Becoming a Technology Leader

Although I learned a lot of things at IBM that were very important, this is something I learned that was wrong, and knowing that it's wrong is one of the most important lessons I ever learned. IBM at that time had a particular philosophy of professional management. They believed that management was itself a discipline, so if you can learn to manage something well, you can manage anything well. I think that's not true. My advice to anyone who wants to be in an important role, whether in technology, or finance, or sales, or marketing, or whatever, is that within your general discipline, you need to be really good at something. It doesn't matter what it is - but you do need to be good at it, and it has to be something of substance, something that's hard to master, something that matters. You have to have earned your credentials, made your mark, gotten your stripes, from having been at the very top of some important subcategory of the discipline you're in, or else you can't possibly understand how to manage things that are on the cutting edge of the larger enterprise you're going to lead.

In my case, as a technologist, I have a Ph.D. in mathematics; I studied computer architectures; I had a very, very successful machine program at IBM; and there are other successes I've had in my career. I've earned a kind of credibility as a result of these successes, with the engineering community, both within my company and in the industry in general, that cannot be won in any other way. It's a kind of a union card, a secret handshake that marks me as a member of a certain society. When I walk into a room full of engineers, they all know who I am and what my background is. Because they know I am a technologist, they think I understand what they're talking about, even if I don't. I can ask unbelievably stupid questions as a result of that, and that's a very important skill. And I will not accept an answer that has any of the technology mumbo-jumbo or acronyms that the computer industry uses. "Enterprise application integration?" What the hell is that? I don't have a clue, and anyone who uses these terms is probably masking a lack of real understanding behind industry buzzwords. No one ever challenges those kinds of things unless they're confident they understand the technology they're working on. It's important to be good enough at something that you're not worried about looking stupid.

About 1994, I was talking to some very senior AT&T executives, trying to explain what was going to happen with IP - the Internet Protocol - and ATM - Asynchronous Transfer Mode, a cell-switching network standard - which are underneath all we do on the Net. I asserted that it would become a substitute for voice, and anybody who was going to be moving bits around on big backbones was going to get ranked into a commodity vendor, which is exactly what has happened to AT&T in the last seven years. During the course of this explanation, I was talking about the difference between circuit switching, which is the way telephone calls are completed, and packet switching, which is the way the Internet moves packets around. I said IP technology and ATM were going to be alternatives to the way telephone companies switched voice, and that was a threat to AT&T's entire enterprise because anybody who moved bits around would become a commodity supplier of pipes.

During the course of this brief monologue, one of AT&T's most senior executive interrupted me and said, "Carl, this is all very interesting, but we still don't understand what automatic teller machines have to do with telephony." He thought ATM meant "automatic teller machine," the machines that dispense cash at your bank. A senior executive in the largest telecommunications company in the world didn't know the technology that was about to clean his clock. He has since gone on to another telecom enterprise, which has failed miserably, and I don't doubt why. He doesn't get it. He didn't have enough technology-specific expertise to make good decisions or to understand what was going to happen to telecommunications technology. He might have been a great manager in another industry, but not in this one. The skills are not transferable.

You cannot understand this industry if you don't know certain things about the technology that underlies it. You don't need to rub people's faces in technology; you don't need to have the customers understand it to be successful - in fact, that would be an impediment. But you have to have that union card. You have to be credible. You have to know enough about how things work that you can make reasonable decisions about the way the technology will go. You have to be really good at something.