the business press, which apparently has no technically capable writers, will give some half-baked reason for the failure, and they will again run praising articles about another imperial CEO.
You should be a manager! Really, your pragmatic way of handling others is one of the most essential skills to any manager. The worst managers I've met are those that want responsibility but actually not being able to cope with it. If you treat everyone with respect and admit errors made, then you will earn the respect required by those you manage.
The sad thing is often that good technical skills are not awarded (economically) compared to good business skills even though it is (at least) as hard to acquire...
I find it really amusing that this story has been so completely turned on it's head. If you take a look at Jobs' history, his technical skills are weak at best. His real tallent is on the marketing side of things.
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.
sigs are a waste of space
I had a boss like this who while we were still doing product evaluations, went in and signed off on a purchase order for the product that was the most expensive and also the most suspicious, which we had made abundantly clear, because the salesman wanted to get it in at the by his December deadline before our office closed for two weeks.
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), subsequent product buys to patch up the broken pieces, before he realizes he needs "a fall guy," so he starts dismissing all the consultants, starting with the project manager and the system architect, because he could do both of those things, right? No, seriously, he actually said that in the meeting after they were dismissed. Finally he was down to two programmers (one being me). With nothing left to do, he proceeded to fire both of us. I'm sure he felt he'd really saved the day by getting rid of all those problem people who had the entire time been advising to do precisely the opposite of what he chose to do.
In one meeting he had the gall to say "this project is my career advancement vehicle." Well, buddy, finish it your damned self... since you're the only one still employed on the project, godspeed and good luck.
With the recent departure of Carly Forina from the top post at HP, it is interesting to note that there are no Fortune 50 CEOs that are female. The Lawrence Summers fiasco also highlights the dearth of women in technical fields. This is due to inherent differences in the sexes, according to Summers. But even if that were found to be true, it doesn't explain why L'Oreal is run by a dude.
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.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
In my experience, a person that manages programmers not only has to be a programmer, but an experienced industry programmer. How else are they to gain the insights necessary in order to manage programmers? We're not assembly-line workers. We're not even skilled-tradesmen -- the average experience-demanding Internet job ad notwithstanding. We're somewhere between engineers and inventors. We're like the non-fantasy equivalent of magicians.
Only twice in my 12 years in the software industry have I had a manager that was an experienced industry programmer. (One was male, one was female, FYI.) And those were the best two experiences of my life. The development teams were well-organized, the goals were realistic (but still tightly scheduled), and I actually got the answers to questions I needed answered in order to do my job.
I remember being "managed" by MBA types with "general technical backgrounds". What a nightmare.
One judged the worth of an employee by how many hours they put in, not how much work they did. My job was to get a PlayStation 2 video game running within the frame rate limit, and there was no documentation, no source-code comments, no institutional knowledge of the source code, and no institutional concept of why anyone would ever want any of that. Nevertheless, I did, in 5 weeks, what the other programmers in the company hadn't been able to do in 6 months. He fired me because I could only put in 50 hours a week without collapsing. Now I have a wonderful 5-week-long salaried position on my work record. Boy, don't I look good to potential employers now. Thanks, Randy.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Technically Bill Gates has a Technical background...
Sure its not in Linux... but it is in a programming language... if you want to call BASIC that.
Also he isn't a CEO anymore... so this is really offtopic. But it seems like he did a pretty good job of directing Microsoft while he was CEO.
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.
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 squeezed out competitors. You could buy DOS for a lot of money. Then, you could buy DOS for very little money, if you would accept a pirated version. Products that competed honestly in the market could not sell cheaper than the widely pirated DOS, and they disappeared. (Most people cannot look at a manual and see that it has obviously been reproduced from a photocopied original rather than typesetting; most people did not know the copies were pirated.)
One day in the years of DOS, I got irritated at this, and decided to protest. They've closed the loophole now, but back then you could call Microsoft and get the phone number of their legal department. I told the woman that answered that my closest 10 distributors were all selling pirated copies of DOS. The woman was very interested. She sounded young and neither of us realized the implications of what we were doing. Once she had accepted my complaint, the information was inside the company, and they had to go ahead with a court case. I participated as a witness against the most open of the pirates, and Microsoft won.
If you were a dealer back then, you either felt that you were taking a huge risk selling illegal copies of DOS, or you could not compete with other resellers. So, it made sense that Microsoft and I were temporarily on the same side of an issue.
Microsoft does the same thing with Microsoft Office, in my opinion. I sold computers only to businesses, strictly legally. But once a friend asked me for help with buying a computer, and we went to what seemed to be the best retail seller in town. We bought a nice computer, and then the salesman offered me Microsoft Office for $50. So, there was Corel, trying to sell Word Perfect for a reasonable price, and they were being undercut by Microsoft's 2-tier market.
Nothing has changed, apparently. I got perhaps 100 spam email messages today, and a large number of them offer Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Office for under a hundred dollars. It's not a big secret. (Anyone who is not getting enough Microsoft software piracy offers, just post your email address somewhere on the internet.)
It's not hard to know who is pirating, because each message contains information about how to find the seller. For example, "Totally legal Microsoft for a tenth of the price WINDOWS X'P Pro + OFFICE X.P Pro - 80 Dollars Contact: http://cork.perfect-oemcds.biz." Microsoft Office is dominant because Microsoft apparently takes a relaxed attitude toward stopping pirates.
That's the later years. What made Microsoft dominant in the early years? Here are my observations and conclusions and opinions:
Back then, IBM executives did not know how to type. They had secretaries for that. IBM was then on the way down. (In later years it was resurrected.) IBM executives did not want to create a mess in their brains by remembering actual technical facts. That's a short way of depicting the IBM culture back then.
IBM executives went to see the then-dominant OS seller Digital Research to arrange an OS for the IBM PC. When they arrived the DR CEO had decided to fly his private plane instead, and his wife was less than respectful. Then the executives went to Microsoft, and Microsoft licensed DOS rather than selling it. Back then the IBM PC was not a product an IBM manager wanted on his resume. A product that would only be used by secretaries probably didn't seem important.