Member-only story
Years ago, I had someone who worked for me that was really bright, really intuitive. I thought he had a lot of potential, but the problem was he didn’t have a technical degree.
So, I gave Matt the least technically challenging product line in the company to run. Matt did a great job. The businesses Matt was responsible for thrived.
Matt kept progressing in his career, and the ball kept bouncing his way. The CEO was against having non-technical people run business units retired, paving the way for new leadership.
The new CEO, who interestingly enough was an ex integrated circuit design engineer, was actually okay with non-technical people becoming business unit general managers. This led to Matt’s continued rise in the company.
Eventually, Matt became the number two person in this $2B/year company. Then Matt left the company to become CEO of a $14B market cap public company in the semiconductor space. All indications are that Matt is doing a great job running a complex technical business without a technical background.
Yet, Matt is the exception to the rule.
