Slashdot Mirror
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
Probably know the field he is getting in to as well as an efficient crap_detector.
An ex-colleague of mine had the gall to ask his PM in a team meeting for an extra couple of days to write a SELECT query just because the query was returning not just a handful of records, but millions!
The PM, to the apparent delight of all, agreed with out a second thought.
Rapid Nirvana
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.
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.
- - - -
KickingDragon
...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
Darryl McBride, who with his 19 years of executive management and leadership experience, singlehandedly led the formerly faltering SCO to develop a state of the art product like Linux.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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?
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.
Best quality these days?
Ability to speak Hindi or Mandarin.
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.
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?
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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 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.
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.
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".
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.
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!"
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.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'