On Prescience

“When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”

Winston Churchill

—House of Commons, 2 May 1935, after the Stresa Conference, in which Britain, France and Italy agreed—futilely—to maintain the independence of Austria.

What makes a great Enterprise company CTO ?

It is nearly two years now since I stopped being a full time CTO in a large company, and this is the first in a series of Blogs I am writing in and around "What makes a great CTO?". In those two years I have found myself often in the role of CTO / advisor with many of the startups or prospects that we are working with; I have also found that many of the other skills I picked up along the way have been equally useful.

There are 7 key capabilities not in order of importance that make a great CTO based on my experience :-

1. Listening. Listening is at the heart of innovation. If you lose the ability to listen, people will stop speaking to you. Being deliberate in taking time to listen to people even when you don't have time will allow you to know things that others don't around what is actually happening in a project, production environment etc.

2. Helicopter. The ability to see the big picture and take a seemingly fragmented set of decisions happening across the IT landscape, and draw the jigsaw puzzle box picture. Helicopter refers specifically to the ability to talk an operate at any altitude from 10,000 to 1 foot and see and articulate the picture that connects these together.

3. Communication. The way you tell and represent the story and help others understand the vision, how it is broken down, and what their role is in delivering it, the more effectively you will be able to lead, delegate and expect the message to be propagated.

4. Networking. An often unappreciated skill and use of time, is sitting down with peers, their teams, your team, the business, the support functions and helping them understand a complex topic, giving tips on how to be more personally effective with technology and so on. Building a reputation as a person who helps people use and understand technology will make it much easier to get your ideas accepted.

5. Technical Ability.  Often mis-represented in job searches as a set of technical skills that a candidate must possess. It is always more important to have the ability to learn and to view learning as a critical part of what you do with your time every day. Whatever you knew 5 years ago whilst it is persistent and useful from analogy based understanding, will be superseded by newer capabilities, methods and practices.

6. Teamwork. Architectural Arrogance (I'm smarter than you are!) and ego are a massive barrier to being effective. You need to work with peers as if they were brothers or sisters, treat everyone with respect and use communication, networking and listening to converge difficult dialogs onto solutions that teams will take collective responsibility for.

7. Diversity. Hiring in your own image is like Einstein's saying about Insanity ("doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result"). It takes a lot of maturity to hire people smarter than you, who think differently than you, who come at problems differently from you, who have completely different EQ than you, whose personality is completely different. Yet every great team that has ever existed requires this diversity plus a little bit of magic (often from the coach) to be that good.