1.3 Geek Up—Tech Is Everywhere and You’ll Need It to Thrive

Many business school students who study finance aspire to careers in investment banking. Many i-bankers will work on IPOs (initial public stock offerings), in effect helping value companies the first time these firms wish to sell their stock on the public markets. IPO markets need new firms, and the tech industry is a fertile ground that continually sprouts new businesses like no other. Other i-bankers will be involved in valuing merger and acquisition (M&A) deals, and tech firms are active in this space, too. The technology sector has become a major driver of global M&A activity. Leading tech firms are flush with cash and constantly on the hunt for new firms to acquire. In just five years, Google has bought a whopping 103 firms, IBM has bought sixty-four, Microsoft has bought sixty-three, Cisco has bought fifty-seven, and Intel has bought forty-eight! Yahoo! bought thirty-seven companies in a year and a half. Trader beware—software might take your job. Researchers in the United States and China have shown an AI approach that beat major trading indices as well as traditional investment portfolio allocation strategies. No wonder so-called robo-advisors like Betterment have been growing by billions of dollars. And even in nontech industries, technology impacts nearly every endeavor as an opportunity catalyst or a disruptive wealth destroyer. The aspiring investment banker who doesn’t understand the role of technology in firms and industries can’t possibly provide an accurate guess at how much a company is worth.

Those in other finance careers will be lending to tech firms and evaluating the role of technology in firms in an investment portfolio. Most of you will want to consider tech’s role as part of your personal investments. And modern finance simply wouldn’t exist without tech. When someone arranges for a bridge to be built in Shanghai, those funds aren’t carried over in a suitcase—they’re digitally transferred from bank to bank. And forces of technology blasted open the two-hundred-year-old floor trading mechanism of the New York Stock Exchange, in effect forcing the NYSE to sell shares in itself to finance the acquisition of technology-based trading platforms that were threatening to replace it. Computer-automated trading, where a human doesn’t touch the deal at all, is responsible for some 60 percent of U.S. equity trading volume. For a look at the importance of tech in finance, consider that banking giant Chase spends $4 billion a year on technology and employs over twelve thousand technologists, globally. Tech isn’t a commodity for finance—it’s the discipline’s lifeblood.

If you’re an accountant, your career is built on a foundation of technology. The numbers used by accountants are all recorded, stored, and reported by information systems, and the reliability of any audit is inherently tied to the reliability of the underlying technology. Increased regulation raises executive and board responsibility and ties criminal penalties to certain accounting and financial violations. Legislation has raised the stakes for mismanagement and misdeeds related to a firm’s accounting activities and have ratcheted up the importance of making sure accountants (and executives) get their numbers right. Negligence could mean jail time. This means the link between accounting and tech has never been tighter, and the stakes for ensuring systems accuracy have never been higher.

Business students might also consider that while accounting firms regularly rank near the top of Bloomberg Businessweek’s “Best Places to Start Your Career” list, many of the careers at these firms are highly tech-centric. Every major accounting firm has spawned a tech-focused consulting practice, and in many cases, these firms have grown to be larger than the accounting services functions from which they sprang. Today, Deloitte’s tech-centric consulting division is larger than the firm’s audit, tax, and risk practices. At the time of its spin-off, Accenture was larger than the accounting practice at former parent Arthur Andersen (Accenture executives are also grateful they split before Andersen’s collapse in the wake of the prior decade’s accounting scandals). Now, many accounting firms that had previously spun off technology practices are once again building up these functions, finding strong similarities between the skills of an auditor and skills needed in emerging disciplines such as information security and privacy.

Technology has thrown a grenade onto the marketing landscape, and as a result, the skill set needed by today’s marketers is radically different from what was leveraged by the prior generation. Online channels have provided a way to track and monitor consumer activities, and firms are leveraging this insight to understand how to get the right product to the right customer, through the right channel, with the right message, at the right price, at the right time. The success or failure of a campaign can often be assessed immediately based on online activity such as website visit patterns and whether a campaign results in an online purchase.

The ability to track customers, analyze campaign results, and modify tactics has amped up the return on investment of marketing dollars, with firms increasingly shifting spending from tough-to-track media such as print, radio, and television to the Web. And new channels continue to emerge: smartphone, tablet, smart TV, smartwatch and other wearables, smart auto, and more. Look to Apple to show how fast things grow: Within roughly four years, iOS devices were in the hands, backpacks, purses, and pockets of over two hundred million people worldwide, delivering location-based messages and services and even allowing for cashless payment. Apple has since sold over two billion iPhones worldwide, creating the primary channel for all sorts of customer engagement.

