Technology & Leadership
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Introduction by Richard Farson

It is my great pleasure to introduce the leader of this policy forum, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. I first encountered Alex's ideas when Hall Sprague of our staff told me I should definitely read an LA Times review, written by Alex, of John Seely Brown's great new book about the way information technology really seems to be working (John is an ILF Fellow, by the way). I was so impressed by it that I got in touch with Alex, where he is an historian of technology at the Stanford University Library, and began a fascinating email relationship, leading to my inviting him to moderate this policy forum. I later ran into John Seely Brown at a meeting and we agreed that Alex's review was brilliant. Since then I have had a chance to read other material by him, and all I can say is that I know we are in for an interesting, informative, and, I trust, a productive time in this forum. So, welcome Alex, and good luck with this brand new constellation of leaders.

Participant
Let me add my welcome to you, Alex. I will try to support the exchange of ideas and interaction in this conference. I look forward to an exciting and interesting experience. I know that this is a topic of extreme importance at this point in history.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Hello to everyone participating in the workshop on information technology and executive leadership. As your moderator, it's my responsibility, as well as my pleasure, to start us off. Before I start, my thanks to Richard for the invitation to participate in this project, and for the kind words about the review of "Social Life of Information." It's an excellent book that I highly recommend to everyone.

I should begin by explaining very briefly how Richard and I came up with this subject. I've been teaching courses on the history of information technology, and have found that very little historical work had been done exploring the impact of IT on leadership and high-level decision-making (though military history is a bit of an exception). Certainly most new IT is aimed at middle management and other techies, and while it has to be sold to executives, the reigning assumption even here in Silicon Valley is that it won't be used in the corner office. In short, is there another Digital Divide, perhaps even more significant than the one we're used to hearing about? Is IT something that generally reaches down into middle management and production, but not up into strategy and decision-making? Are our expectations of what information technology can do for us--what skills it can supplement, what knowledge is can enhance, what activities or actors it can replace--out of synch with the reality? If so, what does that mean for the way institutions--companies, universities, governments--use and respond to IT?

My hope is that we can learn from each other about these issues, and come up with some new insights worth sharing with the wider world. I look forward to being part of this process, but hope my own role will be a low-visibility one: my job is to encourage things along and on-track (or to make sure the diversions are worthwhile). The literature on online communities conjures various ideals for moderators--they're conductors, facilitators, seminar leaders, etc.--but for so distinguished a group I think my best model is that of the courtier, whose court presence (ideally) blended effortless brilliance with unobtrusive yet critical support of his social betters.

Executive Perspectives on Technology

Participant
Hello Alex, I'm delighted to meet you.

I have an enduring passion for the topic of integrating IT with leadership. In 1990 I wrote a book called Leadership and the Computer for which I interviewed 16 CEOs about their hands-on use of computers (and this was, of course, pre-web!). I find it fascinating that this is still topical over 10 years later. To boil several hundred pages down to a sentence, I found that the primary reason CEOs didn't use computers personally is that that saw no reason to. They didn't see any connection between leadership and computing. My book was aimed at changing their ideas about that.

This year I published another book called Managing Interactively. In it I talk about how we've had interactive technologies around for about 30 years but that we haven't had the interactive "attitudes" on the part of managers and executives that are needed to go along with interactive technologies. So, for example, many technologies that are purportedly interactive end up being used to broadcast rather than interact.

I'm also working on a new theory about the connection between computing infrastructures and the way power is shared (or not) in organizations. I'd love to learn more from you about the history of IT.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Mary, Thanks very much for introducing yourself. I've bought, but confess I haven't yet read, your latest book; Carl Hiaasen's "Sick Puppy" keeps jumping in my lap.

It will be very interesting to learn why the CEOs you interviewed thought that they didn't need to use computers, and whether you think that's still true. Likewise, I know I'm not the only one who will want to find out what a more interactive attitude in management would be like.

Let me shamelessly exploit your knowledge--I mean, impress your fellow IFLers and give you a chance to make a few more book sales--with a big question: how computer literate do leaders have to be? It's easy to assume that the leader ought to have a gut-level feeling for the craft and culture of the enterprise; and given all the attention given to IT in recent years, it's easy to believe that close knowledge of ASP, CRM, ERP, etc. at the top level is a matter of company life or death. (Given how expensive systems are, how the impacts of IT decisions can ripple throughout even the biggest company, and how IT purchasing can be connected to other strategies, it’s hard to imaging executives NOT being involved.) But we don't expect the CEO of an aircraft manufacturer to be able to have a pilot's license, be an expert in hydraulics, understand the intricacies of selling to foreign markets, and master the details of tax and environmental law; is it a problem if they don't know how CAD/CAM has changed the practice of aircraft design, or supercomputers affected the nature of modeling? So what level of awareness or familiarity is necessary for successful decision-making? Are there particular attitudes or levels of expertise in IT that you see in leaders of companies that use IT intelligently?

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