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

Managing is more about people then tech, IMO.

[KhaZ]

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.

Why Not?

[Jeff Hornby]

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.

The Jobs-Sculley story turned on it's head

[X]

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.