Course Preview | Chief Technology Officer Programme from Cambridge Judge Business School Executive Education
5:15 min
36
Hello. I'm delighted to welcome you to this course on innovation and strategy. Typically CTOs come through a technical ladder in the organisation. So, their skill set is technical, they have really deep competence and yet this course is about business and strategy. And I want to give you a little bit of a justification for that. And I will use one picture in order to explain that to you. When you talk about innovation activities, they involve multiple levels of the organisation.
So, there is the strategic intent which resides at the level of the CEO and the top management team, then one level down, people talk about customer needs, business value, impact, return. Then when you go down to a technical execution level, people talk about technical solutions, process outcomes, how do we get to behavioural change. And then, at the lowest level, there are the people who actually do work, you know, who are filling out spreadsheets, who are doing interviews, who are doing work. And in order to have technology development and innovation succeed in an organisation, there needs to be collaboration across all of those levels.
There needs to be translation of language. The people at these different levels, they speak in different ways. The CEO and the top management, they speak in terms of return on equity, in terms of market share, in terms of compliance. That is something, which for people at the execution level, they don't really understand what that means. People at the execution level, who are doing questionnaires, they're talking about things like return rates and reliability of the measures.
So, in order to have coordinated action in an organisation, we need to have the capability to translate languages. If we don't have this capability to translate, then the CEO will speak about things which makes no sense and have no connection to what people further down in the organisation actually do. And people further down in the organisation may run into obstacles and difficulties, or see opportunities, and they cannot explain it to the people at the top, who actually have the power to make resources available to pursue it.
I know organisations who actually suffer from this. So, it turns out that organisations where innovation and technology development activities are successfully done, are organisations where there is repeated back and forth, between the top, the language of return on equity and market share, and the people at the execution level, where information goes up and down repeatedly, so there is really unified action.
You as CTOs or future CTOs, you are in the middle of this. Your career has come from execution and then your higher level technical work, and then at some point, being in touch with customers. You're in the outside world, and you need to learn how to speak the language of strategy in order to be able to really bring about alignment and coordination across your organisation.
If you cannot speak the language of strategy then, A. Alignment in your organization will suffer. B. All the big decisions that your company will make will happen with very little input from you, because you cannot articulate things in a language that the business decision-makers understand. And that's what this course is designed to help you tackle.
So, there is the strategic intent which resides at the level of the CEO and the top management team, then one level down, people talk about customer needs, business value, impact, return. Then when you go down to a technical execution level, people talk about technical solutions, process outcomes, how do we get to behavioural change. And then, at the lowest level, there are the people who actually do work, you know, who are filling out spreadsheets, who are doing interviews, who are doing work. And in order to have technology development and innovation succeed in an organisation, there needs to be collaboration across all of those levels.
There needs to be translation of language. The people at these different levels, they speak in different ways. The CEO and the top management, they speak in terms of return on equity, in terms of market share, in terms of compliance. That is something, which for people at the execution level, they don't really understand what that means. People at the execution level, who are doing questionnaires, they're talking about things like return rates and reliability of the measures.
So, in order to have coordinated action in an organisation, we need to have the capability to translate languages. If we don't have this capability to translate, then the CEO will speak about things which makes no sense and have no connection to what people further down in the organisation actually do. And people further down in the organisation may run into obstacles and difficulties, or see opportunities, and they cannot explain it to the people at the top, who actually have the power to make resources available to pursue it.
I know organisations who actually suffer from this. So, it turns out that organisations where innovation and technology development activities are successfully done, are organisations where there is repeated back and forth, between the top, the language of return on equity and market share, and the people at the execution level, where information goes up and down repeatedly, so there is really unified action.
You as CTOs or future CTOs, you are in the middle of this. Your career has come from execution and then your higher level technical work, and then at some point, being in touch with customers. You're in the outside world, and you need to learn how to speak the language of strategy in order to be able to really bring about alignment and coordination across your organisation.
If you cannot speak the language of strategy then, A. Alignment in your organization will suffer. B. All the big decisions that your company will make will happen with very little input from you, because you cannot articulate things in a language that the business decision-makers understand. And that's what this course is designed to help you tackle.
