Back in the early 2000s I worked for a telco. Telecom was having a pretty rough time following the dot com crash. They replaced the previous CTO with a CTO that had a financial background (would have been suitable for as a CFO). This blew my mind at the time. The explanation was simply he's going to be less persuaded by seniors managers arguing for projects on technical merit and more persuaded by the dollars and cents. Rightly or wrongly, it worked, they got out of trouble early and when the economy turned around he was swiftly replaced by a hacker CTO.