The rise of social media is also part of this blown-apart marketing landscape. Now all customers can leverage an enduring and permanent voice, capable of broadcasting word-of-mouth influence in ways that can benefit and harm a firm. Savvy firms are using social media to generate sales, improve their reputations, better serve customers, and innovate. Social media has also lead to the $21 billion+ influencer economy, while AI has ushered in the era of virtual influencers who have garnered millions of online followers and earned millions of promotional dollars along the way. Those who don’t understand this landscape risk being embarrassed, blindsided, and out of touch with their customers.

Search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), customer relationship management (CRM), personalization systems, and a sensitivity to managing the delicate balance between gathering and leveraging data and respecting consumer privacy are all central components of the new marketing toolkit. And there’s no looking back—tech’s role in marketing will only grow in prominence. Analyst firm Gartner predicts that chief marketing officers are on a path to spend more on technology than any other function within the firm.

A firm’s operations management function is focused on producing goods and services, and operations students usually get the point that tech is the key to their future. Quality programs, process redesign, supply chain management, factory automation, and service operations are all tech-centric. These points are underscored in this book as we introduce several examples of how firms have designed fundamentally different ways of conducting business (and even entirely different industries), where value and competitive advantage are created through technology-enabled operations.

Technology helps firms harness the untapped power of employees. Knowledge management systems are morphing into social media technologies—social networks, wikis, and Twitter-style messaging systems that can accelerate the ability of a firm to quickly organize and leverage teams of experts. And crowdsourcing tools and question-and-answer sites like Quora and Stack Overflow allow firms to reach out for expertise beyond their organizations. Human resources (HR) directors are using technology for employee training, screening, and evaluation. The accessibility of end-user technology means that every employee can reach the public, creating an imperative for firms to set policy on issues such as firm representation and disclosure and to continually monitor and enforce policies as well as capture and push out best practices. The successful HR manager recognizes that technology continually changes an organization’s required skill sets as well as employee expectations.

The hiring and retention practices of the prior generation are also in flux. Recruiting hasn’t just moved online; it’s now grounded in information systems that scour databases for specific skill sets, allowing recruiters to cast a wider talent net than ever before. Job seekers are writing résumés with keywords in mind, aware that the first cut is likely made by a database search program, not a human being. The rise of professional social networks also puts added pressure on employee satisfaction and retention. Prior HR managers fiercely guarded employee directories for fear that a headhunter or competitive firm might raid top talent. Now the equivalent of a corporate directory can be easily pulled up via LinkedIn, a service complete with discrete messaging capabilities that can allow competitors to rifle-scope target your firm’s best and brightest. Thanks to technology, the firm that can’t keep employees happy, engaged, and feeling valued has never been more vulnerable.

And while many students have been wisely warned that inappropriate social posts can ruin their job candidacy, also know that the inverse is true. In many ways social media is “the new résumé.” Thoughtful blog posts, a compelling LinkedIn presence, Twitter activity reflecting an enthusiastic and engaged mind, and, for tech students, participation in collaborative coding communities like GitHub all work to set apart a candidate from the herd. If you can’t be found online, some employers may wonder if you have current skills, or if you have something to hide.

And for those looking for careers in corporate law, many of the hottest areas involve technology. Intellectual property, patents, piracy, and privacy are all areas where activity has escalated dramatically in recent years. The number of U.S. patent applications awaiting approval has tripled in the past decade, while China saw a threefold increase in patent applications in just five years. Firms planning to leverage new inventions and business methods need legal teams with the skills to sleuth out whether a firm can legally do what it plans to. Others will need legal expertise to help them protect proprietary methods and content, as well as to help enforce claims in the home country and abroad. Tech is increasingly being used to automate rote legal tasks, and generative AI is becoming mainstream in the legal profession; however, we’ve also seen examples of clueless lawyers who have violated professional practice standards by submitting ChatGPT-generated legal analyses that presented bogus, non-existent examples.

While the job market goes through ebbs and flows, recent surveys have shown there is no end in sight for workers with technology skills. In the U.S. News ranking of “Best Jobs in America” tech skills made up all of the top fifteen jobs that weren’t part of the health care industry. Glassdoor listed tech jobs in nine of the top ten slots in its “50 Best Jobs in America.” The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report ranked IT job titles in twelve of its top twenty, and demand for computer and information technology workers will outstrip supply for years to come. Information- and computer-related careers are expected to grow by double digits for at least the next decade. Want to work for a particular company? Chances are they’re looking for tech talent. Eighty-two percent of CEOs expect to need more tech workers. LinkedIn says, “In the next five years, we’ll see 150 million more technology-related jobs across industries globally, so demand for digital skills is very much on the rise.” The Harvard Business Review has declared “Data Scientist” the “Sexiest Job of the 21st Century,” and Bloomberg says undergraduates with data science training are now being hired with salaries greater than investment banking analysts. The recent pandemic not only showed the resilience of tech careers, but also the work-from-home flexibility offered to tech staff, who often just need a laptop and reliable Internet to get the job done. Fortune’s rankings of the “Best Companies to Work For” is full of technology firms and has been topped by tech businesses nearly every year since it started. And everyone wants to hire more coders from underrepresented groups. Apple, Etsy, Square, Meta, and Alphabet are among the firms with programs to prep and encourage more women and minorities to pursue tech careers (details in endnotes).

