The New Technology Elite: How Great Companies Optimize Both Technology Consumption and Production

Preface

This is a song of hope.”

That's how the band Led Zeppelin led off many of its live performances of what many consider the best ever rock-and-roll hit, “Stairway to Heaven.”

Well, this is a book of hope.

I started my technology career in the 1980s when there was palpable excitement about technology providing strategic advantage. Then technology, IT in most companies, went into the woodshed for the next two decades. It focused on costs, controls, and compliance. It was not focused on competitive advantage. In fact, its costs and overruns made many companies uncompetitive. Over the past 15 years, I have helped countless clients focus on cutting IT costs. That's not much fun.

Starting several years ago, that two-decades-old hope flickered again, and as I wrote my last book, The New Polymath, I saw an amazing amount of technology-enabled innovation being planned.

This book builds on that hope. It comes from cataloging elite technology athletes I have included in the book and how they plan to improve how we live, work, and play.

How this book came together deserves an explanation.

If you have ever seen a Gartner (the technology research firm) presentation, you know it is the antithesis of the old-school McKinsey (the strategy consulting firm) presentation, which dictated “no more than six bullets per slide, six words per bullet.” Gartner slides have dense graphics, the handouts have speaker notes in a small font, and the voiceover allows the speaker a chance to present additional ...