The Golden Rules Skills of the CTO

The Golden Rules & Skills of the CTO

The most important skill a CTO can have is to be able to understand technology well enough that you can explain it to people without having to go into acronyms and mumbo-jumbo. You should be able to do it with metaphors and analogies in a way that makes technology clear not only to the people who are not technologists, but also to technologists who are in related areas but are not themselves experts in your specific field of reference. You should be able to give people a sense of confidence in understanding how the pieces all fit together. This is so important. It's what distinguishes a CTO as a public spokesperson from someone who is a great development manager, for instance, for software or hardware devices.

You can do those other jobs and be able to talk about XML and TCP/IP; you can't do a chief technology officer's job if that's all you can do. You have to be able to make it sing for people who don't know the tune. They may never know the words, but it's important for them to be able to hum it.

But you also have to have that union card, that fundamental indicator of credibility. Engineers love it when a technical person succeeds in business. That's why there's something approaching hero-worship of the geeks who actually make it to the top of a business enterprise from the engineering community. It's fun for them to see someone who comes out of their world succeed in a different way. But the reason some can do that is that they can find ways to articulate those technology visions that take the technology off the front burner and make it recede into the background.

As a chief technology officer, you also have to keep your head up. Go back to the 1960 presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon. A major bone of contention in that debate was the fate of Quemoy and Matsu, two little islands out in the China Sea. The moderator posed that question, and these two guys who wanted to be President of the United States of America got down to the nits and bits about these two tiny islands - and that was the last time those islands were ever an important issue in world politics. They basically just didn't matter.

It's way too easy to get caught up in a specific, right-now contention or technical issue and get your head down into those details, with your nose in the dirt, where it doesn't matter. We CTOs have to keep our heads up, so we can see where the ship is going for the long haul. I think we too often get far too embroiled, for instance, in which standard is going to succeed, and that's not what matters. What matters is what the standard is trying to be used for, so we can figure out where the whole enterprise is going. I think the most important golden rule is to keep looking five years out.