Can a non-technical CEO lead a successful music company these days? Of course, everyone has a patchwork of different experiences and skills, but many of the big, rising stars haveserious technical prowess. That certainly includes guys like Ian Rogers (TopSpin), Daniel Ek (Spotify), Eric Garland (BigChampagne), and Michael Doernberg (ReverbNation), all of whom are leading front-running digital music companies.
Then, there are the absolute monsters of disruption who attacked from the outside. Like Shawn Fanning, Janus Friis, Sean Parker, Mark Gorton, and Bram Cohen, all individuals whose technical brilliance has ripped apart the traditional music industry. This revolution wasn't led by those with fluffy liberal arts degrees—it was led by geeks.
In fact, softer skills like marketing savvy, relationship skills, and even music 'ears' now rank further down the list. Take Doug Morris, who's about to sail to the helm of Sony Music. Morris was mercilessly skewered by Wired for his non-technical cluelessness, though the point was salient. Sure, Morris is a classic 'music guy' with plenty of pre-digital success, but there's plenty of debate about whether he's the right candidate to lead Sony Music out of the woods. Can Morris guide conversations around IT infrastructure, encoding standards, devices, and digital behaviors—in other words, the types of issues that a modern-day media company grapples with today?
The reality is that Morris will need serious facility in this area for Sony to succeed, and his value as an old boy is limited. Of course, not every CEO, founder, or otherwise music-related chieftain needs to be a hardcore programmer, but having some knowledge of programming, IT-related issues, and backend infrastructure—or a willingness to learn—is becoming more and more critical. Because the days of just putting the 'technical people together,' or offloading all of the technical details without much involvement are over. It's now an integral and critical part of the business.
In fact, a lot of major mistakes are made by non-technical minds. In the M&A realm, for example, a common misperception is that separate platforms can just be 'combined,' when that is oftentimes the most difficult thing to accomplish. It might just be easier to build the expansion from scratch—on the same platform, with the same coding language, and by the same engineers who understand the existing system. A miscall can mean millions in squandered acquisition dollars, not to mention months—or years—of wasted development time.
In internet time, that's now the difference between life and death.
Then, there are the absolute monsters of disruption who attacked from the outside. Like Shawn Fanning, Janus Friis, Sean Parker, Mark Gorton, and Bram Cohen, all individuals whose technical brilliance has ripped apart the traditional music industry. This revolution wasn't led by those with fluffy liberal arts degrees—it was led by geeks.
In fact, softer skills like marketing savvy, relationship skills, and even music 'ears' now rank further down the list. Take Doug Morris, who's about to sail to the helm of Sony Music. Morris was mercilessly skewered by Wired for his non-technical cluelessness, though the point was salient. Sure, Morris is a classic 'music guy' with plenty of pre-digital success, but there's plenty of debate about whether he's the right candidate to lead Sony Music out of the woods. Can Morris guide conversations around IT infrastructure, encoding standards, devices, and digital behaviors—in other words, the types of issues that a modern-day media company grapples with today?
The reality is that Morris will need serious facility in this area for Sony to succeed, and his value as an old boy is limited. Of course, not every CEO, founder, or otherwise music-related chieftain needs to be a hardcore programmer, but having some knowledge of programming, IT-related issues, and backend infrastructure—or a willingness to learn—is becoming more and more critical. Because the days of just putting the 'technical people together,' or offloading all of the technical details without much involvement are over. It's now an integral and critical part of the business.
In fact, a lot of major mistakes are made by non-technical minds. In the M&A realm, for example, a common misperception is that separate platforms can just be 'combined,' when that is oftentimes the most difficult thing to accomplish. It might just be easier to build the expansion from scratch—on the same platform, with the same coding language, and by the same engineers who understand the existing system. A miscall can mean millions in squandered acquisition dollars, not to mention months—or years—of wasted development time.
In internet time, that's now the difference between life and death.
