I lived and worked for 30 years in the Silicon Valley before I moved East. I assumed that technology organizations were all very diverse and that other organizations were also diverse. I know this is not true today. Leadership within a technology organization becomes a critical component that reflects on the issue of diversity. It provides the organization with its “soul” and therefore affects the diverse nature of the institution.

Leadership is a primary influencer of organizational dynamics regardless of technology, but it is the latter that becomes the equalizer. This reasoning is based on experiential knowledge and consequences. I view technology as being colorblind; it does not differentiate between red, white, black, or yellow. It does not discriminate based on male or female, nor on the dollar value based on its user.

As I thought about this article, I wondered which theme would become the primary focus for the piece. Would it be technology and how it affects leadership or should it be leadership and its influence on technology? From my vantage point, this is a critical distinction. Does technology lead us, or do we lead it?

If I focus on technology and how it influences leadership, I must consider the mechanistic interpretation of technology as the driver that influences management and leadership. Oops! What is this about management or leadership? Are they not the same, or are they only related?

If I focus on leadership and its influence on technology, I must focus on the strategic element of how leadership affects technology. This is the direction toward which I must move.

After all, I have been associated with the technological revolution for some time now, and it is a fact that tehnology has become both invasive and pervasive. We must arrive at a point in time where all of this technology is transparent to us,
similar to the light switch or the ignition on a car. Few people understand the flow of electrons and the concepts of electricity, and fewer still could deal with the machinations of the automobile engine. So why should we each have to deal with computing and all of the ramifications of technology? Why isn’t it easy?

MIT’s Media Lab has experimented with the concept of enabling technology so that it is pervasive but not invasive. This lab views technology as being people-driven rather than the other way around. Technology is evolving to the point where we will view it as we do the light switch, but the evolutionary process takes time.

How does this “fit” with the concept of leadership and technology? For many years, the technology leaders have viewed the Information Technology (IT) field as one in which the role and opinion of the users have taken a back seat to the
advancement of systems and its speeds and feeds. This, of course, is necessary to a point, but the focus has been rather myopic. The user community suffered at the expense of the machine. Leaders must learn to focus on the end-user environment and what I term the “human and cultural” development of technology. Leadership is the tool that will change the focus of the technocrats and bring the element of humanity to the forefront of the technology revolution.

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