Apparently, only 25 of the FTSE 250 companies have a permanent representative of technology on their boards.
Like the last person to be invited to the party in – what you can argue are the best run, most successful businesses in the UK – is the computer nerd. Or actually, that doesn’t work, because they’re not even invited.
I’ve been thinking about this for a good number of months since someone told me, but I’ve also noticed a lot of online chatter lately jostling to say that technology startups don’t need CTOs.
Now, I don’t think I’m coming at this from the perspective me being a CTO and worrying about this particular gravy train derailing, but isn’t that a strange position to hold? Isn’t that like saying that if you’re a courier company but you don’t have to have someone chiefly in charge of operations?
What I think is happening here is that it’s so hard to find a good CTO at an affordable price when you’re an early-stage business that there’s sort of a cognitive dissonance kicking in and people are convincing themselves of something straightforwardly wrong. Do you want to prove me wrong?