Technology leaders have many different focus areas and motivations. On today’s show, we’ll discuss three common types of leaders - Visionaries, Maintainers and Resume-Builders.
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THREE TYPES OF TECHNOLOGY LEADERS
VISIONARIES | TRANSFORMERS
- Speak in stories, painting big pictures.
- Truly understand the overall business, the broader markets, and the potentially changing landscapes ahead over both the near-term and long-term
- Understand the timing of the markets and when change is needed vs. nice-to-have
- Understand the breadth of competitive threats to the business
- Understand both opportunities and opportunity costs
MAINTAINERS | PROTECTORS
- Would like to be a visionary, but always default back to focusing on re-optimizing legacy investments
- Tend to believe that all decisions are build vs. buy. Aren’t focused on creating longer-term partnerships
- Run long RFI processes vs. creating a mindset of incremental experimental scenarios.
- Have a protectionist mindset (“avoid vendor lock-in”) with new opportunities, but don’t release that with sunk costs.
RESUME BUILDERS
- Recognize that the world is moving fast (lots of new technologies, business models), but aren’t in an optimal starting position.
- Establish a big, audacious goal that portrays a visionary mindset.
- Establish an “everything” or “all-inclusive” policy, even when it doesn’t make economic sense.
- The old 5yrs of building an ERP system is now the 2yrs of transforming to the cloud. Springboard to build the resume without finishing the project.
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