Evolving Executives

Jim Collins points out that entrepreneurs often mature into excellent executives:
"It's simply a myth that entrepreneurs can't evolve into company builders. Our research shows quite the opposite: In great companies the entrepreneurs generally grow as the company grows.

Here is a short list of those who evolved into company builders: Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Hewlett and Packard, J.W. Marriott, Sony's Akio Morita, Walt Disney, Intel's Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher, and of course Gates and Phil Knight. They made the shift from time telling to clock building - to seeing their primary creation as the company itself: what it stands for, its culture and how it operates." [Fortune, Feb 19, 2007]

The same should be true for evolving technology executives. As companies mature, so must the CTOs. One path of positional evolution is described in the paper "CTOs in Transition".