It's Not About the Technology

It's Not About the Technology

9780387233505 (0387233504), Springer, 2006

This book attempts to answer the question: “What is that mindset, that particular kind of thinking, that is required of us to be successful in a high technology company and why?”

To be sure, the “high” in the high technology does not accord the company any special place in the market. But a unique ingredient distinguishes a high technology company: the culture of innovation that leads to new, often highly complex, technologies. The flip side of this unique culture is the excessive fixation of these companies on the technology superiority. The baggage of this excessive fixation has quite often led these companies to disconnect from the end customer, unwittingly so. Hence our question and this book.

A series of semiconductor startup experiences spurred me to write. The bizarre life in the high technology profession, always precariously disconnected from the world at large, provided the problematic. And a rush to connect back lead to this book.

If you are not careful, this profession can make you feel isolated from the rest of the world. What starts off as a genuinely rewarding career of learning new technologies, creating new designs, coming up with products that people liked and bought, can quickly turn into a schizophrenia of a respectable sort. How we purport ourselves at work, the extreme stress we undergo to achieve that teamwork spirit, the unending project deadlines that we are always scrambling to meet, seem to put us on a tangential path from the every day life of our families, our children and parents. When this happens, the disconnect is near-complete.

Truly great corporations have become so by attending to this single trait. Leadership at these companies, at every level up and down the hierarchy, are unusually sensitive to this disconnect. Genuinely spirited startups are this way. But these sensibilities do not come packaged in best practices, nor found in the quality assurance manuals. None of this is part of any engineering or business school curriculum, at least not in a way that is impressive. Perhaps the simplicity of this sensibility is not rigorous enough to be included in the academics.

On the contrary, these sensibilities are a direct manifestation of a particular kind of mindset of a few random individuals. Drawn from their own personal experience, these leaders often are not, at first, conscious of the culture they germinate. Nor do they consult manuals to cross-check if their thinking is correct.

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