Introduction
It’s great to be back for another episode of Digital4Productivity – and today the question of how IT-fit does the CEO need to be? Why do I think this is an important question? When I work with CEOs, I often hear people say that IT is done by my CIO or my IT manager. I have no idea about that and I don’t need to. I think this is a dangerous statement. Why is that? I believe that if you don’t know the basic IT technologies and can’t assess the possible applications of new technologies, then you can’t really assess concepts on an equal footing with the person responsible for IT, you can’t set targets and ultimately, from my experience, you can’t use IT as a resource.
Secondly, as a managing director myself, I know that there is a supervisory board, an advisory board or shareholders. And the question is, how fit are you for strategic digitalization issues, and if you are not fit, then you simply look a bit weak with regard to the advisory board, shareholders or supervisory board. And then, I know this, I spent twelve years in corporate groups and then another ten years as an employed managing director in a medium-sized company. In the internal competition for the best positions, you simply have a disadvantage compared to colleagues who deal strategically with the topic of IT.
And that’s just the way it is in corporations. Yes, and above all, of course, in addition to the personal disadvantages this has for you, you are not exploiting the potential of new technologies for the company. And new technologies are not an end in themselves. At least they shouldn’t be, but if you really go in intelligently with digitalization, which is why I always say switch on your brain first, then technology, then you can generate significant increases in productivity through digitalization, optimize your business model and even enter into completely new business models. Right now, for example, AI is simply making business models obsolete on the one hand, but on the other hand it’s making them possible in the first place because you can simply build new businesses here with minimal resources.
Yes, in some conversations with CEOs in my one-to-one coaching sessions at C-level, I often hear that I know all the topics, I can discuss them strategically, but implementing them in the sense of applying them is not my job, my team does that.
I also think the statement is dangerous, because the question is, one is knowing, the other is doing. I also sometimes describe myself as a giant of knowledge and an implementation dwarf, but I’m always about the things that I also pass on to my customers, so I say that I don’t go about it with googled half-knowledge, but always pass on real experience from my own operational responsibility. And the question is, how can I really judge something that I know in theory but have never done myself? Another question is that even if I only have half-knowledge somewhere, I can easily be undermined. And the question is also how effective I am in my role as a manager when I make announcements and how effective I am when I show and exemplify things. Yes, in my experience, both are really important. On the one hand, you need to know and be able to evaluate IT concepts and you certainly don’t need to be able to program, but you do need to have a certain level of IT fitness.
I wrote an article about this on LinkedIn last week and a great comment was made by Stefan Heinrich, a highly esteemed colleague of mine who deals with the topic of strategic sales for business customers. And he wrote, yes, that would be a bit like the CEO saying, yes, the CFO takes care of the finances and then I don’t need to know anything about it. Yes, and that’s similar, i.e. of course the CFO is more knowledgeable about finance than the CEO. But the CEO should have a clue. And it’s the same with IT issues.
Yes, the next step is to ask what, in my experience, in my view, are the IT topics where a CEO should be fit?
I have nine areas here that I think are important. And I would be interested to hear your opinion on this afterwards, if you would just send me an e-mail to t.jekel@jekelteam.de, or if you go to the show notes, you can also comment there or on LinkedIn, where you can find me and go to my latest newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please feel free to comment on what you think.
Yes, what are the new core topics from my point of view? Firstly, the topic of best practices in the use and introduction of IT systems. Time and again, and just last week, I was on the phone with a board member of a medium-sized bank and he said, yes, we are currently putting old wine into new bottles when it comes to the introduction of Microsoft 365. What does that mean? We are not taking advantage of the opportunity to optimize processes with new systems. And that is precisely the issue. IT projects are change management and should be approached as such. In other words, best practices in the use and introduction of IT systems.
Second topic, and you will notice that the topics naturally intertwine to some extent, but these are still the main topics for me.
Second topic: distributed working, collaboration. We used to send emails back and forth. Now I can use Kanban boards, for example, to do your e-mail zero internally, but also externally. The question is, how do I work securely, but still productively, both in-house and with external parties?
Yes, the third big part is very specific. But from my point of view, it is very, very important that Microsoft 365 is used productively. And here you also need to have an idea at the top level of what is ultimately possible there, which modules are useful and which are not. Because Microsoft 365 has hundreds of modules that are often discontinued from time to time. And my experience is that less is more and it’s important that you can assess at C-level what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense.
