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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?
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
...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
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 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 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
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!"