Well, for anything in this article to make sense, you're going to have to read Eric Sink's latest MSDN Article. Finished? Ok then.
It was interesting to hear about the logic involved behind moving sourcegear to a platform other than Microsoft's. Where I really tuned into this article though was the discussion on MBAs and their impact on the ISV.
Virtually all decisions in a small ISV should be made with the involvement of technology person. Most decisions in a small ISV involve issues of both technology and money. These decisions are really hard.
Agreed. An ISV is a technology oriented small entity. Being that the majority of the decisions made involve technology on some level you need the input of someone who is technologically savvy. The problem you run into is once the product is ready for release your focus becomes less about the technology decisions and more about customer relations, sales, marketing, and accounting. These are things that the stereotypical geek does not have a high interest or aptitude in (especially what we like to call "the social skills").
Now, throughout my life I have been fortunate enough to be interested in both business and technology. When I was in college I dropped out of Computer Engineering and took up Information Systems in the college of business instead. Why? Because I was already pretty savvy with technology and I was confident that I could learn deeply technical things in self study. What I didn't understand well were the other functions of business which I got a solid taste of in Information Systems. Throughout my career, my knowledge of business as a whole has been extremely valuable to me especially since I have focused on custom internal applications for businesses. For example, when I can walk into a room full of accountants and communicate in their language and understand the technological implications of a system as well we can plan a much better system. Add to this that I'm a pretty social guy and I can turn geek speak into business speak and I ended up being the primary liason between IT and the other departments in a company.
I am currently taking this a step further. Now that I have decided to form my own business, I've been working on my MBA. Just as Mr. Sink "cannot imagine facing a decision like this one without the depth of technology understanding that I have", I cannot imagine making finance, accounting, marketing, and management decisions without the depth of knowledge gained through business classes. Even if you are a developer and have no interest in actually doing the business tasks and want to hire a MBA type person to do it for you, how can you possibly make a good hiring decision or be able to work in harmony with this person if you do not at least have a basic understanding of their world? I'll say this in bold letters:
As you move up the hierarchy, you need to know a less about more
If you're the kind of person who wants to dig in and understand everything to its deepest level, then upper management is not for you my friend. Sure, we'll always have areas that we're more interested in than others. And we'll always have areas that we have a better aptitude for. But frankly, in the upper management scenario we have to be able to see the "big picture". Making decisions without being aware of the potential impact on all parts of the organization is a Bad Thing (tm). An executive must be able to make decisions they don't agree with on a technical level when the organizational benefit outweighs it. Sink makes a good point about humility and IT not mixing very well and how damaging it is when IT gets shut out of the loop because of the poor social skills by people like Paul Graham's "Great Hacker".
Having been around with consulting, being a student of business, and through my contacts I have come to realize what is a major problem in business today. The problem is that there simply are not enough of the Geek/MBA hybrid. There are some attrociously bad technology decisions being made at companies and oftentimes there is no one with the political clout to stop them. The only way that things will get better is if some geeks start getting involved in upper management. The keys to upper management lie in people skills and education.