I was listening to an interview with AMD's CEO Dr. Lisa Su, and I was surprised at how casually she was using technical terminology while explaining complex industrial process optimization techniques her company was working on.
I was just so used to the top three or four tiers of corporate management having literally no idea what their company's engineering department actually does day to day. Hearing a CEO knowledgeable about their main product line was a bit of a shock.
But it shouldn't be a shock! It should be the norm.
I work for a small IT-only company. If I start using "technical" terms like "IP address" with our CEO, his eyes glaze over...
I've never met a CEO that doesn't understand their main product. Sometimes, the main product isn't what the employees and engineers think it is. Sometimes that product is the company itself.
I suspect there is a cause and effect relationship here, a CEO with an M&A background will always see the company this way. A CEO with a product background may make the companies customer's/product/team more valuable to an acquirer.
The M&A culture of the 80s was pretty toxic, businesses that financed their own expansion/revamp in lean times were looted for their bank accounts during deep recessions. The "survivors" now run with only a few months in the bank, making the whole economy more dependent on financial liquidity. We'll probably never know whether financially lean enterprises were more capital efficient or just riskier.
I was just so used to the top three or four tiers of corporate management having literally no idea what their company's engineering department actually does day to day. Hearing a CEO knowledgeable about their main product line was a bit of a shock.
But it shouldn't be a shock! It should be the norm.
I work for a small IT-only company. If I start using "technical" terms like "IP address" with our CEO, his eyes glaze over...