ROM at the top
Published: 06 Jan 2006 14:45 GMT
Congratulations to David Yu on becoming CEO of Betfair, the successful online betting company. It's an unusual appointment; CEOs can come from any area of a company, IT and operations rarely produce the top dog. Success at managing IT needs a degree of focus and single-mindedness that isn't necessarily a good fit to the breadth of vision and creativity which characterises the best CEOs.
But then, Betfair is an unusual company. It owes at least some of its success to America's statutory piety about gambling, which neatly removes the competition, and is entirely dependent on its online technology. Yu's department didn't support the company: it was the company. His appointment is a case of the right person in the right place at the right time
The fact remains that if you are in charge of IT within a non-technology company, you'll have to work particularly cleverly to be considered CEO material. Yu has demonstrated that he knows at least one of the key secrets of a good leader: he's said that he hires people smarter than himself and leaves them alone to get on with it. This also implies he'll sidestep one of the traps of the newly promoted, the desire to carry on running your old department.
There are other parts of the CEO's job which the aspirational IT director will need to prepare themselves for. It's one thing being able to argue for budget, quite another to keep the CFO in line and know the books. There are fires to fight — in Betfair's case, including attacks by organised crime — investors to keep happy, a mass of egos to tickle and even those pests in the press to deal with. As a board member, you'll already know about keeping secrets: as CEO, you'll have to know how to find them out. And there really is nobody else to blame.
Considering the remarkable number of things that can go wrong and the responsibilities to shoulder when they do, it's perhaps fair to ask why anybody would want the CEO job in the first place. In the end, that may be the real reason for the lack of technologists at the head of companies. They're just too sane.
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