Managing All the Geeks

During his long career as a technologist, Shane Robison worked at Apple, AT&T Labs and Compaq. Now, as the chief technology and strategy officer at Hewlett-Packard, he oversees the computer giant's small army of big thinkers. In the latest in his series of interviews as part of NEWSWEEK's partnership with the Kaplan University M.B.A. program, NEWSWEEK Chairman Richard M. Smith spoke with Robison about the special challenges of managing a high-tech work force. Edited excerpts:

Smith: You worked for years in computer science before making the leap into management. Was that a tough decision?
Robison: It was a hard personal decision … in management, you do lose some of your edge in terms of being able to actually do technical work. As an engineer, your real mission is to [create] cool things, have people use them and see them successful in the marketplace. Management contributes, but in a different way.

What's been the biggest challenge?
Most good engineers are a little introverted and would prefer to be left alone with their computer screens … [As a manager] you have to care about communication. Communication is what keeps organizations moving forward.

How do you identify when someone is ready to move from the lab to a management role?
It's less often my choice and more often their choice. I certainly don't believe you should force good technical people into management roles just because they're a technical leader—and in fact, one of the things we've done since I've been at HP is to create a dual-path ladder for technical people, all the way up to VP with the same sorts of benefits and compensation. That lets people advance their careers without going into management, which many of them don't want to do.

Why is it so hard for managers to go back into the lab?
Technology is moving so fast that unless you are active every day, it's very difficult to keep up your edge, to keep up with the current tools and issues. When I was a programmer, we used a very different set of software development tools—that's changed every couple of years for the last 20 years. New tools, new technologies, different approaches—you just can't keep up to speed on all that stuff. If you're going to manage technical groups, you need to have a good technical background and basic understanding of how things work, but you probably won't be on the edge of all of the nuances.

You're in charge of a $3.6 billion research-and-development budget. How do you balance projects with a short-term payoff versus the kind of visionary science that might transform HP in five or 10 years?
Well I don't personally make all those decisions—most of them are made in the business groups. We help them with tools and modeling to give them data to make good decisions. It's an analytical process combined with some intuition, and a forward-looking belief about where the market is going. The hardest part is shifting that investment over time, because what naturally happens in most engineering organizations is you work on a project you really care about too long and you tend to over-invest, which means you're starving the new [projects] of capital.