Students studying technology can leverage skills in ways that range from the highly technical to those that emphasize a tech-centric use of other skills. And why be restricted to just the classes taught on campus? Resources like Coursera, Codecademy, Udemy, edX, YouTube, and others provide a smorgasbord of learning where the smart and motivated can geek up. Carve out some time to give programming a shot—remember, the founders of Tumblr and Instagram were largely self-taught. Your author even offers hundreds of free videos on learning to code iOS apps from scratch, as well as tutorials on building robotics and other hardware products. The high demand for scarce technical talent has also led many tech firms to offer six-figure starting salaries to graduating seniors from top universities. Take some advice from the Harvard Business Review: “Leading a digital transformation? Learn to code.” Opportunities for programmers abound, particularly for those versed in new technologies. But there are also non-programming roles for experts in areas such as user-interface design (who work to make sure systems are easy to use), process design (who leverage technology to make firms more efficient), and strategy (who specialize in technology for competitive advantage). Nearly every large organization has its own information systems department. That group not only ensures that systems get built and keep running but also increasingly takes on strategic roles targeted at proposing solutions for how technology can give the firm a competitive edge. Career paths allow for developing expertise in a particular technology (e.g., business intelligence analyst, database administrator, social media manager), while project management careers leverage skills in taking projects from idea through deployment.

Even in consulting firms, careers range from hard-core programmers who “build stuff” to analysts who do no programming but might work identifying problems and developing a solutions blueprint that is then turned over to another team to code. Careers at tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft don’t all involve coding end-user programs either. Each of these firms has its own client-facing staff that works with customers and partners to implement solutions. Field engineers at these firms may work as part of (often very lucratively compensated) sales teams to show how a given company’s software and services can be used. These engineers often put together prototypes that are then turned over to a client’s in-house staff for further development. An Apple field engineer might show how a firm can leverage iPads in its organization, while a Google field engineer can help a firm incorporate search, banner, and video ads into its online efforts. Careers that involve consulting and field engineering are often particularly attractive for those who are effective communicators who enjoy working with an ever-changing list of clients and problems across various industries and in many different geographies.

Upper-level career opportunities are also increasingly diverse. Consultants can become partners who work with the most senior executives of client firms, helping identify opportunities for those organizations to become more effective. Within a firm, technology specialists can rise to be chief information officer or chief technology officer—positions focused on overseeing a firm’s information systems development and deployment. And many firms are developing so-called C-level specialties in emerging areas with a technology focus, such as chief information security officer (CISO), and chief privacy officer (CPO). Senior technology positions may also be a ticket to the chief executive’s suite. Fortune pointed out how the prominence of technology provides a training ground for executives to learn the breadth and depth of a firm’s operations, and an understanding of the ways in which a firm is vulnerable to attack and where it can leverage opportunities for growth.

With tech at the center of so much change, realize that you may very well be preparing for careers that don’t yet exist. But by studying the intersection of business and technology today, you develop a base to build upon and critical thinking skills that will help you evaluate new, emerging technologies. Think you can afford to wait on tech study, and then quickly get up to speed at a later date? Whom do you expect to have an easier time adapting and leveraging a technology like social media—today’s college students who are immersed in technology or their parents who are embarrassingly dipping their toes into the waters of TikTok? Those who put off an understanding of technology risk being left in the dust.

Consider the nontechnologists who tried to enter the technology space in the early part of this century’s tech growth. News Corp head Rupert Murdoch piloted his firm to the purchase of MySpace only to see this one-time leader lose share to rivals. Former Warner executive Terry Semel presided over Yahoo!’s malaise as Google blasted past it. Barry Diller, the man widely credited with creating the Fox Network, led InterActive Corp (IAC) in the acquisition of a slew of tech firms ranging from Expedia to Ask.com, only to break the empire up as it foundered. And Time Warner head Jerry Levin presided over the acquisition of AOL, executing what many consider to be one of the most disastrous mergers in U.S. business history. Contrast these guys against the technology-centric successes of Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google).

While we’ll make it abundantly clear that a focus solely on technology is a recipe for disaster, a business perspective that lacks an appreciation for tech’s role is also likely to be doomed. At this point in history, technology and business are inexorably linked, and those not trained to evaluate and make decisions in this ever-shifting space risk irrelevance, marginalization, and failure.