Monday, 3 February 2003  8:30 am
Most of the people currently in charge of our high-tech assets, do not have the background and education to understand technology!  For example, Pat Russo, CEO of Lucent, comes from a sales background.  Frank Dunn, CEO of Nortel, is an accountant. He replaced John Roth, a technologist, in 2001.   Chris Galvin, CEO of Motorola, has a business education and started in sales.  Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox, has degrees in english and journalism and started in sales.  Carly Fiorina, CEO of H-P, has degrees in history, philosophy, and business, and came out of sales.  On the government side, Sean O'Keefe, head of NASA, has a public administration education and was previously the head of the Office of Management and Budget.  Spencer Abraham, Deputy Secretary of Energy and the COO of the Department of Energy (which oversees the 17 national physics labs) is a lawyer. 

The role of Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), the people who's principal function it is to advise a non-technical CEO on technology matters, appears to be waning as well.  Some high tech companies have recently let their CTOs go and not replaced them, presumably as a cost savings measure.  Others have replaced them, but downgraded their influence.

The Wall Street Journal reported the other day that CEOs are no longer interested in visionary managers, instead wanting pragmatic ones.  Sales people, lawyers, and accountants are definitely pragmatic, but it is impossible for them to have an industry vision because they do not understand what can and cannot be done with the technology they oversee.  None of the above group of CEOs can possibly have the type of vision that John Roth, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Ken Olson, Werner von Braun, or Ed Land had.  Based on intimate understanding of the technology of their companies or agencies, these leaders were able to drive huge growth and changed the world.  Investors came to regard technology companies as growth companies and gave them much higher valuations than other companies, which they maintain to this day.

Sales people, lawyers, and accountants can certainly use their training and experience to make companies run smoother, reduce the risks, cut costs, increase profitability, and motivate sales forces.  However, their training does not allow them to create visions of what is possible and then to motivate a group of engineers and scientists to execute those visions.  Without technological visions, these are no longer growth companies (or agencies).  This is bad news for their stock prices, and bad news for the high-tech industry.   We will once again have to look to startups to provide the technological vision that will drive growth.  And once again the startups run by technological visionaries will replace the previous set of growth companies.

Unless, of course, the current high tech companies evolve into distribution companies for the products of the new startups, as I proposed they should in The Slingshot Syndrome.