Have you noticed how most technologists are, on the whole, extremely comfortable talking to like-minded technologists and find comfort in surrounding themselves in a sea of buzzwords and jargon? The phrase “birds of a feather flock together” speaks a lot of truth. This level of communication can be considered inward looking—talking to their own people, in their own tongue, comes naturally. Turning around and looking outward, we are faced with a foreign world with different words, language, and competing objectives.
Many new CTOs are ill equipped to deal with this world. They are thrown into an environment where a single misplaced phrase can send a whole team into a frenzied panic because how they interpreted it was so far from the meaning intended. Their words have a lot more meaning, and finding that common language to interact with the rest of the business is one of the keys to their success.