Communications of the ACM
Five Ways Executives Misunderstand Technology
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Executive understanding of technology is incomplete and sometimes even dangerous to the pursuit of corporate strategies. If you doubt this, ask yourself how many executives understand "technology" as well as they understand sales, finance, marketing, and human resources.
Technology literacy requires executives to understand the range of existing and emerging technologies and how they might impact business processes, models and strategies. This understanding is not at the engineering level or how a computer scientist might explain AI and machine learning, but at the contextual and purposeful levels.
Comments
Lawrence Fitzpatrick
Steve, Great article for an under-served topic. Tech orgs are implored to understand the business, but non-tech business leaders are (still) not implored to develop intuitions about technology. Adding to your list, two concepts that organizations with traditional IT mindset have difficulty grokking IME: customer-centricity and product mindset. Customer-centric orgs believe in deeply understanding customer needs versus wants and use this information to sustain product-market-fit. Orgs with a product mindset eschew project-thinking ("one and done") in favor of test-and-learn (continuous improvement). Interested in your thoughts.
Stephen Andriole
Thanks!
Yes, customer-centricity and product mindset are definitely two that could be added! We could think of some others as well, I'm sure. Technology drives both perspectives, but ideally it's customer-centric focused. That said, I'm a big believer in market context and the inability of companies to understand what customers need until they need it -- versus telling them that they should really want what they're selling. This is the iterative journey I think both product- and customer-centric organizations take -- and hope for the right results. I am not sure there's enough distance between marketing and reality, that is, money spent on convincing customers that they really "need" something when what they're really selling is "want." Does anyone "need" an EV or is marketing (and some environmental conscience) telling them they should "want" it? At the end of the day, there may not be much distance between need and want, at least as the marketing gurus will tell us!
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