Modern CTO

The essence of being a visionary is not being satisfied with who you are right now, and always, always moving towards who you want to be in the future.

It’s not enough just to come up with incredible ideas. The visionary CTO must have a high capacity to execute, organize, identify whitespace, communicate, and lead.

Whitespace is existing technology that hasn’t yet matured commercially. To blend emerging technology with growing demand requires both technological and business vision.

Being a leader means communicating complex ideas simply. You’ve got to make high-level ideas stick in their minds. The easier it is to understand something I make, the more people will spread the word.

Peter Drucker once said, “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.” Silence may actually be a problem screaming for attention.

The full visionary formula includes: Vast Topic Expertise + Creative Thinking + Solid Logic + Wisdom Cortex.

Act without thinking, and you run in circles; think without acting and you stand still. The trick is in thinking and acting together to move you forward. Imagination and execution together will take you wherever you want to go in life.

It took me about five years to get good at programming and five more to become excellent. And it took me five years to not look like an idiot as a CTO and another five years to become fantastic. That’s actually about 20 years.

Take the focus off the process, and place it on the value. Injecting business focus into your daily standup meetings avoids the natural tendency to get caught-up in the details. By continuously bringing the business into the conversation, I eliminate over-engineering and drive momentum instead.

Problems appear all too frequently in the name of "efficiency" or "optimization." When I see this, I immediately tell people to stop thinking in terms of adding value to the platform. Instead, think of how to add value to the customer.

Your ability to clearly communicate why something is important is critical to success.

The greater the distance a person feels from the top tier, the less they feel a part of the team.

Elon Musk’s “First Principles Thinking” approach which he borrows from physics. It basically states that you work backward from the source instead of reasoning from analogy.

Exponential vision means you see that a series of small goals will fulfill milestones, and a series of milestones will lead to explosive growth.

You build momentum, and that momentum eventually gets magnified exponentially.

Process simplified: Identify the problem. Develop two to three solutions Test the solutions and select the best performing ones. Create variations and repeat.

Israeli judo pioneer and champion, Arik Ze'evi says, “Those close to you will be afraid you’ll fail. Others that you’ll succeed. Suddenly, you’ll see a guy doing exactly what you wanted to do, and it opens up the gate for everyone.”

Now say you’re the CTO or project manager. When you’re the boss, remember this golden rule: Ask people what they think instead of telling them what to do.

Leave behind the bad, conserve the good, improve, and move on.

Think about it. Something goes wrong or an unexpected constraint appears. If my reaction is negative, it affects my team and me. But, if I consider the constraint as part of the process, I can step back and look at the problem as an opportunity for creativity.

Look at the human attention span and the forgetting curve. Better yet, look at how politicians speak at a third grade reading level, and it isn’t because Americans are stupid. It’s because simple spreads. It’s the reason why company taglines are short and sweet. Ambiguity frees us to apply our own meaning.

If you think about it, listening requires you to hold back, pay attention, process, and understand. The more you do this, the greater capacity for patience you’ll have, and the patience you develop can be used to learn more. It's a positive feedback loop.

Who’s on the team? Are they an A-team or a B-team? For example, I look for boomerang players. By this I mean someone you send out on a task, and they come back with it finished. I shouldn’t have to monitor and chase them all the time.

If you stand there and watch it bleed, you’re responsible. If you reach out and stop the bleeding, you’re the hero.

When receiving feedback, the method I prefer is asking what they like about the application. When you analyze the feedback, though, look for what they say they don’t like. This is where you can add value. Still, don’t specifically ask for negatives. When asking for positives, if criticism appears, it’s something that really bothered them. If you ask for a critique, they search out the negatives, which might not be that important.

Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in physics. Albert Einstein and Bill Gates are considered some of Feynman’s biggest fans. He’s been referred to as the Great Explainer.

My communication method is “Reduce, Refine, Repeat.” It’s like I toggle back and forth from the primitive ape me and the highly intellectual me until the ideas gel into one.

Remember the Feynman Technique? The best way to explain complex ideas is with brief and simple terms. If you can’t do this, then you don’t understand the topic.