Yes, then, you know that I am a great opponent of abolishing assistants and that is why cooperation between assistants and managers is a great and important competence. Because the problem is not the assistants. The problem is that very few assistants are used in a really smart way. I’ve been working with an assistant since 1995 and I don’t want to use it any more. And of course I’m always learning new things. But there are now many more technical possibilities. Let me give you an example. When my assistant books a train ticket or a flight ticket for me, the entire travel information automatically appears in my calendar. And the way it works is that the travel confirmations that come in are automatically forwarded to a service called TripIt. And I have subscribed to this TripIt calendar as an Internet calendar and, bang, I have all my travel information, which I used to receive in a resubmission folder, in digital form. Or the topic of rail travel. Of course I have things like that in the rail DB Navigator app. But sometimes there are things for which there is no app. And the nice thing is that I’ve also entered them in my calendar with the relevant times. That’s just one example.
Yes, then scaling, up-scaling, down, making the organization more flexible. IT gives you the opportunity and I can highly recommend the book “Kopf schlägt Kapital” by Professor Faltin. For me, it’s an extremely life-changing book. And today you can really scale organizations up and down very flexibly. This has meant, for example, that I was even more profitable during the pandemic than before the pandemic, because I was able to scale down the costs very, very quickly and scale up the live streaming teams that I used there.
Yes, then the next topic. Now it’s time to say, what one or the other of you is finally expecting, “Gosh, these are all such dull topics, can’t it be a bit more colorful? Yes, namely augmented reality, virtual reality, metaverse, spatial computing. These are topics where you don’t have to be able to program, but where you should have an idea of how you can use these tools for training, for further education, for customer communication.
Then there’s the big issue of artificial intelligence. For me, this is a typical example where we totally overestimate technology on the one hand and say, yes, AI can do everything, but totally underestimate it on the other. Let me illustrate this with specific examples. In the 1950s, we already saw self-driving cars based on artificial intelligence in General Motors videos. And I’d say that today, apart from Mercedes, no one has really managed to achieve the corresponding fully autonomous level yet. So perhaps we’re still a little way off. On the other hand, it’s also the case that the production of texts is now so good that we as humans are often no longer able to tell the difference and AI even produces better results. But here, of course, it is always important to understand not only the possible applications, but also the risks. Where do we need to set guard rails? Where is an accompanying ethical discussion important? Where are compliance issues important? So AI is a very important topic.
Yes, then other future technologies that can already be used today. That could be something like robotics or 3D printing. Here, too, I keep hearing that robots will come at some point and manual professions will not be replaced. Yes, there are definitely industries. I recently had a manager from a civil engineering company at a C-level event and she said that 3D printing and robotics will be difficult in civil engineering because there’s a lot of dust down there. And that means you can’t get clear camera images. So it’s quite understandable. But in my view, that’s a matter of a few years in this case. With AI, it really is a matter of a few weeks in some cases. When I look at the Bavarian Abitur, the GPT still failed in version 3.5. In version 4.0, it finished with a grade 2. I’m still proud that I completed my Bavarian Abitur with a 1.8. But I suspect ChatGPT 5.0 will finish with a 1.0. So against this background, AI is much further ahead. And it’s important to simply look into the topic of future technologies and, of course, always see what can already be used today, which is sometimes more than you think.
Yes, and then last-but-not-least the new topic of new business models is always really coming up with ideas. How can new technologies enable new business models? I repeat again, what are the nine blocks from my point of view? Best practices in the use and introduction of IT systems, distributed working/collaboration, using Microsoft 365 productively, collaboration between assistants and managers, scaling up and down, i.e. making the organization more flexible through cloud services and external service providers, augmented reality, virtual reality, metaverse, spatial computing, artificial intelligence, other future technologies that can already be used today and new business models.
Conclusion
Please feel free to give me feedback, via whatever channel, on which topics you think are the most relevant, which topics are missing, on which topics you would like more input in this podcast, where you would like more support, especially as a manager. Because I always realize that unfortunately there are far too few managers who are IT-fit. The other day, Rainer Pettig said that you are my personal trainer for digital fitness at C-level. And that sums it up quite well. Because, on the one hand, I have 12 years of corporate experience, 10 years of my own experience as the sole managing director of a medium-sized company and have been passing on my experience in this area at C-level since 2010, and I also have a management perspective thanks to my Executive MBA, which I completed in the UK, and on the other hand I have an extreme passion for technology and IT. And I’ve always found that it can be very helpful to bring these two points together. Some of my clients also call me a digital interpreter, so I simply bring these two worlds together.
Yes, I hope I can help you bring these two worlds together in this podcast too. Feel free to give me feedback and I wish you lots of success in both the offline and online worlds.
Yours, Thorsten Jekel.
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