I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . The text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change. Here are some excerpts from Chapter 5.
Traditional technology buyers are learning to become technology vendors as we saw in Chapter 1. Many vendors are replacing buyers as the new best practice leaders as we saw in Chapter 2. Welcome to the world of the technology “buyor” – the switch-hitter good at both sides of the baseball plate as the legendary Mickey Mantle.
Ambidexterity is a skill valued in many other sports. There are the soccer players who can fire rockets with either leg, cricketers who have mastered the “reverse sweep”. They look as elegant as Bjorn Borg did when he dazzled the tennis world with his two handed backhand on his way to multiple Wimbledon wins. They are the drummers who can use all four limbs to magical effect in a band.
Not just in sports – Michelangelo is supposed to have painted the Sistine Chapel with both hands (and it still took him years).
Ambidexterity in technology can be just as dazzling.
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Donald E. Graham, Chairman of the Washington Post Co. which dates back to 1877, says it has become easier for companies to become technologically ambidextrous in the last decade. While traditional media has been decimated by technology, the Post has become a diversified technology company. Its Kaplan unit is one of the largest on-line education companies. Its Cable One unit is one of the largest cable companies in the US and services a number of rural communities. It has digital properties like Slate. It has invested in startups like Avenue100 which provides marketing analytics to institutions, Trove (previously iCurrent) a social news site and aggregator and SocialCode, which helps companies with Facebook advertising and user engagement campaigns.
(In a throwback to the huge influence the newspaper had in the 70s in bringing down the Nixon Presidency with its investigative coverage of Watergate, when it launched its iPad app in 2011, the Post created a humorous video of a befuddled Bob Woodward being pulled away from his trusty typewriter and asking his editor, Ben Bradlee about the allure of the iPad)
Graham also sits on the board of Facebook and is arguably more tech-savvy than the average CEO or Chairman. Modestly, though, he says it has become a lot easier for companies to hire technology talent like Vijay Ravindran, his Chief Digital Officer who was involved with Amazon in its formative years and with other startups..
Graham’s view ‘Increasingly we can offer talent like Vijay equally challenging problems to solve as do technology vendors”.
Vice Versa, technology vendors have been hiring from the corporate world to streamline their own operations. “The conventional wisdom on high-tech vendor CIOs hasn't always been of the highest order. There are but a few "rock star" CIOs leading high-tech vendors' IT efforts. Most notable are HP's Randy Mott and Microsoft's Tony Scott. However, when the right CIO falls into the right situation, the combination can be powerful for both vendor and customer: A peer CIO who knows the lay of the land ( IT governance, project management and political challenges that IT leaders face) as well as the guts of the vendor's software (what it can and cannot do). It's the proverbial "Eat Your Own Dog Food" situation, espoused by many technology leaders.”
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If you talk to sports coaches they will tell you “the earlier (in life) you start switch-hitting, the better.'' It is a lot harder later in life to get the upper-lower body coordination needed to be comfortable hitting a baseball or kicking a soccer ball from either side.
In May 2011 The Thiel Foundation announced fellowships to 24 recipients “younger than 20 years old at the end of 2010—each will receive $100,000 and mentoring under the condition that they stay out of school for two years to build their businesses.” “The grant winners are pursuing a range of businesses, from alternative energy to education and e-commerce.”That’s Thiel as in Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and successful investor in a string of successes such as Facebook, LinkedIn and others.
And Thiel clearly subscribes to what the coaches say – ‘start them young”.
Take a look at Spanning, based in Austin, Texas whose stated goal is to become "the Norton Computing of the cloud computing era". They want to be the provider of all of the things that should have come "in the box" with modern cloud applications like those from Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com, but didn't. They are well on their way with tens of thousands of customers in 58 countries and just six full-time employees.
Charlie Wood, one of the founders describes the journey.
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Whether you start early or later in life, switch-hitting is not easy. Ted Simmons, a coach for the San Diego Padres has been quoted as saying “I also have yet to find a person that completely, totally, unequivocally has bilateral symmetry. One side is always dominant……I've asked concert pianists if it helps them to be ambidextrous. They told me, 'No. It's just that the left hand is trained.' They don't switch pianos for left-handed people. But they switch guitars for left-handers. Jimi Hendrix was left-handed. He switched wires. But being ambidextrous doesn't help as a guitarist.”
And of course, there is need for more practice – not favoring either side means working out more. Then there are the mood swings as one side slumps from time to time. Lance Berkman, considered one of the best switch-hitters ever is on record saying “If I could do it all over again, I would not be a switch-hitter.”
Similarly, becoming a technology “buyor” is not easy. If you are in Indiana or in Indonesia, how do you acquire the DNA of Silicon Valley? On the other hand how do you bring grocery chain frugality to a software company used to 90% margins?
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Some companies are starting to emulate the Silicon Valley model. Let the VP of R&D or Product Engineering develop products and let the CIO focus on internal technologies. As an example, Daimler, the leading auto and truck manufacturer has over 1,000 software engineers in their R&D group as different from hundreds others who support internal IT systems like SAP.
There is another good reason to think of R&D more than IT when it comes to new product development. Gina Staudacher, partner at the accounting firm of Baker Tilly advises clients about R&D Credits and how to structure such product development projects.
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Enterprises are finding that they need “crossover” executives who can bring a blend of skills – vendors are hiring talent from user organizations; user organizations are hiring talent from vendors and startups.
A good example comes from the continuing competition between Walmart, the largest retailer in the world and Amazon, the leading on-line retailer. In 1999, while Amazon was still a fledging player, Walmart sued it for hiring several of its technology and logistics executives. While the suit was settled, it reflected Amazon’s building of a strong team across various organizational areas. The year prior, it had acquired a startup called Junglee which had pioneered Internet comparison shopping. That acquisition brought it two of the co-founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman who were influential in its formative years. While they did not stay long, they continued to broker to Amazon a number of other startups.
Fast forward to 2011. Walmart bought another startup Harinarayan and Rajaraman had started called Kosmix. They are now running @Walmartlabs "to speed with innovations such as smartphone payment technology, mobile shopping applications, and Twitter-influenced product selection for stores" to give Walmart a chance to narrow the widening lead Amazon has in on-line retailing.
Examples of other crossover executives - Tony Scott, CIO at Microsoft went there after stints at Disney, GM and Bristol Myers Squibb and in the other direction and Vijay Ravindran, the Chief Digital Officer at Washington Post who did stints at Amazon and other startups. Scott and Ravindran write about their crossover experiences in the next section.
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The conversations in most technology communities these days is around cloud computing, virtualization, “big data” analytics, service oriented architectures, security concerns around LulzSec. Clearly, every technology group needs a wide variety of technical skills, either on staff or contracted.
But to get to Rogow’s “business arbitrage” and to Cote’s “consumer mindset”, the technology group needs to be far broader - focused on the 12 attributes we cover in Part II. Elegance in product design, global in customer nuance analysis and supplier diversity, ability to stand out in social media and in physical settings, dramatically increased “clockspeed” and many more facets.
To continue with the switch-hitter analogy – they cannot just be good hitters – they are much more valuable if they are also good fielders, they are quick enough to steal bases, and possess other athletic abilities. Similarly, a soccer player who can kick well with both feet is also expected to play good defense. The elite are multi-dimensional.
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