The Technology Switch Hitter

Oliver Bussmann, CIO of SAP is leaving to become CIO of UBS Group and this article has a comment "the idea of somebody moving from an IT services company into an end user company is quite uncommon"

Actually it is not that uncommon. This weekend I finished slides for a presentation in a couple of weeks titled "The Technology Switch Hitter". I point out executives who are good at both consuming and producing technology are indispensable. In the slides I invoke Lance Berkman, off to a great year with the Texas Rangers, and who will retire as one of the best baseball switch hitters in history.

In my recent book,  I included guest columns from Tony Scott, CIO at Microsoft and Vijay Ravidran, Chief Digital Officer at The Washington Post. Scott got to Microsoft after stints at Disney and General Motors. Ravindran was involved with Amazon in its early days and has done other startups since. They represent a growing group of  execs who cross the line from vendor to end user company and in reverse.

Actually, my book was supposed to be called The Technology Switch Hitter. My publisher got cold feet because the term is politically incorrect outside of baseball circles. So they dumbed it down to The New Technology Elite.

For the book research I spoke to some baseball personnel. I learned about the physiology of ambidexterity, the "mood swings" each side goes through, the extra time switchitters have to put in to practice each side. One reason why only about  15% of MLB players are switchhitters and a much smaller percentage is as good as Lance. 

But every team needs some, and every technology leadership, be it at vendor or user organization could similarly use backgrounds like Oliver's, Scott's and Vijay's.