Archive for October 12th, 2007
Technologist and Business Leader – A Winning Career Path
I always enjoyed leading people, organizing events, taking initiative, being creative, doing things in a better way, taking risks, handling more projects at a time, etc. Since my engineering career, my friends always thought I am a better fit for management career and I should try to pursue an MBA. But apparently, I never thought that way. That doesn’t mean that I did not want to go into "management" related career path. Of course, I know that it’s the best career option for me, but I always had certain criteria for my managerial dreams. I always wanted to do managerial or leadership things only in technology related fields.
I am more passionate about technology than management. For me, managerial skills are like – you have it, and then you polish it. But technological skills, you need to learn it, and then you keep polishing it. I always want to learn more technology skills than more managerial skills. That’s why I pursued a MS program rather than an MBA one. I would still prefer to do a PhD in technical area than doing MBA, which apparently my friends think in other way. But then what will be the best long term career option for a person who seems to have good managerial skills, but is passionate to learn more technology skills?
Fred Wilson‘s thoughts strengthen my vision of my career path –
Should the CEO of every technology company be a technologist? It seems
like it’s easier to teach a technologist finance, marketing, sales, and
management than it is to teach a good manager technology. And it seems
that key business drivers are increasingly technical. It was true in
the past, when Novell beat Banyan with marketing over technology, or
when Oracle beat a host of relational database companies with sales
over technology, that technology alone didn’t win the day. But let’s
look at Facebook versus MySpace, Google versus Yahoo!, Skype versus
Net2Phone, and Apple versus the entire music business. The companies
with strong technologists as leaders seem to win more often these days.
I wish to be that. A technology person, leading a technical company.
