Digital CEOs: no longer "digitally homeless," savvy execs are putting tools to work for them

Chief Executive, The, April, 2004 by Justin Martin

When Matthew Rose graduated from business school in 1981, he owned exactly two items that could be considered high tech: a desktop computer and a calculator. He didn't really need anything else. Rose was embarking on a career in the railroad industry, which at that time was about as old economy as you could get.

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Flash forward to 2004. Rose has an IBM laptop, a Nokia cell phone, a Black-Berry, a Motorola two-way pager and, for overseas travel, an SBC satellite phone. He is now CEO of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, a railroad that traces its lineage to 1849. Over time the company has grown into a transportation goliath, with sales of $9.3 billion, and one that is decidedly high tech.

Burlington Northern makes use of trackside monitors, for example, that can remotely assess the mechanical health of a passing locomotive, or verify that an item of freight is truly onboard a speeding train. The raw data gets translated into a constant stream of postings on the company's intranet. For his part, Rose keeps perpetual tabs on his railroad via his assortment of gadgets. "I had no idea everything was going to change so fast," says Rose. "To be an effective CEO these days you have to be comfortable with technology."

Granted, cell phones, pagers and email can hardly be called bleeding-edge technology. But consider that just a few years back, Nicholas Negroponte, founding chairman of MIT's Media Laboratory, coined the term "digital homeless," referring to hidebound, middle-aged executives who were getting rapidly displaced by the technology revolution. Only a short while ago, the stories were legion of CEOs who asked their assistants to print out all their emails or, if you believe that urban legend, those who used their CD-ROM trays as coffee cup holders.

No longer. According to a 2003 study by Forbes.com and Gartner.com, 82 percent of C-level executives check their own email before work; 80 percent make use of search engines such as Google or Yahoo; and only 6 percent delegate the task of checking email to an assistant. Rather than viewing technology in gee-whiz terms, CEOs are coming to look at various gadgets as essential tools for amplifying communication and enhancing efficiency. And those tools are becoming fixtures, both on corneroffice desktops and in CEOs' pockets and hip holsters. No longer lagging way behind the 20- and 30-something CEO crowd, older executives are buzzing, beeping and ringing with the best of them.

As for which info-tech tools are best, there is no consensus among CEOs. Some are cell phone junkies, while others prefer to do everything by email. Such choices are based on the CEO's individual style and his or her company's culture. "This is personal media. The fact is, it is not one size fits all," says Paul Saffo, research director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. Fortunately, there are enough tools and gadgets out there to suit just about every personal preference.

Peter McCausland is CEO of Airgas, a distributor of industrial gases such as nitrous oxide, based in Radnor, Pa. Since 1982, McCausland has seen the company he founded grow to $1.8 billion in revenues and 8,500 employees spread out across nearly 800 locations throughout the U.S. As his company has become increasingly decentralized, McCausland has found email to be an indispensable tool. It meshes well with Airgas' no-nonsense, engineering-driven culture, where there's little room for small talk. "We're dispersed all over the country," says McCausland, so "email is so much more efficient than the telephone, which always requires a warming up period. Often you have to exchange niceties before getting down to business."

And thanks to his BlackBerry, McCausland always has access to email via wireless connection. "Thumb Tribe Executives," as BlackBerry fanatics have come to be known, can now be seen just about anywhere, typing away furiously on their tiny keyboards. McCausland relies on a system of abbreviations for BlackBerry emails, understood by his colleagues at Airgas. For example, C means "see" and U means "you." KTT means "keep in touch."

More and more, CEOs are going beyond mere adoption of tech tools to customizing them for greater efficiency. Take Intel's Craig Barrett, a decided member of the Thumb Tribe who has keenly programmed his BlackBerry with a series of hierarchical rules to sort email messages by importance. He furnished Intel's top brass--and his wife--with a secret code word, and his BlackBerry is set to vibrate if it receives a message bearing the code. This way, Barrett is alerted to important emails no matter where he happens to be. Less important emails (sans the magic code) are downloaded but don't trigger the vibrate function. Barrett has also programmed his BlackBerry so that the bulk of emails remain on his desktop computer. That way he can read them at his leisure. "I'm trying to prioritize and be efficient," says Barrett. "I only want to use the BlackBerry for important messages so that it doesn't wind up cluttered."