Some of you have been reading me for years. Others joined more recently after downloading The Suits & Geeks Trap. Either way, I want to reboot this newsletter by putting some foundations in place so that whether you’ve known me for a long time or only since last month, there’s a clear thread to follow.
Here’s the first: in too many organizations, the commercial and the technical still act like rival tribes. That used to be survivable. Not anymore.
If you’re a P&L owner or transformation leader, you know what they say: “Every business is now a tech business.”
Think about Tesco – traditionally and basically a grocer. But it’s now rolling out checkout-free stores using computer vision and sensor fusion and has teams of machine learning experts working in the background. Of course, you’d expect a huge company like this to be out front, but this shows (shouts?) an inflection point that all more traditional businesses should be aware of.
And it means that if you’re going to keep up and exploit the new opportunities from technology, your non-technical ‘business’ people will need to work more closely with more and more techies.
But the fact is that these groups can drive each other nuts. They easily fall into the trap of stereotyping each other: “Suits are like this” and “Geeks are like that”. The focus goes off customers and prospects, and on to internal bickering. That slows down your change plans and squashes growth potential.
What to do? The first mindset shift for many leaders is this: stop seeing “Suits vs. Geeks” as a battle to be refereed. Instead, see past the stereotypes and remember the potential for synergy:
- Business people need technology to make money
- Engineers need money to make technology
These different goals can lead to clashes, but also provide a win-win growth engine if you handle things right.
I’ll be sharing more over the coming newsletters.