Secrets of a Chief Technology Officer

By Raj Yavatkar

"Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster.”

The late, great Intel CEO Andy Grove said that. I spent a decade as an Intel Fellow, the company’s highest technical position, and Andy was my role model and truly a visionary. He offered this observation about the accelerating pace of change many years ago, but his words remain truer than ever today.?

As chief technology officer at Juniper Networks since December 2019, I’ve seen first-hand how the last two years of unprecedented disruption have confirmed another Andy Grove tenet: No matter how good things seem, challenges are always around the corner. “Succeed breeds complacency” he wrote. “Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

?As companies shift their digital transformation into overdrive, they have had to become more agile and resilient to deliver ever-more-innovative customer solutions. Since much of the job of leading these efforts falls on CTOs, these leaders have never been more critical as enablers of a company’s growth agenda. Now more than ever, they must be forward-thinking, flexible, and highly strategic.

As a McKinsey report put it, “Effective CTOs inspire employees and act as role models for the sort of behavior needed to encourage and embed change… He or she acts as the face of the transformation, sets the tone, spurs enthusiasm, and challenges current wisdom.”

The CTO role doesn’t come with an operator’s manual, but I’ve learned through experience what tends to work or doesn’t. Here are five truths I’ve come to understand.?

1.???Sometimes, great innovations are happy accidents. Penicillin. Pacemakers. Microwave ovens. Post-it notes. Even potato chips. These are just some of the inventions that happened by serendipity. The inventor of the chocolate chip cookie, for example, was making regular chocolate cookies when she ran out of baker’s chocolate. She broke sweetened chocolate into pieces and noticed that instead of melting, the small bits remained. Voila, an addictive snack and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born.

?The same kind of happenstance can happen in high tech. An example from my career is the Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), a set of libraries designed to accelerate packet processing on a wide range of CPU architectures. The goal is to make commodity processors better suited to process almost-wire-speed, high performance virtual network functions such as firewalling, load balancing, and encryption. Now an open-source project managed by the Linux Foundation, DPDK is a core technology in networking virtualization and is used by many well-known companies in a variety of industries including some hyperscalers.

But DPDK was born almost by accident. In the mid-2000s, Intel had sold off its networking processor business and our team was looking for what to do next. A couple of team members decided to explore using newer, specialized x86 instructions to accelerate packet processing and developed the beginnings of DPDK for limited use with a small number of applications. Success beyond that was unclear. But the team members proceeded anyhow, and it soon became clear, through more and more experimentation, that the technology had much broader potential.

The lesson? Innovators want to innovate. If you give them the freedom to pursue their ideas – even absent a specific long-term vision and plan – amazing results are possible. Thus, it’s important for CTOs to suspend disbelief and nurture a creative environment that provides oxygen to happy discoveries. As Andy Grove used to say, “Let chaos reign.”

2.???Involve other stakeholders early. The second part of Andy Grove’s “let chaos reign” maxim was “then rein in chaos.” What he meant was that innovation born out of an unencumbered, free-flowing culture needs to move in short order to testing its practicality.

That means a CTO must take a sooner-rather-than-later approach to involving other stakeholders across the company to help decide whether to pursue development and productization of the new technology or let it die on the vine.

This is where the CTO’s evolution from mere technology leader to technology/business leader comes into focus. The CTOs can’t fall so in love with technology that they lose sight of pragmatic concerns like selling and marketing it. It’s important to remember that input from those stakeholders is valuable and necessary. They need to be brought in early.

3.???Embrace “fail fast,” but with a twist. “Fail fast” is a philosophy adopted by many agile organizations to try a variety of innovations to see what has staying power. Though incremental development and evaluation, companies can take an iterative approach to determining whether an idea has merit.

However, most people talk about the output of “fail fast” as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a product launched with basic features to test its viability with customers, with the final product released only if feedback is sufficiently positive.?

I believe a better strategy revolves around a Minimum Viable Demo (MVD). Rather than introducing a product into the market, MVD provides a faster and more agile way to prove or disprove a hypothesis with sales, marketing, and other internal stakeholders, even with select customers. MVD means being able to “fail fast” faster.

4.???Innovation pathfinding can be nerve-wracking for some. I’ve discovered through the years that some people simply are comfortable with risk taking and some aren’t. Some thrive in the “chaos”; others are uncomfortable with the inherent uncertainty and ambiguity– projects that lack defined end points and, truth be told, are more likely to fail than not.

A CTO should assign duties accordingly. For example, natural risk-takers are better suited to early-stage inventor roles on the team, while others may offer more value as technical experts who come in later as the project proceeds.

5.???Follow “BACCOPF.” This acronym may not roll off the tongue, but it’s a construct I’ve developed to describe a CTO’s way to lead his team and encourage experimentation and going boldly where others may not..

“B” means have the team’s back. Remember that the buck stops with the CTO. “A” means give awards for risk taking and great work even when a pathfinding project fails to graduate to a product. ?“C” stands for collaboration. I don’t care how smart someone is, they need to be able to work collaboratively. “C” is for career development – a CTO must invest in their people’s career growth. “O” stands for obstacles – the CTO’s job is to remove any hurdles, such as unnecessarily restrictive internal processes, that impede team members from being creative. “P” means don’t make false promises, to anybody. “F” stands for freedom. It’s a must to give that to team members at all times.?

To close with one more Andy Grove quote: “There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment and you start to decline.” The digital transformation mandate has made this reality even more urgent. CTOs must play a huge role in helping companies disrupt themselves.