It's Not About the Technology (PDF)

It's Not About the Technology is about a phenomenon that is most dreaded by high-technology industry executives: a failure at the execution leading to a missed market window. Executives in the high-technology space agree that, without a doubt, a critical factor that drives the company to such a failure is the breakdown of interaction between marketing and engineering. Most new employees, whether an engineer or a marketer, in high technology companies come ill-equipped to face this endemic malaise and walk right into it. This book is not about a new concept, or a new technique. It tackles the big questions of how to develop the craft of the thinking that is required of us in high technology companies. It is predicated on a radical notion that, even though the problematic is the execution in a high technology corporation, neither a high level market strategy nor the kind of technology itself matters, insofar as learning the craft of execution goes. How marketers and engineers comprehend a context uniquely shapes the ways they interact, engage in decision-making phenomenon, and eventually their execution performance in a company. The breakdown of their interaction occurs when the individual contexts of a marketer and an engineer are permanently secluded from one another.

Drawing from fundamental economic principles and practical experience from the high technology semiconductor business, this book methodically demystifies the key to successful execution in the high technology space.